Frankly, I didn’t go into this one with hope. I missed some of my friends and I thought it would be nice to hang out a bit again since we hadn’t really done anything since Lord of the Rings faded away.
Bottom line with this one is that it looks too much like WoW, without the good features of WoW. If this game had come out 5 years ago I would rate it very high, but its kind of a late to the table with what it offers. I have to give the content crew some kudos for the sprawling, intricate creationion of the main cities and surrounding lands, but sadly it doesn’t carry too far into the rest of the game.
Unless you like constantly re-adjusting your window posistions and hiding drill-downs you are left with a relatively small area of your screen to move your character around, dare you stray too far you will end up activating context menus on your chat or quest sideboards. Practically everything you click on has a context menu and when you are trying to move around this isnt a Good Thing™.
While I loathe Warcraft, atleast Blizzard designed a smooth and very clean interface. This one is clunkly, with relatively slow draw/response times and I find I spend more time fighting with it than not.
Sadly, it looks not all that much better than UO:Kingdom Reborn and if I had to guess I would have to say UO is using a pre-alpha version of the Warhammer client.
Realm populations are horribly imbalanced on most servers. It’s clear that there are no controls on how many players on each side at any given time and it shows in game. Make no mistake, this is a PvP game, and when you are outnumbered 2 or 3 to 1 it gets old really damn quick. Yes, you can probably get away with never experiencing the PvP in Warhammer but why would you want to? The game is geared to that playstyle.
Normally graphics don’t bother me too much, hell I still play Asheron’s Call and UO.. albeit not much lately, but nothing stands out more than the things that are so horribly, horribly wrong. During the development cycle of a game, one of the earliest things that is worked on is character models and how they move and look. If anything this should be the last thing that isn’t working at release. Having the distraction of switching into and out of combat in between every swing is not only distracting, it’s just plain sloppy.
Warhammer has been around for over 25 years and yet they have totally failed to incorporate any of the “feel” of it into the game. There is no compelling reason to play. Quest dialogs are not terribly accurate, largely unimportant and uninteresting. Honestly, taking the time to read the quest dialogs can, in many cases, lead to a quick death since practically 2 in 3 quests are long quest chains and have a nasty habit of updating while you either in combat or in a very unsafe location.
This is actually a pretty serious problem. There are just too many targets, they are all over the place and they respawn far too quickly. It is very tricky, if not impossible to out-run anything at all so this really does pose an issue. Frequently you either need to travel cross country for a task or it’s just the quickest way from point A to point B and you either have to fight a very repetitive fight every 15 seconds or have a horde of whatever beating on you for the next 5 minutes.
Posted under Gaming
This post was written by Jeff on October 3, 2008
