My first impressions

[[AK]Camelwalk]

Well played about 6 hrs of War today, got to lvl 8! I think the game is awesome! Ill try to run down some of my highlights but I have never been good at reviews so bare with me!

The graphics are great. I love how they used the color in this game. They bring some bright colors in to give you a little eye-candy, but didn't overdo it with bright yellow boots, and neon pink gloves. It does seem like we're playing on medium settings though. Hopefully the full release gives us more video options, including a high quality setting.

Combat is boring in the beginning. If you read reviews everyone says the same thing. I found though every level I gain a new spell or dot and the combat got better. As of now Im dying to get to lvl 9 for my new spell! Still slow but Im getting used to it quick. This is not WOW by far, no 3-5 shots in this game!

RVR (PVP) is just sick! First off you get xp for it. There is some other type of xp you get for RVR I cant remeber the name. The fights are set up for massive amounts of ppl, and as soon as ppl understand there class role it will amazing. Whats kool is you can enter thur you UI!

The UI is competely sweet. I havent messed around with it yet cause it would take forever and it will be gone of Sun. so ill wait! It includs like every mod for WOW! Yeah! 100% customizable

Quests are quests but theres a ton. Nothing special but the XP is good and moves the game along!

All in all a good night in gaming. I had fun and that feeling I had the first time I played WOW. It was like WTF am I doing, Oh now I understand! There are a ton of bugs I noticed but the game was still playable and enjoyable! Is this a WOW killer, far from it. This game will be around for awhile though and like the old days of WOW have many issues. I for one am jumping aboard this one! At least till WOTLK!

[[AK]Camelwalk]

*Update*

The bugs have really began to show. PVE is almost impossible atm. They are having NPC tracking problems. Half the time npc run away from you or disapper and you start taking damage from nowhere. The combat system is way out of whack and not sync with game mechainics. Animations are not showing up correctly or too late. The UI feels real off almost like a 1 sec delay. The game is still fun but War has a lot of work and polishing to be done.

I will be playing this at release, hopefully they will have some issues resolved. ALL in ALL a good weekend though. My favorites parts where RvR, amazing! Also group quests that you just walk into, you get xp, and the winners of the group quests get a chest of goodies. I will be rolling an archmage, this to me has been the most fun to play. I have tried most other classes and each are compeletly unique in there own way. Well I hope some other AKers out there will try this one, but I would wait till after release.

[[AK]Camelwalk]

Well this is about as refreshing as it comes. Marc Jacobs of WAR posted this as a response to feedbackhe got from this weekends closed beta preview. All of the issues I had are being addressed and the guy is kinda funny too. Im really starting to like this game and the ppl behind it.


Folks,

Okay, it was a wild and crazy weekend in WAR and while some of you might be tempted to go all Samurai on us for a couple of the bugs, overall things went very, very well. As long-time readers of my notes now, I won’t do a Nick Winters and we are anything but pathological liars so we’ll always own up when we make a mistake and we made a couple here. So, let’s talk amongst ourselves and have a little chat about the top nine list of the biggest issues and where we stand in regards to them.

(1) Client Crashes – I’ve talked about this as one of the reasons why we didn’t release the NDA until recently. Here’s the current status.
- Just a little too many currently. While we are better off than we were in beta, we must do better still before release.
- A number of players will lower spec machines had more CTDs than higher spec machines.
- Number of fixes already in pipeline. They are working their way through our testing servers and will be pushed to the players once they have been vetted internally.
- Engineering time for CTD issue has remained heavily committed; our top engineers are working on the various issues.

(2) Monster Pathing and AI – Well, what can I say other than not even all of King Tut’s wealth could have made us feel better for messing up on this one. Well, maybe all his wealth.
- “Yes, that monster seems to be behaving a little oddly”. Monster responsiveness was very sketchy, odd pauses and tethering issues.
- “Oh, was I supposed to go in that direction?” Pathing sometimes wonky - mobs get stuck or go in wrong direction.
- Utter confusion at times as both monsters and pets will engage and disengage seemingly at random
- Internal server optimizations last week broke the pathing/AI. And I mean really, really broke it. This truly was a “Opps, we broke this code” moment for us and we don’t have many of them.
- Going to ensure that this problem is fixed this week. As I said in my first Preview Weekend, this is a major concern for us. Fortunately we have no underwater combat in this game or some of the NPCs may have been appropriately dubbed land sharks.

(3) Pet Responsiveness – With similar issues to Monster Pathing and AI, this was not our finest hour.
- Need to transfer "combat responsiveness" fixes to pets - have pet move immediately on button press.
- “Oh no, Mr. Bill!” Pets suffer from same pathing and lack of response as general monsters. Pets hopping around like they were headed to Del Staters.


(4) Global Cooldown Timers –This seems to be a hot topic for players to talk about. However, things aren’t always as they seem.
- Reality and perception are two different things, Warhammer has a GCD of 1.4s, WoW has 1.5s
- “Ability not ready” messaging needs to be improve, a sound effect if Global Cooldown in effect, maybe more cowbell?
- Need to improve on the feeling of sluggishness of the GCD and UI. Bug with display where our timer shows 2s when it is really 1.4
- The next best thing to a queue is? We will add in better "slop timer" to allow players 0.3s extra to pre-queue a second ability followup.

(5) Better animations
- So much more coming in the next two versions of the client. We are currently incorporating serious amounts of new animations into the game. Hopefully nobody will sneak a coneheads model into the game.
- Look at what my XXXX does now? Over the next month we will address many class-attack specific issues across all 20 careers.
- “U think you can dance?” Nope, but we have added new racial animations for movement, fidgets and redid some emotes.

(6) Texture Blurring
- Textures are currently cached in a manner that results in blurriness on entering a region.
- We will look at adding a client scalar.

(7) Client Performance – This is one of those issues
- Need better scalers on effects, sounds, graphics, etc to help lower end machines (already lots of additions to coders)
- This thing loves memory like Dan Aykroyd loves bass. We have already improved the memory consumption of the client and taken 100M out of current test best.

(8) Targeting, Camera, etc
- Currently our targeting system differs from many MMOs in terms of our features and how we go about things. We will identify and make a more standard initial setup but allow flexibility.
- Will add additional keybinding selections to allow flexibility

(9) Renown rank gear
- Unfortunately, a new bug (well an old bug we fixed and then managed to break again) which allowed Rank 10 RR 6 players can go to Tier 2 to get better gear and then come back to Tier 1 and own scenarios. We are currently working on a fix.

I hope you enjoyed the Preview Weekend and we thank you for your interest and we hope, patronage of our game.

Guess what folks, that’s the news and I am outta here!

Mark

[[AK]Rocks]

fileplanet access: http://www.fileplanet.com/betas/warhammer_key.aspx