Pumping Irony

I just finished my first 30 minutes or so in WAR, so these are quite literally my first impressions.

First, I’ll start off by reminding myself “remember what you said about making assumptions?” Yeah… So, apparently Chaos are people. I’ve been all fired up over playing a Chosen because all the screenshots (fully armored, of course) look cool and because the description of the class are so reminiscent of the Dread Knight from Vanguard. My Dread Knight is an orc so I had assumed that I’d be playing an “ugly” humanoid monster race in WAR as well. Nope! Turns out Chaos are just homely and not-very-nice humans. That one’s my fault though for making assumptions as well as not knowing a single iota of Warhammer lore. Color me disappointed nonetheless. If the Chosen ends up not grabbing me, off to Black Orc land I’ll be heading.

Since I can’t play the racial type I’d wanted, I went for the “voodoo” look, dreadlocks and all and a rather pissed-off look about him. Here’s Draevus, currently at Rank 2.

All I’ve done so far is a handful of PvE quests, gained Rank 2 and some heavy boots. I hate to play the WoW card so soon, but Chaos reminds me way too much of WoW’s humans, which I always thought looked extremely goofy, so I’m looking forward to getting Draevus covered in armor as soon as possible. I don’t normally like having helm graphics showing but I’ll be making an exception in this case. This is exactly why I’m always preaching about not going into new games with pre-conceived notions; the whole race thing has really bitten me in the ass and already puts a dark cloud over my first character. Hopefully once I get him covered up in armor and can forget he’s a Stormwind reject, the class itself will have enough coolness to draw me in.

Here’s my list of initial impressions.

+ Pros:

• The font is awesome! In the UI, Quest Log Tome of Knowledge, combat text, etc. it’s very clear and has character (pun intended) that I feel fits what I’m seeing. I love the way it looks and reads with one exception, which I’ll note in the cons list.
• Chat bubbles! Sure, City of Heroes has them but these are just cool and remind me of old-school Star Wars Galaxies. Chat bubbles fit the art style as well.
• The quests tell how much XP will be rewarded! This is one of those tiny little things that make you smack yourself in the head asking why no one has done this before. Every other game’s quests inform you how much money they pay and any item rewards, so why not just tell you up-front how much XP as well?
• Fading between texture swaps! I’m tempted to say “every other game” but I’ll go with “LOTRO and Vanguard” since I’ve been playing them and this is in my face constantly. LOTRO and Vanguard each show low resolution textures on the environments then as your character gets closer to certain features, will swap to the high resolution texture. Unfortunately, it’s often a very jarring experience, sometimes even causing a split-second hitching. LOTRO uses fade-in for a few other effects and I’ve often wondered (often as in “every time I play”) if a fade-in for environmental swaps would work or not. WAR has answered my question: it works beautifully! Turbine needs to add fade-in to their world textures immediately if not sooner! My only minor gripe is that WAR’s radius for high resolution textures is relatively short. It probably helps performance in PvP but I’m not to that point yet so it’s quite noticeable here in the starter area.

- Cons:

• No integrated VOIP. It’s almost 2009, are we seriously going to release new games without VOIP? Especially games that are supposed to encourage grouping and teamwork? Sure, Casualties has its own Ventrilo server, but come on… I’m sure I’ll be PUG-ing at some point. Public Quests anyone? Turbine licenses Gamespy’s VOIP which works ok. Blizzard has their own proprietary VOIP. All the cool kids these days are licensing Vivox.
• No key bind to toggle names. Again, I’m in late 2008, not sure what year Mythic is in but if need be I’ll call Doc Brown and have him get Mythic a flux capacitor so they can get to us here in the future.
• UI toggle only works while held. Huh? What. The. Fuck? [Edit: Disregard, this was a one-night fluke and works properly now.]
• The awesome font doesn’t scale well. It’s extremely difficult to actually read names over NPC heads until pretty close to them.
• No FSAA. Even though I’d have it turned off most of the time for the sake of performance, it’s nice to have it there for screenshots.
• Tooltips do not give class information. I see other characters running around, and the tooltips tell me what rank they are and that they’re friendly. That’s it. I saw some other Stormwind rejects with shields running around who look just like Draevus so they’re probably Chosen. I saw a guy riding a non-animated (ugh…) frisbee thing, no idea what the hell class he is because it won’t tell me. Even inspecting him yields nothing. Am I supposed to roll one of each class to figure out what everyone is?
• Global cooldowns. This annoys the hell out of me in Vanguard, and I’m really not appreciating it here either. Hey, I have a great idea: it’s 2008, how about when I use an ability only that ability has to refresh? Do I seriously need to see a timer and animation for every single ability on the hotbar refresh every single time I use one? Seriously? I’ll excuse Vanguard because it thinks it’s “kickin’ it old school” but WAR isn’t getting off that easily.
• Progress bar casting. Yeah, WAR is just another first-generation Diku-MMO. I knew that. But I have to watch a progress bar to throw an axe? As soon as I get a better ranged ability, axe throwing is getting deleted from my hotbar. If every damned ranged ability is considered a spell and I have to watch a damned progress bar constantly, the odds of me sticking around in WAR are much lower. If I have to start staring at progress bars to use melee abilities, I’m gone. This alone has just negated any possibility of me rolling any type of caster, including a healer. I am sick to death of staring at progress bars. Cue up some Twisted Sister, because I’m not gonna take it anymore!
• Exit Game… doesn’t. Well, it does, but it logs out first. 20 seconds. I don’t think I will ever understand that particular annoying mechanic in MMOs but in this case, every MMO gives me the option of “log out” and “exit game.” In every other game “exit game” does exactly that and it does it right now. Not in 20 seconds after it “logs out” first.

So, yeah. My first 30+ minutes and my con list is already twice the size of the pro list. I’m not playing at the moment because I was aggravated a little, so I haven’t queued up for my first Scenario yet. Also Van Hemlock is tapping his fingers impatiently for me to hurry up with this article and get into Guild Wars so… more WAR impressions later!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008 at 4:59 pm and is filed under WAR. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.