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GC 2007 - Day 2: Eve, Conan, Quake Wars and more

By: Jarno Kokko Aug 24, 2007

Warhammer Online - PvP demo

Well, I took it like a man and queued up for the public demo of Warhammer Online. Unfortunately GOA seems to think that GC is an all-german event, so all the things on display were in German. I picked the biggest guy with the biggest swords, figuring that melee bashing would be easy enough even without understanding what the ability descriptions actually say. I managed to figure out the WoW-compatible controls and the concept of targeting the other team and hitting '1...2...3' pretty quickly, and the enemy cloth weenies got chopped up rapidly, regardless of the linguistic barrier. "I hit you with a heavy and sharp object" is a universal language.

I couldn't snap photos while my hands were tied pwning the opposition, so here are some snaps taken from the monitors around the booth.

Warhammer Online was playable - again, auf Deutsch.	The gameplay looked very familiar.
That would be the WAR version of the yellow exclamation mark...	Queueing up for battleground.
Greenskin nuker blowing things up.	Match in progress.

I also took a quick ShakyCam(tm) video of some PvP action.

As I couldn't understand any of the text, it's hard to say anything definite about the gameplay. The controls felt okay, copying WoW very closely. Much of the UI was also very derivative. During play I did experience some character warping and visual jerkiness, but I guess it's to be expected from a beta build. Textures were mostly done in a higher resolution than in World of Warcraft, but models were not quite as well animated and the landscape art felt more blocky. Blizzard has perfected the art of making beautiful areas with the minimum possible polygon count, and unfortunately Mythic artists, while good, have not yet matched that. If you look at a close-up still image, WAR looks better, but when actually playing the overall feeling is a bit more crude. Some of the animations were obviously not finished (dwarves actually ran in the air while jumping), so this is commentary on something that is still work-in-progress.

I guess the biggest disappointment to me was that the PvP battleground demoed felt very much like a poor man's copy of WSG from World of Warcraft. One could argue that Mythic and their RvR got actually copied by Blizzard, but in that case Blizzard refined and tuned the concept in so many ways that now it is different. What I saw was in no way different from a WoW BG round. Sure, the classes and abilities differ, but I saw nothing game-alteringly different. Good fun, but only an evolutionary half-step from the current king of MMOs.

I apologize that I may sound jaded and "WoW fanboyish", but I assure you that I do not especially love WoW or any other game for that matter - all I care is for a smooth, polished and well-balanced gameplay. It's just that WoW is currently the yardstick you have to use for comparison. On the upside Warhammer Online is definitely the most polished-looking game of the upcoming contenders - it's just that when you aim to put out a game very similar to an existing game, it should look and play a lot better. WAR, at least at the moment, just doesn't.

There is still lots of polishing and tuning to go with Open Beta scheduled for the end of the year and the launch later in the spring, but I have a feeling that those expecting a WoW killer that will trigger a landslide of players jumping from WoW to WAR might end up disappointed.