WAR! What is it good for?

The MMO crowd’s gone wild for Mythic’s online RPG Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. It’s claimed an impressive 750,000 registered players, is on track to be one of the best-selling PC games of 2008 and currently enjoys an 88 per cent review score average on Metacritic. But not everyone’s as impressed as we are. Here, in an open and honest critique of the game, one writer explains why WAR is nowhere near as good as rival World of Warcraft.

“I’ve been playing a fair bit of Warhammer Online recently and, well, you know all those Warhammer Online Angry Internet Men who get inordinately annoyed if people call WAR a WoW-clone? They’re actually right. It’s no World Of Warcraft. It’s nowhere near as good.

Firstly, it’s laggy as hell – I’ve not found a server that doesn’t feel like wading through three feet of treacle. Secondly, a frame rate would be nice. The game doesn’t even look that good: textures are gritty and drab, the poly count hardly rivals Crysis and it’s not really going overboard on the special effects, either – so why the hell is the frame rate so poor when I’m well beyond the recommended spec? Thirdly, the animation is risible. With WoW I’m used to combat animations where staff thrusts don’t sync properly with the actual hit rolls, but with WAR it’s even laggier, and the less said about the ranged weapon animations the better. The Witch Elves’ throwing knives are invariably totally invisible (the animation doesn’t fire at all) and the arrow animation for the High Elf Shadow Warrior is beyond hilarious – the arrow arcs 20 feet up into the air before coming back down onto the target, even if he’s only standing eight feet away. I know I only have a degree in physics, but I’m fairly sure that arrows don’t fly like that…

Fourthly, queues. Server queues, RvR queues… I’ve waited an hour to get into the Khaine’s Embrace scenario, only for the whole thing to be over in five minutes, because the team balance was so poor, we (Destruction) had no healers at all and the Order side were roughly 50 per cent healers (on average about three or four levels above our players, too). How annoying is that? Especially since you’ve got another wait in a queue to endure before you can try again and hope for a better team balance. Fifthly, for the love of Slaanesh, why the heck do I have to click through a screen showing me the terms and conditions EVERY SINGLE TIME I load up the game? It’s almost like they expect us to read them, or something. Here’s a hint, Mythic – don’t put in unnecessary and annoying barriers between your customers and the game.

Beyond that, the game is totally grind-tastic, and the much-vaunted Public Quest system, while fairly neat, has a couple of flaws as well. Namely, unless you want to get totally screwed over by the loot rolls after you finish the third stage of the quest, you have to wait in the PQ area and grind through all three stages. Which, depending on how many players filter through the area, could take an hour or more. Oh, and I really don’t like the interface. Surely it won’t be long before half of it is modded out of existence. Speaking of the interface, I love how a lot of WAR players are talking about how great it is that classes build up dark magic or wrath (or whatever) to power up their finishing moves like it’s something innovative. They’re combo points. They’ve just been dressed up in a hat and bow tie so they look a little bit more posh. How exactly are they any different from the combo points used by Rogues or Druids in Cat form, or Warrior’s Rage points in WoW? Well, they appear in a slightly different part of the interface!

This kind of window dressing happens a lot… For example, characters don’t have levels, because levels are bad. No, they have ranks, instead. They work in exactly the same way as levels, but they’re not levels. They’re ranks. Don’t forget that… Something else that’s annoying is the character creation screen. When you pick a character class, it parades these cool-looking characters in top tier armour and you think, ‘I want me one of those!’. Then you pick your character and all you have is a witch elf in a sackcloth bikini. It’s like they’re openly taunting you: ‘play for two hundred hours and then you can have a character that looks that good!’ Also, there’s so little variety in the early game armour sets that you might as well be in a cloned army. In WoW at least there was more of an illusion that you were playing an individual, not the latest identikit Squig Herder off the production line.

There are a couple of things I like – the Tome of Knowledge is good (if mostly superfluous window-dressing), the way you can mark quest objectives with the general area you need to be in on the map is useful, and if you just want to play something where you can watch a Dark Elf run around in her bra and knickers, there’s surely no finer game – but I’m not convinced by the game world. It’s too compartmentalised by far – almost reminiscent of RF Online in that way – at least with WoW you have quest mobs intermingling and spreading over a larger general area, so it seemed less artificial. I’m also not that keen on the art style, either. It doesn’t grab you by the lapels and shake you shouting: ‘This is awesome, look at me!’ Most of the opening map areas in WoW have a sense of wonder about them that transcends the poly count. WAR on the other hand isn’t that vibrant and feels dull by comparison. Gritty realism is fine for a real-world soldier simulation like Armed Assault, but for a fantasy game? Have they forgotten what fantasy means? If you want someone to spend time (and money) playing in your game world, you’ve got to give them something worth coming back to. Drab, flat textures that suck all the vibrancy out of the game design will not win over players who are interested in more than the base mechanics of the game.

Granted, I’ve not seen a huge amount of the game but there hasn’t really been anything I’ve seen so far that would convince me to subscribe. If you bought WAR because you’ve played WoW to death and were expecting or wanting a game world that could compete with Azeroth, I can’t see how you’d be anything other than horribly disappointed. The PvP/RvR bias is so great that there literally is only war. There’s nothing in the game world itself that’s worth exploring for the sake of sightseeing, and precious little worth actually fighting over. The balance towards the PvP/RvR scenarios is so great that it can actually be quicker to level up your character doing scenarios than completing quests in the game world, which makes you wonder why they included a PvE element at all. I can see a lot of WoW players who made the jump to WAR eventually going back to Warcraft, because lots of MMORPG players, especially the more casual players WoW has been so good at enticing into the genre, are more inclined to the PvE side than player versus player, and WAR’s PvE is unconvincing at best. I’m more of a virtual world tourist or war correspondent than a foot soldier in these war-torn, online worlds, so I don’t think that WAR is my kind of MMORPG. Still, it fills in the time until Wrath of the Lich King comes out, so that’s okay.”

This article is an extended version of a piece that originally appeared on the Bark and Byte blog.

What do you think of Iain’s views on Warhammer Online? Agree? Disagree? Let us know in the comments section below.