How many of you guys are going to give WAR a test run?

[Sanctume]

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 The movement is simply hideous and spell casting is so so incredibly out of date.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.

Yeah graphics is not totally hot. But even back in Doom 1, fragging someone felt great despite the crappy graphics.

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 Again, 5+ years out of date.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 mob pathing was not bad when I played the past week during Open Beta. The PvE contents were playable. There are still bugs, but I won't be playing too much PvE when PvP get me levels and renown ranks.

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.

I think the "public" part of public quest fails when the server population of a beta server is not there. On a theoretical live server, there should be plenty of people wanting to group and do PQs, or even guildies.

In my 2-box setup, I kept my group as Open and it was easy to add people in. I notice a lot of people "solo" in PQ and after soloing one, you will realize you benefit more by joining a group. I just initiate group invites and do them.

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.

That's the game. Just like WoW is about content with PvP as an after thought. It seems that any game doing after thought design fails. EQ/EQ2 were made for PvE so their PvP aspects fail. Same in WoW but better than EQ.

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.

Is WoW talent building any different? Trees are just there to help every player choose for themselves. Often times, players aren't independent enough to think for themselves and just copy builds/templates. Where's the fun in owning your own creation when you just copy from the flavor of the month.

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.

I did not have any problems with lag, but I set mine to highest framerate rather than quality. As for Mage bullshit blink, what fun is that to the melee hopelessly trying to catch a mage? and even if they catch them, the freezing slow armor slows the swing times. In WAR, at least if the mage is dumb enough to let the melee get to his face, then he's going to pay. That caster better be able to dump his nukes to kill the melee.

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.

The only point that matters is I kill the enemy players. There's no ambiguous wtf Alliance and Horde co-exisiting in a city called Shattrath. Rank, Renown Rank, Levels in WoW are all grind. Anything that puts quantifiable measurements to progress is a grind no matter what flavor text you put it. That's one property of a MMO character, it is part of character advancement.

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 played first person shooters and it is fun once in a while. But it lacks the "hook" of caring for the character building or character advancement found in MMOs. That is one of the addictive qualities of an MMO, how each player put some care to their character. When in FPS games, there's little care for character building, and so there's little care for time investment in building one. Just enter the fray.

War would be a transistion from an FPS to MMO with PvP as the main motivation.

WoW would be a transistion from a RPG game like Oblivion or Baldur's Gate and into the more massive MMO world population.

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.

Ratings are just one gamer's judgement. It's only good if my play taste similarly matches the one who judges it. Obviously, your play taste differs from mine.

I think WAR has a certain game niche that Blizzard can't provide--but there are also a lot of gray areas where WAR and WoW touches as part of their game world. I prefer more Game Company competition as each company needs to prove they have a better game than any other, so that's some good for me as a game and consumer.

If WAR did not come out, will WoW come up with all the fanciful "fun" titles as in the Tome Of Knowledge? or a BG in WotLK that is more world persistence similar to WAR's RvR zones?