Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning
User Rating:
  Log in to rate this game!
ESRB:
Blood,Suggestive Themes,Use of Alcohol,Use of Tobacco,Violence
Publisher: Electronic Arts Genre(s): MMORPG Home Page: http://www.warhammeronline.com/
PvP is Mandatory Quests are fairly conventional - there just isn't enough to level up. While it's clear that PvP is the big feature of Warhammer Online, it was always marketed as one way to advance in addition to the more conventional PvE content. This is misleading. Experience curve of WAR was hastly tweaked very late in the beta to slow down the rate of leveling, and in a way this broke the game by removing that choice. Everything appears to be fine until level 10 while you just do all the PvE quests presented to you. Any PvP combat and Public Quest is optional - or you can skip the PvE and just do some RvR. Choice is yours. Past level 10 you slowly notice that you must participate in the Public Quest in every chapter until you max out the influence rewards or end up outleveling the PvE content in your own racial areas - or alternatively you have to RvR a lot. After level 15 the only way to keep filing up that experience bar is to jump off to other Tier 2 areas in other race pairings or constantly RvR, and by level 20 both RvR and jumping to other areas becomes mandatory. The illusion of choice presented early on is removed as the stiff experience requirements hit you. As an example example, at level 18 the math goes like this; approximately 150 000 experience needed to level. Quests reward you with 2000 to 3000 experience, while individual monsters two levels above you (maximum practical level to kill alone) reward you 450xp per kill. The experience needed per level grows far faster than the experience awarded by quests and monsters, and there definitely is nowhere near 50-60 quests per level that would be needed to fill that bar - in fact, for a single level there are usually less than ten quests per racial pairing, and even if you scourge the content from the other two pairings, you are still at less than half of what's being asked. Only real way to fill the gap is either by RvR, grinding monsters or grinding Public Quests past what's needed for the influence-based rewards. Additionally, even if you can often tackle quests meant for players 1-2 levels above you, item rewards are strictly level-limited. It's very annoying to complete a quest and get a reward that you can't use for two levels, and it's easy to run out of bag space while lugging out gear that you can't use yet. Item drops are also very strictly limited to specific classes - most of the drops you see are auction house bait.  Inevitable City - the only Destruction city, as Greenskins and Dark Elves had their cities pulled from the initial release. Personally I noticed this issue at level 17 when I had every available level-appropriate quest completed in my own area while doing some casual RvR. Doing the other four Tier 2 zones and the quests available in the capital (pretty much everything designed for players between level 15 and 20 in those zones) got me near the end of level 18 and the monsters I was supposed to be killing for quests after that were level 21 and above. Bit of grinding pushed me to 19 and I again had couple of quests and a PQs to tackle, but the rewards would be unusable for a while. RvR and mindless monster/PQ grind are the only remaining option - and I can't queue to the scenario of Tier 3 - I'm too low level - so after each Scenario I'm forced to return to the earlier zone to start up a new queue to the Tier 2 scenario. The optimal way would be to sit at Tier 2 warcamp and wait for a new scenario start with all the RvR-related quests, do a scenario, cash in the quests for some extra experience and wait again. With wait times sometimes in excess of 30 minutes between scenario starts, this is broken. Even a hardcore RvR player would balk at the lack of options, especially since queuing to all three Tier 2 scenarios requires constant flight path hopping between warcamps. The disparity between available PvE content and experience required to level grows rapidly past level 20, and by level 30 the word "grind" becomes familiar - only the constant experience sources (PQ and RvR grinding) are the true options. Sure, you get to pick between grinding endless piles of monsters or grinding endless scenarios for PvP experience, but either way the game simply runs out of new and interesting content well before the maximum level and combat with other players over the exact same few screnarios becomes absolutely mandatory. PvE achievers need not apply. Data Loss IssuesIn most modern MMOs when the server goes down, you might experience a slight "rollback", but changes to critical data like your character's skills, money and inventory are saved to a transaction log and the situation can be resolved after reboot without data loss. Alternatively, if there *is* a true rollback, it's universal and anything that happened after a certain moment in time is lost. Anything else could lead to database corruption and create openings for so called "dupe bugs" - same item ending up in two different places. Warhammer Online seems to forget quite a bit when a server goes down, but it's not consistent. Players have reported lost weapons and lost items related to the in-game mail and server crashes. The most obvious example is when you pick up an item sent via mail. The mail server remembers you took the item, but the game server rolling back character data and inventories to a previous state in a crash has no record you ever having the item. To add insult to injury, EU (GOA) customer support is currently unable to recover lost items - they simply do not have the necessary tools to establish what (if anything) was lost, or to replace the loss. In fact, if anyone can figure out a repeatable way to crash the server, there is already a dupe bug in the game - mail the items to your alt, then cause a crash and, hypotethically, as the server state rolls back, the items will be back in your inventory and in the mail (as the mail server is separate). This is basic MMO server infrastructure stuff, and Mythic should be ashamed for problems like this. I'm sure they are working hard on a fix, but these problems should have been sorted during beta. Crafting, an Afterthought Talisman Crafting - stick some materials together, and you get a temporary item enchant. At some point I guess Mythic decided that their RvR game had to have a crafting system of some sort. So they slapped something together. The end result feels completely disconnected from the rest of the game, and none of the craftables appear to be truly useful - at least during the leveling portion of the game. You can gather up resources for crafting through four different skills. Cultivating allows you to grow up fungi and weeds from seeds and spores you find on monsters. Salvaging is Disenchanting - you can disassemble magic items into magical resources. Butchering and Scavenging are used to gather resources from corpses of dead mobs. There are currently just two crafting skills - Apothecary and Talisman Making. Apothecary can cook up potions and dyes from materials obtained through cultivating and butchering. Talisman Makers can craft talismans that enchant your equipment from ingredients obtained through salvaging and scavenging. I like that all the crafts are very much interlinked, and there is no obvious "no-brainer" combination (you can learn two skills), but overall all these skills and the items available through crafting feel unimportant. I've seen worse crafting systems and nothing is obviously broken, but there is a lot of room for further work in this area.
Related StuffTags |
 
 
See if your PC can handle the latest games:
 
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
Games: 
