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Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Review (continued)
More User Submitted Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Reviews
Date: 2008-11-05
Definitely Not a WoW Killer
I purchased Warhammer Online in hopes to find something different. The game is different than World of Warcraft, but there is one huge thing that bugs me, movement speed in the game is slow. Running feels sluggish and combat feels sluggish. It has nothing to do with hardware, because my computer goes above and beyond the system requirements. Even combat isn't all that exciting.
I've been playing World of Warcraft for 4 years and this game was a let down. I'm baffled that this game got as many good reviews as it did. Perhaps many of the people that reviewed it haven't played a MMORPG like WoW. It's a question I can't answer myself. If you've played WoW then don't bother with this game. It does offer a good concept and overall the graphics are a step above WoW, but performance wise everything looks slow and the servers are empty. While Blizzard tends to give the WoW community the shaft at times, WoW is way more fun than WO. Just my opinion.
Date: 2008-11-02
Bad Execution
1. This game has the worst installer I remember using in many, many years. The installation failed 4 times; and my hardware is fine. Following the suggestions in the troubleshooting guide, I had to copy the DVDs to the hard drive first and do a "manual installation". However, the instructions were incorrect but I finally figured out how to do it anyways.
2. The game has the most obnoxious and stupidly egotic startup flash screens ever, one for every company involved (and there are too many), that can't be bypassed by hitting the escape or spacebar keys.
3. The customization of avatars is very limited and primitive. Male avatars are ungainly and some look more like undead monsters than heroes, even the elves. The female ones are passable.
4. No tutorials.
5. Bad user interface. I spent 15 minutes trying to find the settings to stop my avatar from impatiently sighing at me. You'd think that, and the mouse UI settings, would be under "UI customization". No... You have to choose the button that suggests that you want to exit the game. Then you get to finally turn off the annoying music and shut up that petulant avatar. In general, it's not intuitive.
6. You click the buttons to logout or exit the game and nothing visible happens. Ever. The first time I used Ctl-Alt-Del to force quit the game. Eventually I noticed that there is a countdown... Except it's hidden in one tab of the window that grays out and vanishes unless your cursor is over it. Of course your cursor isn't over it after clicking the logout button.
7. Bad animation. It's hard to describe how badly the elf scout is animated, but probably an Orang-Outang runs more gracefully.
8. The MMO mechanisms I don't like. Queues for instances, shared areas where players can accidentally engage the same enemies...
9. The same tired, unappealing storylines. The most fun and unusual it got was manning a catapult to shoot harpies, but they didn't react; it was just practice target shooting.
10. Nothing to redeem the rest, unless you're a die-hard Warhammer fan. Some free-to-play MMO games are better.
Date: 2008-11-02
Needs a personality :(
I was hoping for something to take myself and my boyfriend away from WoW (World of Warcraft), but this game just had no flavor or life to it, placing it on the opposite end of the joy spectrum from WoW's overflowing colors and energy and lively chat almost no matter where you are in its world. If you're way into PvP, give it a shot I guess, but for me, it's back to WoW, rediscovering its wonders. :)
Date: 2008-10-30
Warhammer Online An RvR blast.
I've been a long time World of Warcraft player and felt it was time for something new. Warhammer came out so I jumped on it. I was happy I did. Good graphics. Decent quest to keep you geared and filling in time while you do scenarios. This is the way to level!! Its a blast. From level one you can engage in combat verus other players and you earn coin, experience and even gear. I like it!! A much easier game to play solo or just for a short bit. No looking for a group for an hour to get into a three hour instance that only gets you part of what you need. Quest give decent experience and your map gives you a location to complete that quest so your not searching a zone for an hour to find the right mob.
A few things to think about against Warhammer Online. It requires a higher system to run it. Two gigs of memory at least to run it effectively. Log in times and be a chore with daily patches and video intros. NPCs aren't as easily laid out or instructed as in WoW.
If you want a game where your taking on other players and kicking butt. You'll enjoy this game. If you want a game to look good and do quest here and there to try something new. You'll like this game. If you want big instances and 4 hour runs and huge unbeatable bosses then stay in EQ or WoW. Age of Conan has nothing on either of these and the customer support is great so far. Gold spammers ruin people's day. Not in War, just type /rg and they are reported. Then banned. And yes they really do ban them. You don't even have to type in the spammers name its done already along with the message. All you have to do is type /rg and hit send. Its great.
Hope this helped and happy hunting.
Date: 2008-10-28
An Excellent Game
Games I have played: FFXI, Age of Conan, World of Warcraft, Warhammer Online
Everyone always starts off by mentioning World of Warcraft and I think I will as well. I love World of Warcraft and have waisted many hours in World of Warcraft. I had a 70 tier 6 Troll Shamman, 70 tier 5 Human Mage, 62 Human Paladin, and a 54 Tauren Druid. I still think that World of Warcraft has the best raiding content in any game I have ever played.
This being said I got tired of the way that World of Warcraft did PVP. This is where Warhammer really steps it up. In World of Warcraft, most of the game was being stunned/feared/sheeped. I do not enjoy loosing control of my character and waiting for my character to be killed without being able to do anything. I am currently only a 23 Ironbreaker/ 10 White Lion but already find pvp, or referred to as rvr in Warhammer extremely fun. The scenarios give you experience when you compete in them, and is also probably the fastest way to level up.
Now I am going to discuss the game and what my impressions of it were.
I got into this game because several of my friends had started playing it and talked me into trying it out. The first class I tried out was an Archmage. I found the class ok but it did not mesh with my play style. Then I created an Ironbreaker with a friend when we were playing together and absolutely fell in love with him. This seems to be the way the developers wanted you to play the game. Some classes you will like, some you will hate. I definitely recommend trying a few.
Warhammer brings some interesting new things to the game. For one I enjoy I no longer have mana. Every character now has energy. This energy continuously regenerates so that you can continue to fight for any amount of time.
The second is something called tactics. You can pick and choose which tactics you have on but think of them as selecting which buffs you are going to have active at any one time. You can switch these out after being out of combat for 10 seconds. This means that in an RVR or siege you can hot swap abilities if you need to adjust for a situation.
Warhammer also gives you abilities that you can set called Morale abilitys. Your morale abilities charge the longer you are in combat. The higher tier ones typically give group buffs or group damage. For example my tier 3 morale ability the other day lets me makes my group within 30 yards of me take 50% less damage of all types for 10 seconds. Morale has a maximum of four levels and anytime you use any morale ability, you loose all of your morale.
Another thing Warhammer gives you is a class specific self buffing system. For my archmage I would start to cast faster, do more damage, or more healing if I cast spells in the same school like 4 healing spells in a row. My Ironbreaker gets grudge which is used to increase damage I do and to activate special abilities that take no energy at all. I have not played all of the classes yet so I can not tell you what every class gets but everyone gets something to help them out and make them even a little more unique.
Warhammer also allows for some interesting world RVR. I was a part of a siege on a keep. Let me tell you setting up battering rams and ballistics are just amazing. You have to have healers healing the people on the ram because everyone is getting burning oil poured on them. This is something you need to participate in to see what the end game type of pvp is going to be like. The end game of this game is trying to capture the enemy's capital.
I will now leave you with my thought on MMO's out there at this time that I have played.
FFXI - Fun to play, I hated the xp penalty for dying, the exuberant amounts of time required to level and the zero availability to solo in this game. I spent most of my time on this game looking for leveling groups.
World of Warcraft - I have played this game more than anything else to date. It is great fun, well polished but extremely tedious after going through content once. The PVP is horribly imbalanced and is just not as fun. The raiding content can not be matched by any game in the mainstream market today.
Age of Conan - I got bored quickly, interesting ideas but the lack of focus of any objectives made me not like it. Open PVP was just horrible because there were no factions and no real reason to do anything other than just bragging rights. I hate it when a developer instances normal zones like Guild Wars.
Warhammer - Extremly fun. Lack of endgame PVE, best PVP in a game so far to date. I wish that when you left Tier 1 zone, to Tier 2 zone it did not have a loading screen. Interesting that not everyone has an exact copy of your character on the opposing side.
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