Warhammer Online sucks
At the behest of some of my old WoW buddies, I tried Warhammer Online for a while. I canceled my account before my free month ran out. Here’s why.
The launch sucked.
I don’t want to hear all the fanboi excuses for this. Yes, I pre-ordered. Yes, it was the “head start.” Yes, launches are always rocky. Yes, WoW’s launch was rocky too.
But I’ll tell you what. I played World of Warcraft closed beta. I was playing World of Warcraft more than six months before the release. And the WoW beta servers as of March 2004 were more stable than Warhammer’s head start servers. And there was no wait. Not so with Warhammer. The server we picked had at least a 1 hour wait time past about 6pm EST every day of the headstart. For a guy who doesn’t get back from work until 7pm and wakes up at 5am, this gives me maybe 3 hours a night and that’s if I’m stretching. Spending 1 hour of that staring at a queue screen is unacceptable.
It wouldn’t be so bad if WAR didn’t have so many epic bugs. For example: blue screens of death. I haven’t seen a BSD in Windows XP except for some shitty Radeon TV Wonder drivers in 2003 since… well, 2003. Somehow WAR managed to crap out on me randomly and BSD my machine. With 1 hour queue times, one BSD and I was done for the night.
Another one? Try using dual monitors and switching tasks. If I alt-tabbed out of WAR – or in some cases if something stole focus like Adobe Acrobat whining about updating itself – WAR wouldn’t restore its window. Kill process and spend another 1 hour in queue. Are you freaking serious?
What Mythic fails to realize is that first impressions are huge. Strike one.
The game’s quality is several orders of magnitude worse than World of Warcraft’s closed beta
Obviously WAR had a steep hill to climb to compete against WOW, which has been out since 2004 and has 10 million subscribers. But the fact that WoW’s beta was more polished than WAR’s release really makes me wonder if Mythic had any realistic hopes at all. I’m not even in the MMO business and I know how deadly it is to release a shitty, unfinished product early to meet budget deadlines. Were they not paying attention to Vanguard? That studio had MMO veterans on the staff and they dropped the ball entirely because they released early.
It’s hard to exactly why the quality was low without launching a long littany of little things, because that’s really what it boils down to – little things. For example, every single character looks the same. I could tell which class a character was merely by looking at their armor – since their armor was all the same. Disciples of Khaine all wore the same stupid red robes. I’m not even sure what the other classes are called because they don’t tell you in the player info (WoW’s tooltip, for example, says “So-and-so, level 7 Orc Rogue”, whereas WAR’s is just the name). But I know the rogue-ish character wore a bikini. Every time I upgraded my sword, I noticed that the sword stayed exactly the same.
The animations were poorly done and boring. I could barely tell that I had cast “Fist of Khaine” because there is no animation whatsoever. Most of the melee attacks have no visible difference between a regular swing. Dual wield doesn’t even work for the Disciple of Khaine (only one attack was affected, by my reckoning). There are too few skills – everybody always does the same thing – it’s even more predictable than WoW.
Mobs were stupidly easy, unintelligent, and had amateurish animations. They chased you forever. The only thing they ever dropped were seeds which rapidly clogged your inventory. Of all the tradeskills they could have implemented, cultivation was about the dumbest choice they could have made. Boring.
Even the RvR scenarios, while admittedly better than WoW’s, got extremely boring extremely quickly. I had fun for about 8 hours and then it just became repetetive. WoW’s problem is that combat is too short – you can get owned in 15 seconds by a rogue if he’s got a big gear advantage on you. In WAR, battles can last forever. The latter is definitely better but they’re both broken IMO.
Quests were the worst. Even with the little circles they draw on the map for you, I could never figure out what to do. In fact, if there is one thing that caused me to quit WAR, it was this. The quest logs were extremely vague and stupid. They would write one paragraph of lore that doesn’t give you any suggestion on what you’re actually supposed to do and then expect you to be able to finish the quest. Lame.
Your character grunts when you jump. What? Who came up with that idea?
More classes, fine, but they are indistinguishable and don’t warrant strategy at all. I never saw any players in RvR behave differently against different classes. I was still “low level” but 15 out of 40 isn’t that bad.
I’ll admit that the PvP is good, but it’s not that good. It’s not $15 a month.
The scenery is about as polished as EverQuest 1. I was surprised I didn’t find any untextured, single-colored cubes laying around randomly.
Overall, it was just crappy. It looked like Mythic tried to save money by hiring homeless people off the streets, sending them to a 3 day 3DSMax class, and setting them loose.
Anyone who reads this might just assume that I’m a WoW fanboi, but I canceled my World of Warcraft subscription a long time ago. When I compare WoW, even with all its faults and PvP that I always hated, to WAR, WAR is shit. Plain and simple. There is no comparison.
I played WOTLK beta very briefly just to see what I was going to be missing and I wasn’t impressed, but it blows Warhammer Online out of the water. If you have to choose, stick to WoW.
In fact just writing this review makes me miss WoW. WAR sucks.
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Going to post some comments, to put some things in perspective here. I also agree with some of your comments, but perspective is always good thing.
The launch sucked.
I don’t want to hear all the fanboi excuses for this. Yes, I pre-ordered. Yes, it was the “head start.” Yes, launches are always rocky. Yes, WoW’s launch was rocky too.
But I’ll tell you what. I played World of Warcraft closed beta. I was playing World of Warcraft more than six months before the release. And the WoW beta servers as of March 2004 were more stable than Warhammer’s head start servers. And there was no wait. Not so with Warhammer. The server we picked had at least a 1 hour wait time past about 6pm EST every day of the headstart. For a guy who doesn’t get back from work until 7pm and wakes up at 5am, this gives me maybe 3 hours a night and that’s if I’m stretching. Spending 1 hour of that staring at a queue screen is unacceptable.
– Wont comment on release, but the que screen was unacceptable. Thankfully they fixed it and no longer have this problem. If you crash or are booted while playing, you don’t wait in a que –
It wouldn’t be so bad if WAR didn’t have so many epic bugs. For example: blue screens of death. I haven’t seen a BSD in Windows XP except for some shitty Radeon TV Wonder drivers in 2003 since… well, 2003. Somehow WAR managed to crap out on me randomly and BSD my machine. With 1 hour queue times, one BSD and I was done for the night.
– Might be audio related, but this is very rare… hasn’t happened to me or any player that I know once yet. –
Another one? Try using dual monitors and switching tasks. If I alt-tabbed out of WAR – or in some cases if something stole focus like Adobe Acrobat whining about updating itself – WAR wouldn’t restore its window. Kill process and spend another 1 hour in queue. Are you freaking serious?
– Maximum windowed mode Ftw. Never have a problem with window restore, it’s instant and seemless. I can run 2 games and 10 programs at once and it still always pops back open —
What Mythic fails to realize is that first impressions are huge. Strike one.
– First impressions are at the eye’s of the beholder and how committed that beholder is to seeing the bigger picture –
It’s hard to exactly why the quality was low without launching a long littany of little things, because that’s really what it boils down to – little things. For example, every single character looks the same. I could tell which class a character was merely by looking at their armor – since their armor was all the same. Disciples of Khaine all wore the same stupid red robes. I’m not even sure what the other classes are called because they don’t tell you in the player info (WoW’s tooltip, for example, says “So-and-so, level 7 Orc Rogue”, whereas WAR’s is just the name). But I know the rogue-ish character wore a bikini. Every time I upgraded my sword, I noticed that the sword stayed exactly the same.
– When I envision creating a game, there are things I want to take away, just like there are things I want to put in. I think it’s important to gain that understanding of the fact that just because something doesn’t say “Level 7 Orc Rogue” doesn’t mean it’s a flaw or a missing feature. I actually LOVE the fact that you can’t see what everything is instantly, it brings more competative advantages/disadvantages to a person depending on how they react… instead of being vanilla. You have a decent point regarding armor looking the same. But remember, no one is really running dungeons/lairs and such for the multiple levels of gear sets available… I don’t so much care that the short run from 1-35 or so is some of the same. —
Mobs were stupidly easy, unintelligent, and had amateurish animations. They chased you forever. The only thing they ever dropped were seeds which rapidly clogged your inventory. Of all the tradeskills they could have implemented, cultivation was about the dumbest choice they could have made. Boring.
— I really hate the seeds (fixed in today’s patch by the way) So are the mob issues with chasing. Which is also a mechanic designed to challenge the player instead of fleeing and getting away scott free all of the time. Here’s a test for you… the next time you have to flee… go pretty far and stop before you normally would… before the mob turns around. You’ll see him immediately turn round, and the reason for this is to make sure you think better next time and/or don’t exploit by kill&run tactics. —
Even the RvR scenarios, while admittedly better than WoW’s, got extremely boring extremely quickly. I had fun for about 8 hours and then it just became repetetive. WoW’s problem is that combat is too short – you can get owned in 15 seconds by a rogue if he’s got a big gear advantage on you. In WAR, battles can last forever. The latter is definitely better but they’re both broken IMO.
— Ahh, last forever seems to be “lasts longer than 15 seconds” I know that’s not what you really meant, but too many are thinking that way. Scenarios aren’t queing/rotating out very well.. which gives the illusion that it gets boring. Mythic needs to fix the system so people can see more Scenarios —
Quests were the worst. Even with the little circles they draw on the map for you, I could never figure out what to do. In fact, if there is one thing that caused me to quit WAR, it was this. The quest logs were extremely vague and stupid. They would write one paragraph of lore that doesn’t give you any suggestion on what you’re actually supposed to do and then expect you to be able to finish the quest. Lame.
— On this one, you are absolutely way off base. This game tells more about a quest than any other game on the market, period. Granted, people actually have to read for 10 seconds… but directions are VERY clear and very concise. And if there is any time they aren’t… that’s a good thing. The gaming market is becoming too vanilla and too easy… no one is thinking for themselves anymore, everyone wants instant gratification and that’s not what gaming is about. If it was, Cheats & godmode codes would be printed on the boxes of every game. My suggestion to you here is… do some development, even on a text based mud… see the difference between creating and making it too easy for the player and/or too hard…etc. You gain a lot of perspective from that. —
Your character grunts when you jump. What? Who came up with that idea? — I realize this was just some comic relief thrown in… but do me a favor…. put on a ton of robes and weapons… or armor and shields and go outside. Sprint as fast as you can and try and jump 10 feet forward over 3 people laying down without a sound. People spam jump too much, which is more annoying than the grunt. —-
More classes, fine, but they are indistinguishable and don’t warrant strategy at all. I never saw any players in RvR behave differently against different classes. I was still “low level” but 15 out of 40 isn’t that bad.
— I think this is an opinion based on a very small amount of gameplay. I play against a witch elf a whole lot differently than I do a tank. Same with witch hunter vs. an Engineeer. Come on now… —
I’ll admit that the PvP is good, but it’s not that good. It’s not $15 a month.
— It’s best available unless you’re an Arena grinding junky. Actually, 2nd place might be AoC because of the realism, especially on a PVP server. I’d play that as a change of pace with a little dash of FPS gore before WoW PVP (and for the record I like WoW)
The scenery is about as polished as EverQuest 1. I was surprised I didn’t find any untextured, single-colored cubes laying around randomly.
— I hate the blocky look of some of the models/archi and completely agree with you here. They are less than stellar in that area… but then again so is WoW… one thing WoW helped proved, is that you don’t need EQ2, Vanguard or AoC graphics to be popular and fun. Gameplay always wins that battle. —
Overall, it was just crappy. It looked like Mythic tried to save money by hiring homeless people off the streets, sending them to a 3 day 3DSMax class, and setting them loose.
Anyone who reads this might just assume that I’m a WoW fanboi, but I canceled my World of Warcraft subscription a long time ago. When I compare WoW, even with all its faults and PvP that I always hated, to WAR, WAR is shit. Plain and simple. There is no comparison.
I played WOTLK beta very briefly just to see what I was going to be missing and I wasn’t impressed, but it blows Warhammer Online out of the water. If you have to choose, stick to WoW.
In fact just writing this review makes me miss WoW. WAR sucks.
— In closing, I recommend to anyone that you gain some perspective and actually TRY to look at things from a lot of different angles. I think too many people get caught up in what they THINK they are supposed to think… instead of what actually matters most.
People fool themselves into thinking they HAVE to make a decision of best or better… when really that’s not a requirement at all. Anything can be worth $15 a month…. which is half as much as you spend on greasy food at Mcdonalds in a week or two. —
I tried windowed mode and found the performance to be worse enough to annoy me.
Battles did literally last forever. When one healing class fights another healing class, they simply last and last. I liken it to resto druid duels in WOW – but even then, eventually there will be a winner because mana is finite. In WAR, my ability to continue to cast healing spells was essentially infinite. Makes for better PvP in general but it does make many 1v1 situations pointless. Maybe that’s the point?
I find it funny that you would try to use the realism angle to justify grunting during jumping when we’re talking about a fantasy MMO filled with elves and ressurection spells.
You have to be smoking rocks if you think WAR’s quests are more detailed than WoW’s. I had one quest in the elf area that said something like, “recover the lost knowledge.” The quest text said something along the lines of, “I really want this book.” The map circle was a gigantic area of the map that covered an entire PQ area. I had no idea where to look for this lost knowledge. Do I kill a mob? Is it a ground drop? Who knows?
Say what you want about “games are supposed to be challenging” and while I agree with you, MMO quests are not the place. Quests should be very clear. They aren’t puzzles. Most WAR players do quests as an aside to PvP – it is not the focus of the game – and therefore it should be easier.
Your argument about changing something like a standard player tooltip for example and how that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s worse, just different, illustrates something I wanted to point out but forgot in the original in the post. I feel like a lot of the decisions the WAR team made were specifically to be different than WOW so people wouldn’t accuse them of being a WOW clone (they still do). But the problem with that approach is that WOW has done so many thousands of things right that changing them for the sake of changing them necessarily makes you wrong. This tooltip thing is an example. It’s not like it’s hard to figure out who’s who – I could definitely tell the 3 different classes apart because like I said, they all look exactly the same, and are limited to only using specific weapons like DoK’s and their 2 swords (which is another thing that is retarded, by the way). The only thing they accomplished by intentionally removing class info from the default player tooltip is put new players in a situation where after 15 levels of play, I still don’t know the names of any WAR classes other than the one I played. Stupid!
I’ll let the numbers speak for themselves. When WAR breaks 1 million subscribers, we can have a chat about “eye of the beholder.” I call it like I see it. WOW is a Ferrari and WAR is a Model T Ford.
So, based on your numbers logic. We should only shop at Walmart?
I’d take screenshots of quests and the detail if I had the time. But it’s really not a war of words. Just some comments on your blog.. trying to donate to the community and get some synergy going on.
As a last comment to throw out on perspective/perception. Last time I checked, WoW wasn’t the first MMO that got thousands of things right. Granted, they had more success and some were better, but they by no means created a lot of good concepts that they use/make better.
Different is good, there is no better/or best judgement required. That’s why I love freedom of choice, if it’s not fun to us, we don’t have to play. You can gain perspective from a bum on the street though… and realize some of your judgements weren’t as solid as you think.
I don’t think any other game will win the WoW numbers war for a very long time. Much like the movie industry and Titanic……etc.
Here’s a famous quote on perspective, and I think it hits the nail on the head for ANYONE (self included)
“If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.”
WAR on the left, WOW on the right:
http://roissy.wordpress.com/2008/10/13/beauty-is-not-mysterious/
How’s that for an analogy? WAR sucks.
Maybe you’re just running a shitty rig.
It’s not the most expensive GPU I could buy. I get 60 fps in WoW sans the WOTLK fancy shadows.
Even if I could render WAR at 60 fps, I wouldn’t want to. The graphics are so amateur that I’m not missing anything by upping the details.
This article is what we’ve come to expect from a wow nerd.
And your response is what we’ve always expected from a WAR fanboi. We saw the same nonsense with Vanguard. Any objective analysis of Vanguard says it sucks, it wasn’t ready, it’s barely playable, it’s a retail beta, blah blah blah.
But as with everything, a certain fixed percent of the population will completely ignore these facts just so they can be different. WAR fanbois are kind of like Goth kids in high schools. They always have and always will look and act like douchebags, but for whatever reason they are compelled to be anti-majority no matter how badly the minority sucks.
That’s fine. Go smoke your clove cigarettes and keep paying for a game that’s slowly dying. 750,000 boxes sold, 300,000 current subscribers playing, vs. 11,000,000 WOW subscribers. Sure, WOW might suck, but it doesn’t suck enough to convince people to stop dropping $15 a month for it. Apparently WAR can’t make the same claim. The numbers speak for themselves.
Half the people who say WAR sucks either never played it, or only played till level 10 there for their opinions are as worthless as themselves.
Since WoW stoll the idea from Warhammer books, wow fanboys have nothing to really complain about. This article is anything but relevant considering you played to only level 15. If your going to judge a game you have to play it all the way through. The game doesn’t even really start till you hit 40 anyways.
Clearly you wrote this article with a biased opinion and in some ways I wish I got my 2 minutes back.
And before you start ranting your ass off on how I am a Warhammer Fanboi I have played every wow expansion since the day it came out. As hard as it is for me to admit it, WAR is much more interesting which is surprising considering it felt like same old same old. Not to mention the graphics on WAR blow WOW off the map. WOW may have better pve but it will never come close to WAR’s PvP. Which is why people play MMOs to begin with. If they want PVE go play Guild wars.
You are a WAR fanboi because you are a WAR fan, not because you also play WoW. If you play WoW also, you are both a WAR fanboi and a WoW fanboi. Simple reasoning is difficult, isn’t it?
My point still stands. WAR’s subscription numbers are in the toilet because it is a shitty game. WoW’s subscription numbers continue to grow because it is not a shitty game. QED.
FM1:
WoW ripped most of its culture from old school Dungeons and Dragons than anything else, WAR fanboy. I’m glad to see WAR dying a slow and painful death, as I’ve had to hear the incessant braying of WAR idiots like yourself. The next MMO to challenge WoW will be Star Wars: The Old Republic. I actually have high hopes for this game and think it will occupy a sizable chunk of the MMO market; however it won’t challenge WoW in any serious way. More than likely, it will soak up competition from EVE Online and LOTRO. Still, Bioware has a dedicated group of drooling fanboys (myself included) that will play anything they put out.
And for your info, I actually did play WAR for my 1 week trial and found it tedious beyond belief. I know you will argue that “it doesn’t start till level 40″, but shouldn’t a game engage me the moment I turn it on? Otherwise, what’s the point?
WAR sucks. Get over it. Now, go roll a Death Knight and stop being a noob.
WOW stole the best parts from a lot of games and I think it was the smartest thing any game could do. Look at the numbers. Wow has 11 million+ for going on 5 years, other games are lucky to ever break 500k in their lifespan (which is usually no longer than 2 years when it becomes known in the mainstream how crappy it is). Point is, WAR needs to some upgrades/major changes or it will go the way of all the others. And no, I don’t play WOW.
wow didnt steal anything
people who make mmos like that use ideas from RL lore etc
war is fun to play but the downloader sucks very very hard
if you try to download with a wireless connection and you loose the connection( which can happen a lot,even with a good inet connection and a new router) be prepared to download EVERYTHING again and again and again
other players continue(when you get it back) but the war one does not, it lets you download everything again,tried it 3 times, lost the connection at 80, 98 and 99%, 11 wasted hours, wooptidoo
gonna pass on this shit, downloader sucks too much
@ emach
thats not simple reasoning you dumbass
get yourself some descent points before you try to act smart
ah nvm, you are one of those stereoptypes
ruggah – get yourself a 5th grade education before you comment on internet blog posts. Spelling counts.
Why when I try to find a WAR review do so many compare it to WoW? I don’t play that shitty game and never will. If I wanted PvE and EPIC RAIDS I would play a RPG like baldur’s gate 2 or Oblivion. WoW WoW WoW…. THIS IS MY FIRST MMO AND IT IS THE BEST 11 MILLION CANT BE WRONG. jesus christ. The person who wrote this sounded so homo for world of warcraft I felt sorry for him… ‘just writing this makes me miss WoW’ oh god. fucking fanboy douchebag… and war does suck. I guess they got the lame ass instancing idea from WoW… yah because that makes for great PvP. I WANT A NON-CAREBEAR GAME. Have fun killing AI.
And what about Aion… ???
Yeah, what about Aion?