… Yeaaahh.
Not good. Actually, it’s bad.
I’m a caster. I play a Zealot, it’s the best healer there is.
Gameplay and Interface. Buttons don’t seem to activate right away when I press on a corresponding number. It usually happens in fight and I’m thinking it has something to do with “auto attack” being turned on everytime I start casting a spell. I then try to melee my opponent instead of casting spells. There are fractions of seconds, lots of them, where I’m pondering what my character’s waiting for.
Animations. Really, synchronism isn’t your friend in WAR. If you get hit while casting a several seconds spell your animation’s going to finish before the spell actually hits. It happens a lot. How about spell animations being stuck in loop mode when suffering from lag? Characters (a lot of them) stuck in akward positions for nothing. And many miscellaneous other bugs like this. It’s an immersion breaker of the worst kind.
Characters. Some do have style, but ffs, this mage guy floating around on an ovni type of round surface… It awful. There could AT LEAST be some kind of animation when he’s moving forward, floating on his.. thing. Other than that. When you get in Inevitable City (the only city), some monsters there don’t have animations attached to them yet. They just move around in t-poses. Charming.
Graphics. Textures loading is bad and it’s worse than bad annimations (not, it’s not really worse). Try to ALT-TAB? Yep, you get textures loading all over again starting with very low rez versions of all of them. Probably because of reasonably high level of graphics you also have the bonus of “while there are no concrete zones, you get to constantly load stuff into memory” which is most annoying.
Enough of details, the real stuff.
Story and moving forward. You start at chapter 1, you end at chapter 22. The goal is to get to “the end”, and then you can’t go back. There are 4 tiers. You start at T1, the end is at T4. When you reached T4 you can’t go back to T1 or T2. Cities? Only one big city and yes, you guessed it, at the end of T4. You fly to it when you reach warcamps, but you really don’t need to. The general feeling of it? If you ever wondered what “having to grind your way up” was, that’s the best example you can get. There are no feelings of open world in there; it’s a fabricated storyline you have to follow to reach Rank 40, hitting chapters camps after camps.
Grinding. Talking of grinding… There aren’t enough quests past T2 to easily make your way up. I was stuck at level 22 having to do Public Quests and Scenarios because I was out of quests, and then later quests were just too hard for me.
PQs and Scenarios? Yeah, that requires people online and playing for this. My server was Med/Med (rather high ranked in the overall server population ranking) and the only hours I could be playing was prime time for about 2-3 hours and even then, PQs were hard to do. And Scenarios… Could I be playing ANYTHING else than Tor Anroc/Mourkain’s Temple please?
But, You tell me, The fun really starts at level XX.
No, it does not. It’s the fucking wrost excuse for a bad game there ever was. And it’s been the favorite fanboi’s excuse since Everquest.
And no, you don’t get better spell effects at 29.
Tags: warhammeronline