For awhile now I have been curious about Warhammer Online or rather WAR as it's short hand would be. I'll admit that I'm somewhat one of the types that a lot of people would label as a MMO jumper, or I would have been if not for my own decision. After quitting World of Warcraft a few years ago before WAR came out, I was looking for a game that would have a emphasis on PvP to my luck WAR was starting to be announced around then and I decided to stop WoW for WAR. However eventually after a long series of waits I decided to go back to WoW and then from then on I forgot about WAR entirely, now after a long period of time (if I remember right, WAR was in the stages of near final and final development throughout Burning Crusade to the WoW player's timeline) and because of the interest in finding out what the Endless Trial is about, I decided to go check it out.
My first few hours with WAR
From the start I thought I knew what class I wanted to play since I spent, quite literally, days of staring at the classes of WAR while it was only a website, but when I got into the character selection screen itself, I was quite fascinated by all of the classes and how they have different animations when they're selected and high lighted. After simply just watching the small animations play over and over again, I decided to go with my first choice of class before looking through the others, the Orc Choppa; although it was very hard to choose against playing as a Black Orc after thinking the selection animation for him was funny (he hits his blade into the ground and has trouble getting it out for those who haven't seen it).
Unfortunately right at the start I was already kind of disjointed from the game as I expected to start out in a racial zone where I wouldn't see anyone but other Greenskins, and maybe a few Dark Elves and Chaos players around, instead I was apparently summoned through the warp by the Chaos directly to be a part of their army. While this part was unexpected it was definitely not entirely unwelcome as I thought exploring the Chaos would be interesting too, and since the characters are predominately Chaos there's plenty of exploring to do, infact I only saw one Orc npc so far.
The style of questing from what I gather is very similar to the post Cataclysm expansion style of questing in WoW, where you actively move with the quests rather than going to a quest hub and picking up dozens of quests, and doing that for pretty much your entire stay. I personally prefer the Cata style as it's more attention grabbing, whereas the other is definitely more classically MMOish.
The combat is very interesting on the other hand, as a Orc Choppa it seems like a lot of abilities are meant to hit hard but also increase the damage I take to the point of being super easy to hurt. To me this in turn means that it would be a overarching factor to deal with as a Choppa as there are some abilities that would exhaust my berserking and thus reduce the damage I take, but also increase the chance to get a critical strike on myself. While all of this sounds counter productive, it remains to be seen if the game's balance is enough so that my offensive power makes up for my vulnerability. On the same note, I enjoy how flashy and decisive most of the attacks are, that's alittle strange coming from a Orc Choppa I know who is suppose to redefine wild and undisciplined, but it's still true, a lot of the strike skills leave a stream of fire from the swing which makes it easily identifiable which attack is just a auto attack and which one is a used attack. At the same time the animation is often so fast you won't gain a appreciation for it the first few dozen times you use it, instead it takes awhile but it still doesn't at all detract from the deserved attention it gets when it's really looked at.
After doing a few quests that mainly involved going to a location of undead or minor daemons and killing them to prove my worth, I came up to the first actual quest hub of a small outpost where the forces of Destruction were mounting an attack on a village, I at first thought this was very neat because it reminded me of the Death Knight intro sequence where pretty much the entire thing is about raiding a town called Havenshire and New Avalon, in WAR however this is where I first encountered public quests.
The addition and style of public quests really drew me in, the set up was that players in the town would have to defend cultists who were preparing to summon a daemon to aid in the further razing of the town. The first thing I noticed is that you never had to actually be in a group during the quest, a window simply popped up that said you were in the vicinity of the public quest and that allowed you to participate in it, even if it was ongoing, the main and only problem with that part of the system is that there really is no visible boundary of the quest, but there still is a boundary, so leaving it would remove you from participation. It does however keep your progress in that session, making it a minor point. The quest itself had multiple short stages making the quest overall fairly fast and painless, the first was to kill milita men that threatened the cultists, moving onto gathering nearby stones from the tombstones to aid in the summoning, finally there was a small scene of the beast coming forth, however as most could suspect the beast itself isn't controlled, and it soon turns on it's chaos controllers, from then on it has to be put down by the players. At the end of all of this a scoreboard pops up ranking your contribution against everyone else, I'm not entirely sure what the contribution scores on but I assume it's based on completing objectives, there are of course other factors like for slaying objectives in terms of how much damage I did to a particular enemy against someone else, but again the scoreboard gives no representation of what it actually scores contribution on. In the end, while that part isn't specifically stated, generally the contribution score is right on the nose. Another factor in a player's score is called the “persistence bonuses” which are awarded if a player participated in the last match but didn't win anything. Finally at the end, everyone does a random dice roll seeming to range from 1 to 999 and that adds to a player's overall score which determines the quality of loot bag they get, and if they get a loot bag at all. I'm not entirely sure if the amount of players participating scales with the amount of loot given out, but I was able to get at least a minor loot bag each time, and sometimes a green quality loot bag. On one occasion out of maybe only 4 attempts in the public quest, I scored the highest on the contributions but ended up being in 5th place because of the roll. All in all I think the public quest system is a super fun and innovative addition to simply questing, they're more like instances but not entirely as they take place in the world itself; the addition of loot, and competitive ranking helped make it quite easy to come back a few more times.
While I was redoing the public quest just to see what kind of ranks I could get against other people, there were a few Empire players that came by, they were of course level 10 while everyone else around me was level 3-4ish so they were in a clear advantage, however after the current session that was ongoing, everyone decided to team up on them. After a short while the Empire was able to easily kill a few of my allies including myself. We were able to kill them, and as a result I got my first renown points even though I had died. Although I haven't really looked into renown, it seems like it's simply a ranking of how much PvP, or rather RvR that you participate in; success probably also plays a factor into it, however even as a causality I was still was able to gain a degree of points, so it seems like a fairly lenient system, but only time will tell.
Public quests also have another role to attend too as well, the gaining of influence points. Currently I'm not sure if public quests are the only way to gain influence points but it was the only noticeable increment point for me, not that that's a bad thing. Influence allows players to gain “Influence Rewards” which are simply just extra items, you are limited to only one item per tier of influence because as I found out once you use up influence you are not able to gain more of it if you've already reached the maximum amount.
That's about the end of the first few hours I spent with the Warhammer Online Endless Trial on the side of Destruction. There are quite a lot of ways to advance your character from what I've seen so far, from achievements, to stat tracking which is definitely a hook for me. However it remains to be seen if I am able to handle it's all too familiar MMORPG conventions and game play. While WAR definitely has new takes on those said conventions, and game play, it still doesn't separate it enough from the feel of familiarity of other games I've played for me, but I guess the same can be said for every person, and game out there.
No comments:
Post a Comment