Warhammer Online: My time in Beta

Intro
Okay, Warhammer Online! Bit of background, I played Warhammer the tabletop game for a while between about 16 and 18 years old (23 as I’m writing this) and I really enjoyed it. I loved game, the figures, the background especially, and the whole wacky atmosphere that was brought to an otherwise incredibly gritty and dark universe. I also loved Blood Bowl and it is the only GW product I still play regularly.

When WAR was first announced it was announced that it was going to be largely based in cities. There would be no leveling, abilities would be earned by mastering each profession and different combinations of professions would grant access to new ones. PvP would be based on people with opposing professions to you. Games masters would descend from on high as Skaven characters to run regular events and the pixies of gumdrop forest would all sing and dance whilst they had tea.

Okay the last bit was made up but you get my point; I found a lot of what they were saying unrealistic. Needless to say the project soon fell in the gutter where Mythic picked it up from, claiming they’d hold true to the original design as they swiftly axed everything from the original design apart from the Warhammer IP.

So I got into the beta of War a long time ago about last October and hated it then. I stopped playing the beta almost instantly and forgot about the game as another failed attempt at a GW game. Earlier this year I heard they had closed beta and had a massive overhaul and recently I decided to check out the game again. That’s where this review is coming from.

PvE
From stepping into the world as an Orc or Goblin there can be no doubt as to what game world you are in if you’ve had any experience in it before. The feel of the orc zones is fantastic and really helps you feel like you’re playing a Games Workshop game. The character speech is just as good as you’d expect from the greenskins and the quests can be just as whacky. I say can be because at the end of the day this is an MMORPG and as such the bulk of the quests could be transplanted into any other without a blink of an eye. Collect 10 boar heads, kill the boar king Sergeant Pain, explore this place, and go back to the place you’ve just been for a follow up quest. The formula is tried and true and though WAR wants to tout itself as some innovation, that’s what the majority of quests still come down to. I said “As an Orc” because I felt stepping into the world as most other races came across more as generic fantasy game than WARHAMMER! This may be GW’s fault, it may be Mythics.

The game plays okay when you’re soloing. It would be pretty hard to mess this up but WAR doesn’t. All the classes have abilities to solo without issue and even as a full tank specced Black Orc I didn’t have issues killing things. I felt the respawn timer was a little out of whack in areas, some you’d be waiting 5-10 minutes for a mob to spawn whilst others you’d have them spawning on your head at a rate faster than you could keep up. Then you’d die. The death mechanics are not ones I favour, I’ve been told they are lifted from other games but they are really a pain. If you die in the outside world you respawn, alive, at one of your friendly towns in the zone. This leads to a number of problems.
- Having to reclear entire areas to get back to where you died.
- Places you in your base where you are subject to gank squads that like to camp outside. Maybe not so much of an issue on live but a pain on beta.
- Putting you outside the zones in Public Quests you were participating in. I’ve been told, “Why didn’t you just get a res!” but that requires competent players to realize you’ve died, and where, and be able to res you. As anyone who has played a MMORPG knows competent players are few and far between and being told “im dps” when asking for a res isn’t that fun. When you do get back you’ve lost a lot of participation bonuses and area rep from your time away, if you can get back for respawns/gankers.
- I decided last night to go exploring to see as much as I could see. I roamed for a good 15 mins discovering the sites. Upon dieing, I was ported back to a town a good 10-minute ride from where I was which didn’t impress me at all.

I must also talk about Public Quests as well. These were the only things I liked from my first play of wow beta almost a year ago, and I still enjoy them. For those of you who don’t know what they are, look them up. But problems start showing in these areas too. I had problems getting groups for them most the time but okay, its beta and on live I’d expect them to be packed. But the large majority of them are again just grinds. Its nice that in all the interviews we hear about the quests where you have to feed a giant beer till he destroys a dwarf fort door and all but those PQ’s are the minority by far. The majority goes like this. Kill x number of peons (usually 100-150). Kill x number of champions (5-10). Kill the big boss. Get loot. It was then I realized that the public quests weren’t that much different to a dungeon in mechanics. It was an open dungeon that more could join when they wanted but at the end of the day just a dungeon. They even have the equivalent of reputation, all the time you’re in one you gain rep for the local town for it and at each rep level you can choose a reward. I sat down to grind a new rep and came out the other side 2-3 hours later on “exalted” with a shiny new blue stick. Also the success you get is tied largely to the people you’re grouped with. I’ve had 6 man groups that have cleared a PQ with ease, whilst the next day going back with twice that number we got wiped repeatedly.

I unfortunately haven't had chance to try out any of the dungeons yet, instanced or otherwise.

PvP
Okay, well PvE isn’t largely impressive but the game has always touted itself as a PvP game in an effort to draw the, at the time, disgruntled PvPers from WoW.

The idea on the grand scale of things is that you compete for objectives across several tiers which correspond to the level of the participants. It is a big tug of war really and looks and sounds really good at first sight. I found the first problem being that I didn’t feel I was contributing to the overall effort. Taking xyz ruins in the middle of nowhere didn’t really seem to serve much purpose to the overall war effort, especially since no one was fighting for it.

So I then decided to jump into a Scenario, the equivalent of WoW’s battlegrounds. Scenarios tend to involve the usual FPS style objectives like cap a flag, king of the hill and control points just like WoW BG’s. I found the majority of these BG’s to be incredibly ranged orientated. I don’t know if that is just due to the large number of engineers and Bright Wizards we were facing but as a Marauder at the time, I felt there was simply no cover.

As an example, one map I played was like a symmetrical cave. It had an open space in the middle, a few side tunnels and a few bridges leading to open tunnels below (read: death trap). The large open space had a single small rocky outcrop in the middle. The fight quickly progressed into two parallel lines of ranged classes and healers fighting each other, whilst the melee classes were humping the rock in the centre not able to do much. The odd one would charge the opposing lines, dieing horribly, or come round to fight the other melee at the other side of the rock, dieing horribly. I also got a feeling a lot of these weren’t finished. This one had various Skaven machinery about the place that didn’t seem to do anything, and Skaven mines in the lower parts that weren’t activated.

So it has a few balance issues but I didn’t feel like these were major flaws to be honest. Its beta, it is for balancing this sort of thing.


Combat
So combat has to be the real selling point for a PvP game. This is the first real major flaw that WAR presents for me. Maybe I’m just spoilt after years of playing WoW with my customized SCT, big flashy custom text, and reporting tools coming out of every one of my characters orifices.

But my first WAR encounter ended in success. A dwarven Engineer attacked my squig herder whilst on a quest. We stood at range and nuked each other out. But to be honest I wasn’t really sure what abilities I was using. They all just looked like arrows, occasionally leaving an unnoticeable debuff on the opponent (see UI below). I thought this may just be inherent to ranged classes but it wasn’t. The next day I tried my Marauder and the combat was even more incomprehensible. I’d run into melee range, and spam my abilities. They all look exactly the same and I couldn’t tell what was going on. The same was true for my opponent, and Ironbreaker at the time. It looked like he was just blindly swinging at my character yet I’d get occasional debuffs show up. In fact the only time I really knew what was going on in combat was when I’d pressed my sprint button to run away. This is in vast contrast to a game like WoW which has much greater transparency for players on what actions they are doing.

The combat was also incredibly slow and frustrating. Once I reached melee range on my Marauder I spammed my abilities as best I could, putting up “Hamstring” and “Sunder Armour”. But we kind of just looked at each other slogging away in confusion as 5 more similar battles went on around us. Suddenly the Ironbreakers damage increases a lot and I wonder what is happening. I’m swiftly reduced to a corpse on the floor where I spot a Shadow Warrior stood a few miles behind the front line firing at me. I had no idea this was happening because his animations are so small and the arrows even smaller. Again to compare it to WoW, you know when a hunter is shooting you, and you even can identify incoming shots based on their colour.

The last of my combat vices, though it applies equally to PvP, is the targeting system. Players of WoW are well aware of the ease of tab targeting in assiting you in the heat of battle. WAR has tab targeting too, but something about it seems fishy. I found it incredibly difficult at times to simply swap to the target next to the one I was attacking, which is especially a problem for a pet class when you want your pet to start on a new mob attacking you. At other times it would switch to another target, but its difficult to see from afar which target you have selected. So I’d send my squig at what I thought was the nearest target, only to have him run through a crowd of dwarves to one on the other side of the valley.

User Interface
The UI is pretty downright terrible. It is even more terrible on some classes that have additional combat mechanisms that require tracking such as WAR’s equivalent of combo points. The debuff icons are so incredibly small on a cluttered screen it is impossible to tell at a glance who is afflicted and buffed with what spells. It also isn’t very intuitive as to spell activation and cool downs. There is something going wrong here, its tough to describe, it may just be some sort of client/server lag but at times I’d be firing my abilities and trying to weave them into a decent cool down rotation but it just fell apart as some seemed to be still on cool down when my client told me they were done.

There is a good possibility that outside mods will rectify the bad UI in a few weeks but I feel at this stage they should have a much better one rather than rely on the community to make one.

The chat box seems a bit... its tough to put my finger on it to be honest. It wasn't as noticeable as in WoW. I changed it to be more solid colour like I'm used to in wow, but a lot of system messages (in white) and loot messages kept getting spammed to it which tended to blend in with the general chat and such. The combat log looked pretty comprehensive though.

Conclusion
WAR had a lot of good ideas but a flawed implementation of the basic UI, targeting and especially the combat system lets the rest of the good work down. The idea of fighting for objectives towards a war effort is a good idea though and with a lot of work in the first few patches they could possibly sort it out and get a really successful game.

I hear a lot of “Well WAR isn’t trying to compete with WoW” but really it is, no MMORPG can really be released at the moment that isn’t looking to either take players from WoW or from Lineage 1+2. It looks and feels like WoW from the first moment you step into the game, which isn’t to say that’s a bad thing at all. But it looks like WoW did at launch, not how WoW looks now, which is a big difference.

I think at the moment it will draw a lot of players in from release, the large majority of which will be playing WoW simultaneously and some who haven’t played a MMORPG before, just Warhammer products. But the minor annoyances plus the confusing and slow combat system will drive them straight back to WoW, except for a few die hard players who either love Warhammer devoutly or hate WoW passionately. It doesn’t even just have WoW to compete with either; it has fellow time consuming game Spore to compete with. Should it do enough to get a good foot hold, a few months after its release WotLK is going to come out which I can’t help but think is going to spell the end of WAR.

Will I play it?
Probably not. I will keep an eye on it and see how it looks in 6 months, or a years time. But I really don't see myself buying this at launch.