I think the time has come for me to accept the fact that I'm missing the draw of Warhammer Online.
I got started with it when Direct2Drive was throwing an opening bash letting players start three days before the official launch if they bought it RIGHT THEN THAT VERY MINUTE which happened to coincide with Adam and I being in New Orleans visiting my family and having a lot of free time and nothing to do (other than drink, but I digress). At the start I had a hideous problem with terrible frame rates on my mid-range travel computer and my high-end desktop replacement (which didn't exist on a computer with a really terrible video card, annoyingly enough), and although this problem was really widespread and a big deal it never got fixed to any degree on my equipment and Mythic's advice ranged from blaming the problem on me to pretending it didn't exist at all. That, coupled with my realization that Mark Jacobs is really a big baby, made me lose all taste for the game for a good while. I played long enough on the Chaos side to get several characters across several servers to level ten, and when my first thirty days came up for renewal I canceled my account.
With Mark's recent departure from Mythic at least half of my frustration was removed, so I restarted playing again to stave off the onset of WoW Burnout.
I have tried to be open minded about it; really, I am not going to be the type of person who's a "loyalist" to any of these things, I see people bitching about WoW vs Warhammer vs Darkfall vs Ultima Online (which is still around!) and I don't get the point. Why fight about it? But like the Windows vs Mac debate I guess these things need warfare.
I've played enough of Warhammer to figure out by now that I just don't get it. It definitely has some features I like a lot; a stronger emphasis on PvP is really cool as well as a lot of UI tweaks being built into the client that until recently were only available in WoW via third-party addons. But that's where the interest pretty much ends for me. When I first heard they were making an MMOG around the Warhammer IP I desperately hoped it was the 40,000 end of the spectrum; the MMOG genre is in extreme need of something that isn't yet another cookie-cutter DIKU game. I was disappointed to see they went fantasy instead, but I tried to not let that tarnish my opinion on my first run-through. Yet the more I play it the more I see myself looking at things and thinking "Well I could be doing this same activity in WoW and at least I'd be improving my character there instead of this guy."
I know that PvP is supposed to be the main draw, and there is something really awesome to having sudden warfare spring up in a demure area out of nowhere. But that situation happens infrequently (especially frustrating when you have quests to complete that center around that requirement) or not at all. The ability to queue for battlegrounds anywhere is convenient; however, I don't know if it's my server or what but every single time I've played, no matter how many hours I had the queue running while I quested, it never popped up with an open battleground. The only time I saw them in the first place was when the game first launched and servers were inundated.
And then there's the visual aspects. For all WoW's dated appearance, it still looks pretty good for something that's been around since 2004. It will also run on practically all hardware down to old laptops that can't even open Office Outlook. Warhammer, on the other hand, isn't a year old yet and to me looks so visually bleh (not to mention much more processor and video-card intensive) that I can't see how anyone got away with it when they were finalizing art direction.
I would desperately like something else to play that is innovative and pulls away from the generic MMORPG format that the success of WoW has entrenched in the consciousness of people with deep pockets. Sadly WoW's success has stifled innovation for competing offerings; they end up creating largely the same experience with a different intellectual property and a change or two to the interface and call it a day. If something clever doesn't come along soon, my burn out might not be specific to just WoW.
Possibly Related Posts:
Review: Champions Online
Infinity Ward's PSA is brought to you by "FAGS"
Preview: Allods Online second closed beta test underway
A tale of two guilds
On playing MMOGs and being anti-social
Allowed HTML tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
This is a Gravatar-enabled site. To get your own globally-recognized-avatar, register at gravatar.com.
Edav Nomad
28 Jul 2009 · 4:26 PM Edav Nomad[quote this]
In Warhammer Online I've, maybe, gotten one character to level 10 and got bored with it. Plus it came out just before the latest WoW expansion which I believe hurt it since the servers appeared to be almost empty. I'm also not that interested in PvP so that also got me out of the game. I'm pretty much burned out on all fantasy video games now but I am looking forward to Dragon Age.
MMos just needs someone to come along and say that we really need to do something very different and not follow the WoW example, like most of them try to do now.