War's character graphics are apalling. The movement is simply hideous and spell casting is so so incredibly out of date. Even compared to wow. The buildings and props look totally stunning but they are set in a landscape filled by monotextured ground, angular surfaces and bits which again are far less appealing than wow. The collision detection on props is totally dreadful and I got constantly stuck on pretty much everything.

The PvE stuff is totally irrelevant. Most of the end game gear comes from the pvp, the instances and world group mobs are pretty much there just as tick boxes. PvE solo quests are awful. "go here kill x of these come back" and "walk there and talk to them" nothing else. What's worse is that the PvE quests involve killing the mobs. Now even in the beta on mostly empty servers these mobswould constantly without fail port to you. When you got to see some of the pathing and mob interactions, like aggro, it was laughable. Again, 5+ years out of date.

The public quests are totally genius, granted. However, after the initial runthrough, there simply wont be any people at the public quest spots. As a feature, i love it, as a game buying feature it's not enough.

So to be honest, the game does NOT have any pve. The rewards from it whilst levelling do help but the exp mainly comes from pvp, pvp gives far more exp and there really is very little to do any pve bar a few public quests for progression gear. there is zero end game pve. it's an afterthought and a tickbox, like it was in guild wars. the devs clearly state this.

Onto the pvp... erm... where wow dumbed down rpgs as far as character customisation goes, war dumbs down wow. The gear, as mentioned above, will be very samey as it comes from the pvp. The builds will be even worse. Each class gets 3 trees, 1 of those is usually terrible, and EVERY player will max one of their chosen trees and then allocate the spare points into another. There won't be many mixed builds as in war you allocate 15 points to a tree which makes your 5 base, granted spells, more powerful. So basically you max your tree every time, there is no variety or choice, you just do it. so 2 builds per class max. The selection of powerups "buffs" and special powers etc will make for some customisation but yea, at their core you will have characters with the same skill trees and gear running around. Coupled with the fact a lot of the classes plain old suck on damage/utility and because there are so many classes most are samey, it wont make for much fun.

My main issue with the pvp there was that the classes in general lacked fun stuff. Like blink, iceblock, daze... all the crowd control and survivability stuff you see in wow simply isn't there. The combat is also significantly slower and it didn't do much for me. it felt disjointed and sluggish and the awful graphics didnt help.

What gets to me is when people say "oh but there's a lot of point in the pvp its so meaningful"... erm... did anybody in planetside care about the bases? No. Just like in war the bases and capture points are all largely irrelevant, the sieges too. It's basically a series of BGs, there is no real point in the pvp thus it's a grind. Now in games like planetside where the fighting was hugely varied and you could change your playstyle this worked just fine, war doesn't have this variety, it lacks class and character variety, it has no pve of significance and the combat just isn't that much fun.

Playing war is basically like playing a bunch of different bgs, to level and at end game pretty much constantly using blander characters than wow does. It's a lot like guild wars in the group v group aspect and i do respect that, even though i didnt like the lack of character variety, but this just isn't a complete rpg. As a guild wars follow up its ok, I might have played it had it either had some satisfying combat animation or spec variety or something which would make me not think "meh, why don't I just go do some av".

I genuinely believe if you rate this as an mmorpg it's about 75%. Eurogamer's review is pretty spot on. Not broken, just bland. And it made me want to go play wow instead, so I did.