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I've been noticing a trend lately. I play both Order and Destruction characters, each day choosing one just purely on whim. Despite my experience and better judgement, I also occasionally peruse the IGN warhammer forum, mostly because from time to time Mark Jacobs, Mythic GM posts there.
As I knew from my time in Dark Age of Camelot, the place is a gathering spot for whiners and haters of the highest caliber. You thought the WoW official forums were bad? Welcome to Butthurt Central.
So anyway, I have a passing familiarity with some of the gripes the gripers make about this game, from my (as brief as possible) visits to the IGN vaginalogue fest and of course from hearing the occasional whine in /1 or /sc while I play. I've noticed that Order seems to whine about how Destruction outnumbers them in open world RvR (though that is becoming less and less the case with Mythic's recent incentives to roll new characters on numerically disadvantaged realms), and especially at low levels they whine about the nigh-invulnerability of the Orc. Destruction, however, whines about Bright Wizards and scenarios.
My order characters never seem to have a problem getting into a scenario as quickly as they like, and they can pick and choose. Don't want Stonetroll crossing or Tor Anroc? No problem! Just queue for the others and wait a couple minutes. I am absolutely loving Highpass Cemetery, btw. But they do seem to have some trouble hanging on to keeps in the non-scenario RvR arenas. The whining is actually pretty sparse there.
Ohhh but destruction. Never have I heard more mealy-mouthed tear-streaked mewling crybabies in one spot since... well, since closing the window that had IGN's forums open. God forbid more than 3 players on the other side in a scenario should happen to be bright wizards, that's just grounds for logging out right there. And one of the recurring whines is how the only tier 3 scenario that ever comes up is Tor Anroc. Never mind that if all these people who hate tor anroc simply didn't queue for it, they'd have a grand time in the other ones.
For instance, just last night I managed to get into Temple of Isha on destruction side (by simply queueing for everything and then removing myself from the Tor Anroc queue, go figure) three times in a row. The first time, Order claimed the flag first, and we didn't manage to fight them away from it until they were up by about 280-50 or so. General consensus in /sc was "just hold the flag and we can still win" even though there was less than 8 minutes left to go. But certain dumb players couldn't help running off where the healers (who stayed at the flag) couldn't get to them, and kept feeding the enemy points so that we finally lost... by three points. It was a gutwrenching defeat. So close.
Second time in, we started out rough again. Many on our side didn't join in a timely manner, only appearing 30 or so seconds after the clock started running, so naturally Order got the flag first. Then people started whining about how order had FIVE! FIVE! five bright wizards! This was intolerable to them. They started whining about wanting to log out. I remember this one dark elf called Ysr or Ysl or something like that in paricular, because she was one of the brainless twats handing the enemy extra frag points by hustling to her death in the first match. She vocalized her intent to log out and then did so. So did some others, mostly the brain dead simps of similar bearing as her. This meant that in mid-match, some poor bastards got brought in from the queue to fill those who logged out, only to get their butt handed to them in less than 5 minutes and get pushed back out (probably running back to Tor Anroc with their tail between their legs) because some big girls' blouses couldn't handle a challenge.
I wanted to haul the quitters back into the scenario and yell at them. "You know what Ysl? Go ahead and bail, because you're useless anyway. I saw you last match, running off to hand victory over to Order by trying to solo the entire Order team while out of healer range. If you really want to do the forces of evil a favor, just log out and stay out. Don't requeue for another scenario, ever. Better yet, delete your character. Better still! Roll order and subject THEM to your incompetence and whining! Or why don't we just cut to the best solution of all and have you go die in a fire??"
Fortunately the whiners didn't come back for the third round. Despite Order getting the flag first as always, we rallied, kicked them off, and held the flag. Without the Short Attention Span Special Forces going and getting themselves farmed one at a time, we managed to overcome the exact same situation we were in first match and win. How about that. Who'd have thunk that the loudest whiners were also our least effective fighters?
There's a big debate at good'ol IGN about whether or not people who log out of scenarios because they are losing are complete wankers. For me, there's no debate. Undeniably they are the biggest wankers since wanking was discovered. They'll tell you that "getting my ass kicked is not fun. Why should I play if I'm not having fun?" So let me get this straight... only winning is fun? You can never be allowed to lose or else you're not having fun? Why don't we just get you a game that consists of a single big red button marked "WIN" that you can push and it will play fanfare for you every time you do?
These are probably the same kids that when they realize they're going to lose at chess or checkers, their answer is to slap the board across the room and storm out. Listen you pasty retards, when you joined that queue, you signed up to play a team game with other people. While not exactly as binding as a commitment to the armed forces, it still labels you a dick if you then take your ball and go home the instant you start to lose. It's PvP! Someone has to lose if someone's going to win, and if you're routinely experiencing crushing defeats perhaps it's time to start looking for the problem in the mirror! In a soccer match, do players on the losing team start driving home at halftime? No! The entire attitude of these "I quit when I'm not having fun" people just absolutely reeks if immaturity and possibly developmental/personality disorders.
Well, it's just further proof that even in the best MMOs on the market, the worst aspect is always the other players.
No doubt both my regular readers will have noted that my content has dropped off for the last few weeks (thank goodness for Zero Punctuation, eh?). I'm in Warhammer Online and I'm hooked.
My highest level character is only mid 20s (out of a max 40), so really I don't feel comfortable doing a full review, but I also feel that already too much time has passed where I've been playing the game and not writing about it. So, here's my look at the non-endgame tiers of Warhammer Online.
First of all, let's get something out of the way - the experience of playing Warhammer Online is very distinct from the experience of playing World of Warcraft. The only thing they really have in common is the layout of the default interface and the ability to add in LUA-based interface addons. Yes, WoW draws on Warhammer for its inspiration and basic art, but the two diverged a long time ago. Warhammer's atmosphere is much more dark, bestial, brooding and dystopian. Warcraft "reformed" the Orcish Horde and now there's a "sort of" war going on between two sides where there's really no bad guy (except, of course, the NPCs), whereas the war between the forces of destruction and order is so bloody and desperate that lofty ideals and morality have pretty much gone out the window in a frantic scrabble just to survive. The forces of Destruction are unrepentantly evil, and the forces of Order are just as likely to impress a 15 year old into military duty and execute his Father for objecting.
Warhammer is extremely casual-gamer-friendly, in that the content does not require large consecutive blocks of time. The matchmaking tools are also very good, featuring a grouping model very novel for the genre: the "open" group. Unless you otherwise specify, your group can be joined at any time by anyone who wants to join it (though the group leader still retains the ability to kick out members, set loot rules, even change the group to the traditional "closed" group). Also, the UI has an excellent tool to find nearby "open" groups and get you into them. RvR scenarios typically run 15 minutes and "public quests" rarely take more than half an hour, with rewards being doled out generously. Also, there are separate rulesets available on special servers to suit the player's taste, whether you desire RvR to be limited only to designated areas or for there to be the potential for combat with the enemy no matter where you are. There are no "hardcore free-for-all" PvP servers as of yet where team restrictions would be ignored for PvP combat... and really, the nature of the game doesn't really lend itself to such a setup, and it isn't needed in any case.
The game itself however is pretty taxing on your hardware. If you haven't upgraded in the last year or two you will probably feel some of that strain on the kind of graphical settings you see in screenshots. You can turn them down, but texture quality tends to degrade very quickly when you do that, and even on low settings you really ought to have 2 gigs of ram, a multicore processor and a fairly recent video card.
The PvE has the usual "go here and kill this" type quests up for offer, but the real star of the show are the "Public Quests." Public Quests, or PQs for short, are multistage npc-driven events which usually require player cooperation to complete. You don't have to go see somebody to get a public quest, nor turn it in. Just wandering into the area automatically makes you part of the public quest. Most PQs are 3 stages, the first stage usually requiring the mass slaying or gathering of plentiful mobs or items that pop up on the ground. The second stage will usually be either a "miniboss" or another item-driven objective (burn down X houses, for example), and the final stage is almost always a boss encounter. The game keeps track of who contributes to the completion of these objectives, because when the PQ is successfully concluded there is loot to be rolled for (rolling happens automatically but transparently, like a scoreboard), and the more you contribute the higher a bonus will be added to your roll. This generally makes for a rather equitable distribution of loot, but it isn't perfect. I personally HAVE walked into a PQ that was nearly done killing the 3rd stage boss, took two whacks at the boss mob, and when it was over I won first place in the rolling (granting me the best item that dropped) and people who contributed exponentially more to the PQ got lesser items or nothing. Conversely, I have also many times been the "most contributing" member and walked away with nothing more than the XP and "influence" I gained for doing the PQ (each little area has an "influence" bar you can fill up, with rewards available once you do. Doing PQs is the only way to raise influence). However, the injustice is rather diminished because the PQ will reset itself quickly, and you can go through again, this time with yet another roll bonus for "persistence" because you did the PQ already and didn't win anything.
At this stage (a month after release), the patches have been small and frequent, mostly concerned with fixing bugs. There are still some pesky bugs flitting about but nothing near the caliber of Age of Conan's problems, and there are more things coming. Mythic maintains an excellent avenue of communication to their playerbase through their "herald" website and their GM, Mark Jacobs actually spends a great deal of time posting on the IGN warhammer forums (Mythic seems to be repeating their practice from DAOC of not having "official" forums but using IGN's forums extensively). I worry about the influence of the hordes of brain-dead whiny preteens (and mental preteens) that hang out at IGN searching for reasons to hate the games they play, but so far Mr. Jacobs has proven rather resilient and resistant to their influence. Mythic clearly has remembered the lessons they learned during DAOC's time in the sun and is building upon them carefully.
At this point, I can give my hearty endorsement of Warhammer Online, and recommend it unflinchingly with the one caveat that you need a pretty nice system to get max enjoyment out of it. Not as much so as Conan, but still pretty beefy. I think I've found my drug of choice for the forseeable future.
Verdict: A+.
