Originally posted by infofront
I'll try to keep this short but sweet, as you probably know what the game is about already, for the most part. Instead of the typical review style, I'm going to list some of my thoughts about the game, focusing mostly on things you haven't heard often in other reviews.
A little on my background: I've been playing WAR since the end of closed beta, and I've purchased the game and leveled up to 40 (max level). I was really looking for a good change from WoW, as I got really sick of WoW and ended my subscription 8 months ago. I knew WAR had some problems before release, but I really tried to remain optimistic. Mythic gave a valiant effort at repairing the game before release, and they were semi-successful, as the game was just a total mess before open beta. It has taken me only a few weeks into release to get sick of this game though. I think it needs another solid year (at least) in development to infuse the game with more variety, content, and polish. Moreso than that, I seriously wonder about some of the design decisions. Without further ado, here is my list of the top 13 things that suck about WAR:
I can't believe I read through your post. But after I read it, I realize something. You know nothing about WAR AND you know nothing about WOW too. Hahah, that's pretty ironic since you keep comparing WAR to WOW.
1. The combat system tries to be like World of Warcraft's, but fails.
I give you number 1, but WoW was probably your 1st MMORPG so you don't know. I can tell you that the combat system from WoW borrowed directly from Everquest combat system. The original combat system in Everquest is just as fluid and responsive and that game released in 1999. But yeah, the combat in WAR is not as fluid and responsive
2. Many of the character animations are too long. They don't sync well with the combat, and some of them extend well into the global cooldown period, which often can exacerbate some of the combat bugs, and gives it an even more unpolished feel.
This is the same issue with the previous one.
3. There are almost no dungeons in the game. Those dungeons that do exist are still pretty buggy, not at all fun, and don't even offer great rewards. Public quests were largely implemented to replace dungeons. Public quests can be fun, and give decent loot, but they get old really quickly. There is essentially only one public quest in the game. It goes like so: Phase 1-Kill a lot of easy monsters, Phase 2-Kill a dozen champion monsters (these are like WoW elites), Phase 3-Tank and spank a boss. There are lots of public quests, but they all follow this formula, occasionally adding an extra phase or some kind of minor twist for variety. These are something like poor-man's dungeons. Dungeons typically give you an intense, epic, unpredictable experience. Public quests are short, completely predictable (as they're all essentially the same), boring, and easy.
What you described PQ can be applied to ANY dungeon in WOW too. How could you not realize it? Everything in WOW dungeon is scripted and static in many ways. Once you have done it, you have really done it. There are nothing new anymore. This get old really quickly too. You follow the same exact strategy, tactics, perform every little things the same way again and again for every dungeon in WOW and the mob will react the exact same way they always do. When you first approach, the mob will do this, after that it will do this, after a certain point it will do this. Exact behavior everytime.
4. You may be saying, "But wait a minute, this is a PvP game!" Yes, but it's still an MMORPG, and one that is trying to compete with WoW in every facet. Mark Jacobs of Mythic even said that the reason for all of the delays is so that Mythic could get the PvE up to a level found in WoW: TBC. WAR has better PvP, if you can get past the combat issues, but the PvE is nowhere even close to WoW - not even Pre-BC. When WoTLK comes out in a month, WAR's PvE will look downright ancient.
No, WAR isn't trying to compete with WOW in every facet. The thing is, you can always add more instance/dungeon in later, but you need to have a foundation, in WAR, that foundation is PvP and they are still working hard to solidify that foundation. Once they have the foundation in place, give them a couple years and WAR will have just as many instances/dungeons.
5. The UI in this game is sub-par. It is a lot better now than it was at beta, but it still leaves much to be desired. One problem is that your health and action bars routinely disappear. This is really wonderful when you're in the middle of an intense PvP fight and your health bar disappears. Should I heal? Run away? Hell if I know. There is a lack of keymapping and control customization also. The biggest problem is that there's absolutely no way to tell what value your action bar is at. You get a skill that uses 50 action points. Is that half your action bar? 5% of your action bar? There's no way to know because there's no way of knowing how many action points you have, or even how many action points you have when you're at 100%. You can look at your action point bar, but there's no way to equate this visual reference with any actual numbers, even though all of the skills you use relate to the action bar using set numerical values. This is utterly unbelievable. Imagine playing a Mage in WoW and having no idea how much mana you have at any given moment, how much you have at 100%, etc. Totally unacceptable.
You don't know why your health and action bars fade away? There is no way your health and action bar faded in the middle of an intense PvP fight unless you are no where near the fight. The action bar does not give you exact numerical value but it gives you percentage. From the amount of action point each skill use, you can link percentage with number fairly easy. This could probalby provided later on via an addon may be. And I don't find anything about the UI is sub-par to the original WOW UI. Do you know the original WoW UI?
6. There is a severe lack of good skills, and of skill variety at all. Look at a skill list for any character. For a dps character, for example, you will see many damage skills, most of which have no differentiation between them. Many skills have a very minor debuff effect, which is really the only difference you'll find. You'll have tons and tons of skills by level 40, yet it feels like you have few because there is lack of any real variety between many of them. Also sorely lacking are the kinds of class-defining abilities that WoW had. The mage in WoW had blink, polymorph, frost nova, ice block, several different kinds of magic (ice, fire, arcane), and you could change your spec and you'd have almost a completely different class. The closest thing to a mage in WAR is probably the Bright Wizard (or the BW's mirror class on destruction, the sorceress). The BW, in comparison, has a few minor snares and knockdowns, and only one real crowd control ability, fire cage, which is a root that has a 50% chance of breaking when receiving damage. The only other spells the BW has are fireballs, and variations of different fire damage attacks. That is it - one root, a few snares, and a bunch of pure damage attacks. In WoW, you receive some major abilities at many points throughout the game, and these seem to keep refreshing your class, so it never feels too boring. Also the sheer variety of skills keep WoW fun and exciting. In WAR though it is ALWAYS - *Ding* - "Great, another generic direct damage ability..." There's little to look forward to - no "Sweet, I get to wear plate in two more levels, and get uber skills X,Y, and Z!"
Do you know that the majority of WoW class-defining skills you described do not come from regular skill you learn as you level up but from the talent tree? The BW have a lot of utility skills, you just did not pay attention. And no, not all damage skills are the same. The 3 mastery paths give the BW quite different skills. If you change your mastery, you will have to play your BW in a very different way too. A WoW mage receive almost all of his class-defining spells at very low level, as he level up, he just get the upgrade version of whatever spells he has at low level except for those from the talent tree. So no, the life of a BW and the WoW mage are pretty similar and WAR lore restrict the BW to only fire magic so, compare about different type of magic is a mute point. The fact that you praise the WoW mage and bashing the BW give me an impression that you either way too bias and intentionally do so or you don't know much about WoW at all. Plus in WAR if you mix and match tactics skills, moral skills with other action skills, you can come up with many many build you can use for many different purposes. The same BW, if you change your tactics set, switch your moral skills you could have a very different version BW. You can do this while you are on the field and it gives you much more depth into the class you play.
7. There is a severe lack of character customization. The character creation screen is incredibly lacking. I'd say it's on par with WoW's. Even WoW's character customization level was pretty empty, but that was in 2004. This level of character customization is just unacceptable in 2008. It's as if Mythic tried to include exactly the same amount of customization as WoW - they did just enough for it to be passable. As with every aspect of the game, Mythic went just barely far enough, but didn't go the extra mile in making this feature truly good.
You forget something. What about trophy slots, pockets...? They are visible and can be customize in many ways.
WAR implemented something similar to WoW's talent point trees. These are called mastery trees, and are just a half-assed (more like quarter-assed) attempt at mimicking WoW's character skill customization/focus system. In WAR, these aren't really trees, just bars. There are three such bars, and none of them contain any choices at all. In WoW's talent point system, you'd often have to make tough choices within a talent tree. In WAR, the only decision is which bar to stick your points into. For example, if you're a tank, you might get a defensive mastery bar, a single-target dps mastery bar, and an aoe dps bar. Each bar just has 4 active abilities and 3 passive abilities called tactics. The more points you put into a bar, the more abilities you unlock. Like I said, it's just a really lazily-implemented, poorly done, half-assed clone of WoW's talent system.
Like I said above, the mastery path in WAR is not exactly as the talent tree in WOW. The mastery paths in WAR are not the only thing you can do to make your character skills more depth. In WOW, the talent tree is it, there are no other way to customize your skills set. In WAR, you still have multiple morale skills you can swap, many tactics skills you can set. There are more tactics skills in WAR than those come from the mastery paths. Moreover, the mastery paths are exactly what it sounds. The more you go into a mastery path the better you do with your existing skill belong to that path. You are not only put point into your mastery paths to get new skills, you do that to improve your existing skills as well.
8. There is a lack of variety in PvP. There are a bunch of keeps to raid, but once you've raided a keep in one Tier, you've raided them all. Keeps are really supposed to be the bread and butter of WAR's much-hyped PvP. Keep battles end up being all about who can bring the biggest zerg. Right now, on most servers, that is destruction, because they outnumber order by 2:1 or 3+:1. This is due largely to the developers hyping up the destruction characters as being very cool, and the order characters being lame, before the game was released. Good job there Mythic. In other games (like WoW), an outnumbered party can still win in combat because they have so many skills and CC abilities at their disposal, that when timed right, can dramatically alter the battle. WAR generally required much less skill to be good in PvP. There is very little CC, so it comes down to a battle of who's the best at spamming their damage skills (and at fighting the terribly buggy and unpolished combat system).
The way you look at PvP is wrong. The variety of PvP does not come from the objective. It come from people playing it.
Each side only has one castle. Yep, each side spends all of it's time, at end game, defending its own castle and attacking the enemy's only castle. The only other end-game content consists of scenarios (like WoW's battleground), and a couple of really bad PvE dungeons. The main focus is on the castle sieges though. How many times can you seige the same castle over and over again without getting bored?
How many times can you raid MC, BT, ... over and over again without getting bored? Even though those encounters behave the exact same way every time you do it, like clock work. In PvP you have the unpredictable of people, mobs always behave the exact same way, people don't. Yet you claim that doing it is boring and don't find raiding the exact same mob same dungeon that behave the exact same way over and over and over again not boring?
9. The WAR engine sucks. It is based on Mythic's outdated DaoC engine. The game's looks are about on par with WoW's, but slightly nicer. Yet while it's graphics are only slightly better, it will bring any system to a crawl during a large scale PvP battle. I'm not flaunting my epeen, but I have a system with a Q6600 processor, vista ultimate, 4 GB of Corsair Dominator, ATI 4850, and cable internet. If I get more than 30 characters in one area, is slows down immensely, becoming almost unplayable in the truly large battles. WoW can handle large battles much, much better than WAR, which is kind of odd, seeing as how WoW is supposed to be PvE-centric and WAR is supposed to be large-scale PvP-centric. Also, you better have a whole lot of RAM. If you're running Vista, you better have at least 4 gigs while running WAR, because it's very resource hungry. 3.5 gigs out of my 4 are used up while running WAR on my fresh Vista install with no other programs running. So again, the graphics would be okay if they were released in 2005, but they're very subpar for the end of 2008. It would be understandable if the the engine could handle tons and tons of players really well, but it's only slightly better at this than Age of Conan, while AoC's graphics are vastly better. Also noticeably absent in WAR are most graphics settings we're all used to. Want to enable AA and AF? Better figure out how to force AA and AF in your drivers...
The engine does not sucks that much. It's not based on the outdated DAoC engine. Both DAoC and WAR used the same comercial engine GameBryo and it constantly being developed. Although I find GameBryo is not the top engine but it's not that bad. WAR just lack of fine tune the engine. This same engine was used in TES4: Oblivion, works fine.
10. Last, but not least...itemization - a huge part of what makes these games so fun. The color coding system is the same as WoW's (green=uncommon, blue=rare, purple=epic, etc.). The difference is that you'll be decked out in blues by the time you're level 15.Most people are totally decked out in epics before they even hit level 40. This kind of devalues the whole meaning of epic loot. This game just hands it out like candy, and doesn't make you work for it. You get new loot so often that it takes the fun out of getting new loot. Remember getting that sick purple sword in WoW, and in a single instance you've increased your dps by 30%? Well you'll never get this from WAR. First of all, there are no epic PvE encounters that I know of, so no great gear there. There is the renown system, but renown gear is typically not all that impressive. Second, you cannot craft any equipment. Third, and most importantly, you will completely change out every piece of gear at least once every 3 levels. The result is that you're always bettering yourself incrementally. Every level you'll increase your dps by 5% or so. It is much more exciting to get a new weapon every 8 levels and increase your dps by a whopping amount, like 40%
Do you really understand the itemization system in WOW and WAR at all? You don't seem to understand them so let me explain them to you. The color coding indicated the quality of loot, not the level you acquired it. If you have time, look at those level 19 twinks running around in battleground in WOW, they are deck out with purple and blue. Does it devalue the whole meaning of epic loots? No. The way item in WAR does not give the instant mad boost like WOW because it was designed that way. Have you ever try to fight those little WOW twinks in battleground? It's not fun, they can practically one shot you. My friends has a level 39 rogue twinks deck out with all best possible items and he can practically killed the whole enemy team in WSG all by him self.
Your whole idea of exciting lead to the whole gear progression grind in WOW right now and it's actually an issue, not a good system that you should follow. Once you go down that path, you can never stop.
11. As I touched on above, there is a severe lack of crafting in this game. You get to make potions, or talismans - which are something you put into an item socket. Every one I've seen has a time limit, so the quality of your talisman decides whether it disappears in two hours or two days. Since you can't make any real equipment, and it would be pointless to anyway, since WAR is always throwing new equipment at you, there is basically no player economy. There is an auction house, but even on a good day, you might only find 5 or 6 items for your class. There is extreme specialization in WAR's items. Every single item in the game is class specific, which ends up hurting the item selection at the AH. Again though, there's no real reason to use the AH, as quest, PQ rewards, and renown rewards give you more than enough loot anyway. Sometimes it's nice to take a break from combat and take some time crafting and selling stuff at the auction house in WoW. You'll never have that pleasure in WAR. This is another part of WAR that is totally unacceptable to me. A 2008 MMORPG, which is openly challenging WoW, which is backed by EA with almost infinite funds, is released with virtually no crafting whatsoever, and uses an economic model that excludes a player economy!? Are you kidding me?
Ok, crafting shall we? What are the most sell/trade crafting profession in WOW? Alchemy, Jewelcrafting and Enchanting, right? So WAR has Apothecary, and Talisman making which is kind of like Jewelcrafting and Enchanting mix together. They got the most heavily used and trade craftings as a foundation. The rest can be added in later.
12. There is a lack of immersion in WAR. The only way to get to other zones is to talk to a flight master. After you talk to the flight master, you're given a loading screen, then you magically appear in the place you want to go. The only zones that are connected are your racial pairing's zones. This all results in a disjointed game world and a feeling of disconnect. Also, if you're a high elf, dark elf, dwarf, or greenskin you won't even be able to defend your capital city in a siege. Nope, Mythic took your capital out (along with several classes) so they could rush WAR out the door ASAP.
Another gripe I have is that there is only one flight master per zone, so if you want to travel, you might be in for a really long run to the nearest flight master.
Finally, and this effects tiers 1 and 2 the most, since they only have one scenario per racial pairing, if you want to play more than just your own racial pairing's scenario, you have to fly to another race's zone. You will get sick of your own scenario, but then it's a total pain to try to join another one.
The only way to get to other zone is talk to fight master? Hahah, are you kidding me? And you say you have a level 40 in WAR with that pittiful knowledge of the game. You can virually run everywhere in this game. Just like WOW, between continents you have to flight but within the same continents you can virually run everywhere. And the problem with different scenario has been solved a long time ago, where have you been? You either paid people to level your character for you or you exploit to level 40 because your WAR knowledge seems very tiny.
13. There is a surprising lack of PvP for a PvP game. I played on an open server, and surprisingly, WoW PvP server's are more open than WAR's. I thought WAR was gonna be everywhere, and that WAR was to be the king of all PvP MMORPGs? I can't go into tiers below my own, unless I want to be turned into a chicken that has 1 HP. This also sucks because I can't go into lower zones to help guildmates level, and I can't go back to unlock tome entries that I missed. It amazed me the WAR, the supposed king of PvP, has such a carebear ruleset compared to WoW, the supposed PvE-centric game.
Again, your knowledge of the game are very questionable. You are in an open RvR server, this means you can go to a tier below you without any problem. If you are in a core RvR server, as long as you don't flag RvR you can go any where, kill anything help friends as much as you wanted.
To sum it up, the biggest problems with this game, on a macro level, are lack of polish, lack of fun in pve, lack of any innovation, and a very severe lack of variety in all aspects of the game. That said, the RvR combat is fun at first, but it gets boring quickly. Also, the buggy and unpolished combat, along with the poorly optimized engine detract from RvR.
