I got a beta key from MMORPG.com, so I thought I'd give the game a try.
I started downloading from Fileplanet on Friday night. Or, rather, I entered the Fileplanet queue on Friday night, about 6 pm PDT. The downloader started on Saturday morning at about 6 am PDT. I wasn't too peeved, b/c I knew that was going to happen. By 9 am the downloader had crashed. When it restarted, it put me back in the queue, which was highly irritating.
At that point I went searching for a .torrent to download. After a couple of hours, I had found several, but none had more than 60% of the file seeded, so I gave up. By then I had moved to the front of the Fileplanet queue again to find that their download manager could not resume my previous download. I was in for another 8 hours of waiting.
Luckily, the second try worked without any hiccups, and I had the .rar by about 10 pm PDT. I spent the next 30 minutes decompressing and installing, as well as creating my Mythic account and registering my beta key.
At about 10:45 pm on Saturday, I tried to fire up the client, in case there were any patches. Unfortunately, since beta didn't start until Sunday, I couldn't access the patch server. I was hoping it was time locked, so I stayed up until past midnight PDT, but could never connect to the server, so I went to bed.
I woke up at 6 am PDT on Sunday and tried to fire up the client. What did I find? About 300 MB of patches to download! Thanks, EA/Mythic, for letting me get that taken care of. :roll:
The patch, at 300 MB, wasn't too bad in size. My connection would probably download that in about 10 minutes. Oh, wait, since none of the beta participants could pre-patch, Mythic's servers were hammered. It only took me 10 HOURS.
So, I got into the game mid-afternoon on Sunday. Being beta, and not being sure if I would like it, I felt no need to settle on any particular server. I did notice that ALL of the servers were 'core' rulesets, none of them were 'open' PvP. I picked one with 'high' Order and Destruction populations and rolled an Empire melee DPS'er (whatever it's called). I later rolled a Dark Elf range DPS'er on a different high-population server.
I had read in an interview with a developer that Warhammer intentionally had a lackluster character creation system. The point was that the player is a soldier in a war, not some all-powerful hero. You're a nameless body in a faceless mob. Even with that considered, I was underwhelmed. After trying a robust system like City of Heroes, I'm spoiled. Overall, it had more options than Warcraft, but that's not saying much. 6 aspects to customize is more than 3 or 4, but 6 feels more like a win-by-default than a true win. It didn't help that after several hours of gameplay I STILL looked like everyone else. Even the gear didn't change anything, since everyone got the same gear.
I entered the game without reading the manual. (I'm a guy, I don't read instructions!) The in-game help did a decent job describing things. The Tome of Knowledge, which is like the Warhammer version of the "Civlopedia" did help some also. I did find the ToK to be very cluttered and poorly organized. I can't imagine how ungainly it would be at Rank 40. It reminded me somewhat of the LOTRO Deed Log. It was definitely more informative, but also a lot less user-friendly.
The GUI was a mixed bag for me. In many respects, it felt WAY too cluttered. There was an XP bar, a PvP bar, and a Public Quest bar. There were buttons all over the place, not all of which would tooltip properly. Your bags, character info, ToK, settings, etc. were all across the top as well. The only items occupying the bottom were the action bar and the chat window. It really felt like the top of the screen was too busy and the bottom was too empty.
The graphics overall were ok. A bit more realistic (i.e., less-cartoony) than WoW. Quality was acceptable, though I believe other have said that higher-res options will ship with retail. I certainly hope so. I have a pretty top-of-the-line computer, and am getting spoiled by super-hi-res stuff, and DX10.
Performance was a bit sub-par, but I recognize that WAR is still technically in beta so I won't hit it too hard. Some retail games have much worse performance (*cough*AoC*cough*). There was some stuttering, even with medium level graphics. Mobs would bug out quite often, and there was no indication that they were bugged until you tried to attack them. The worst part about the bug was that they would still move and attack you, but you couldn't attack them!
The mobs bugs weren't too concerning, as nothing at that low of a rank was a challenge. While the game is incessantly compared to WoW, especially graphically, the gameplay felt quite a bit different to me. I would compare WAR's combat more to Tabula Rasa or Pirates of the Caribbean Online. It played, to me, much more like a Third-Person Shooter with RPG elements than an RPG. Combat was, for the most part, a skill spam-fest. Since most or all of your skills shared a timer, there wasn't a whole lot of strategy going on. This was especially true for the Dark Elf range DPS I tried. By the time I went to bed, I had 4 attack skills: a high-damage single-target skill with a long induction, an instant DoT, an instant medium-damage single-target skill with a longer cooldown, and an instant single-target attack that had damage that varied based on what other attacks you had used prior.
For me, PvE combat degenerated into a chain of high-damage (so I could get through the induction before I had aggro), then DoT, then instant damage, then if the mob hadn't dropped, the variable-damage. It took me about 5 minutes to figure out my chain, and once I had there wasn't much reason to stop using it. It was rather unsatisfying.
I did try out two of the T1 battlegrounds, the Empire/Chaos and High Elf/Dark Elf. The Empire/Chaos was fun, though Empire steamrolled due to numerical superiority. That BG was a standard "control the 3 hotspots until one side has 500 points". The Elf BG was also a hotspot battle, though there were only 2 and it had a nasty surprise lurking for the uninitiated. Dark Elves got beat ina close match by High Elves, mainly due to the Dark Elves stupidity. They had absolutely no teamwork going on. My battleground trials were fun, but they really would not keeping me coming back. It was nice that the game had collision detection, so that the tanks could form a defense, even if it really didn't work well.
I also tried the Public quests for good humans and evil elves. The concept was very nice. During beta, it seems to work well. Once the game goes live and most people get to higher Tiers, it seems like they could be a huge pain. Both T1 public quests were similar: kill tons of weak guys, then kill fewer slightly tougher guys, then kill 1 Hero-level enemy. They ended up being big clusterfudges that weren't aided by bugged mobs and questionable AI (mobs tended to run around seemingly at random, sometimes not attacking and sometimes just swinging once at everything they ran by until they were killed). If you don't have a dozen or so people available for them, they won't get done. A plus- they're pretty quick to complete. A minus- they reset every 2 minutes so there's really no sense of accomplishment.
Based on first-impressions, WAR is a decent game. It will have a pretty good following. Calling it an MMORPG is a bit of a misnomer, as I think it's more of an MMOTPS. PvP'ers will like that it's a bit more fast-twitch than WoW. It's definitely weak in PvE, the quests are cake and the map shows you where to go. If it didn't come with a $50-60 initial outlay as well as $15 per month (meaning you pay about $240 for the first year of access) I might find it a fun change-of-pace. For all of its faults, it is entertaining, which should be the #1 consideration. Still, I couldn't help but feel that it just won't hold my interest, as PvP is not a main concern of mine.
In its current state I'd rate it a C for me. It's ok, but not good enough to justify the expense. If I were to talk to someone off the street, I'd rate it a B. Even though I'm not a big fan, I can recognize that more people will like it than dislike it and my tastes in games are not mainstream.