Warhammer Online has a “recruit a friend” program I was able to take advantage of to give the game a peek. Thus far I have made it past installation and into about ninety minutes of gameplay, and have not hated it.
After the initial installation last night, I created a character and played for about 5 minutes. In that time, I saw four things that struck me as unpolished.
- The shortcut to play game time is too long; those movies should not play after the first time.
- At the creation screen, I was able to access graphics options; which is good. Alas that good is lost when the skybox disappears after making a change.
- My character does not look to actually run on the ground. She instead performs a run animation that slides/floats across the surface. Its weird and but not many games seem to be able to get a feeling of proper gravity.
- I was ready to sleep, so I brought up the “esc” menu, and clicked exit. Nothing appeared to happen. There was no click sound nor did the ui switch to an exit countdown. So in a bit of confusion I kept clicking, and after about the fith one I noticed that the first click did work. It just displayed the log out message in chat, and ever second click was canceling it.
At this point, I was really not that impressed but I was also super tired and had to sleep. So today I gave it over an hour more of play and was not bothered as much by three of those above four; the skating around move animations still make me nuts.
I did about a dozen or so PvE quests which all has lots of story text that I probably should read but didn’t. They were pretty forgettable, but they did serve their purpose and were not broken or hard to figure out.
I also tried to do a public quest, but there was no one else around so I could not get passed the first part. booo. Not sure yet how I would fix this, but if there is only one person around the public quests are just frustrating.
And the whole time I was doing the above I was also waiting in a queue for a scenario, war’s versions of Battlegrounds. I was able to get in three times, and had a blast in all three. Sure we lost but I was level 3 and having fun with PvP so I guess thats a win!
A few other misc thoughts:
- There built in tools for the UI are good, and the UI is moddable which is great.
- There was no quest leading me to a trainer; this is bad. I was level 4 before I asked a friend when and where I should go train.
- I am not sure I am a fan of the race specific classes.