I’ve been thinking about this post for a day and a half now and how I want to portray this game.  I know a lot of folks who will read this post are fellow gamers and also former and current WoW players.  After thinking it over, I think it’s quite fair to compare what I saw in WAR with what I see in WoW.  In order to lure me away from WoW, the game has to be at least as good as WoW for what I like to do.  From the limited preview I had, I think it’s safe to say that there’s good and bad and for a beta, they’ve done a hell of a good job.  Let’s take a look at some of both – I know everyone wants to know how it shapes up.

Character select is pretty simple.  Choose Order (Alliance) or Destruction (Horde) and then a race.  Each class can only be a single race and some of the race/class combinations are even gender dependent (no male dark elf witch elves for example).  No classes are duplicated accross factions but there are classes that behave similarly accross faction.  The Order Rune Priest is similar to the Destruction Zealot.  The Order Bright Wizard is similar to the Destruction Sorceress.  They aren’t exactly the same but, generally speaking, they share some mechanics.  Which brings me to my next point: each class has a special bonus mechanic in addition to normal spells and abilities.  For example, the Witch Elf builds Blood Lusts (combo points, a’la the WoW rogue) and expends them on finishing moves (worth noting that the blood lusts persist from enemy to enemy, meaning you build up 5 on one mob and move to the next with 5 still intact).  There’re 20 classes and tons to explore.

So far so good.  That part’s pretty easy and what you expect.  Getting dumped in a newbie zone with a thousand other noobs is pretty typical, as are the kill x, gather y quests that start you out.  What about gameplay?  The world?  RvR?  Well there’s plenty to say about that too.  First the Great.

Public Quests are awesome.  You walk into an area and suddenly you’re doing a public quest.  Nothing to accept, nobody to join with, just wait until the timer on your screen winds down and follow the objectives as they appear on your screen.  As long as you’re in the area of the quest your efforts help toward the objectives.  For every mob or boss you kill you gain Influence and XP.  Influence is roughly like Reputation form WoW except there aren’t faction names – you gain bars of influence and then visit the Rally Master (Innkeeper?  IDK, he sets your “hearthstone”) near the PQ to collect rewards once you’ve filled in your one, two, or three bubbles of Influence (obviously the three bubble rewards are better than the one bubble).  Way cool mechanic and it gets you to work with your teammates.

Open Parties, Warbands – Warband is the WAR term for a raid.  A WAR party consists of 6 people and a Warband is 4 parties (24 for the math-disabled, I’m looking at you religion majors).  Any party you form begins as an open party, but you can close it from the party menu.  An open party can be joined by anyone by typing /join <party leader’s name>.  The same goes for Warbands.  I can’t tell you how cool such a simple and subtle modification to the party system this is: instead of having one person type /inv <name> over and over, you just put into general chat Open Warband for PQ, /join me to get in.  Everyone joins together, everyone gets bonus Influence and XP.  Fucking sweet Mythic, that’s innovation.

Scenarios – The battlegrounds of WAR are called Scenarios and you can queue from anywhere.  You’re immediately returned to where you joined from at the end of the Scenario as well, making it a great way to supplement questing.  Join the queue, do your quests, bop into the scenario when the queue pops, continue questing right where you left off when it’s over.  You get XP and Renown from Scnearios, along with a sweet sense of kicking ass.  There’s even a mechanic to boost you up if your level is insufficient to compete in your bracket.  For example, the first bracket is levels 1-11.  If you queue at level 6, all of the damage of your skills and your stats will be boosted such that you are a level 8 contender.  Same goes for level 1 – all the way to level 8.  You lack the skills of those in-between levels but at least you aren’t getting one shot by the level 7s and can actually help out your team.

RvR – I alluded to it above but I didn’t explain what Renown is.  Everyone has two ranks – your rank and your renown rank.  Renown rank is basically your pvp level and you have to reach certain ranks before you can purchase the quality pvp gear (think of the very first iteration of the Honor System in WoW – reach a rank, buy the gear).  It’s pretty good shit too, everytime I saw a 10 or 11 they all looked cool and kicked the shit out of whatever they touched.  RvR is specific areas dedicated to non-instanced world pvp.  Go in, kill some folks, take control of enemy territory, cool stuff.  I didn’t do this much but a friend tells me it’s pretty neat.  You can even storm enemy keeps (big-ass castles) and kill the keep lord (I heard a story about a 5 man group of a tank and 4 healers that managed to take a keep lord down to 30% [an 8 minute fight no less] before getting ganked – apparently they’re Warband level mobs).

The bad.  You knew it was coming.  Drew, what didn’t you like?

Pathing – It sucks.  Full stop.  Mobs get confused as hell, don’t run at you, fucking run in the opposite direction toward a wall, I don’t know.  I played a squig herder for like 3 levels and wanted to shoot myself because my pet would walk 30 feet behind me and never actually get to the mob (200% aggro doesn’t do you any good if your pet can’t find your target).  You get stuck on shit randomly too, boxes, rocks, any kind of terrain that isn’t flat just hiccups you all over the place.

Spellcasting – I don’t really know what the problem is here but there are issues with casting.  My guess is that they want to discourage spamming but the UI isn’t very responsive to button presses at the end of spellcasts.

Quests – every MMO always says they want to do away with “kill x, gather y” quests yet we all know grinding is part of the MMO.  WAR suffers from the same.  There’s gotta be a way to do this leveling stuff without these needless kill x gather y quests.  At least they have minimap indicators from the get-go, something easily yoinked from WoW’s bag of tricks.

And that’s really about it.  I can’t think of much else I didn’t like.  WAR is not as pretty as WoW but it doesn’t try to be.  The ambience is pretty great though the RP-inspired skill naming for every greenskin ability is somewhat grating.  “Yer Bleedin’!” and “What Blocka?” are a few examples – every greenskin skill is like that.  Overall, grinding the quests to level I felt like I had played this game before (yawn, leveling alts) but the Scenarios and public quests were very refreshing.  The classes have enough differences to keep things interesting.  There are innumerable small details that have been put in that I like that I didn’t mention – for example, when you finish a quest, you get might have a choice between a belt and a robe that are both tailored specifically to your class instead a choice of 6 generic rewards any of which may or may not be usable by you (see: every single fucking WoW quest).  There’s a ton of little things like that that make the game a refreshing change.

Earlier today I told a friend that I gave it a 6.5 but after going through this explanation, I think it deserves a 7.  For a beta, I can’t find anything other than buggy quests and a horrible PVE pathing engine to fault the game with.  There’s a ton of time between now and live and even more afterwards.

Looking forward, I’m really excited to see how the game fares at the topend, where the hardcore PVPers will find themselves very quickly.  Will Mythic balance out the complete pvp dominance of casters with suitable gear and ability tweaks?  Will World of Gearcraft rear its ugly head?  What sorts of PVE content are they planning to introduce down the line, if any?  If you haven’t yet, I’d recommend checking out the open beta, going live Sept. 7th.  For $1 (at Target, IIRC) you can download and play for a full week before live.  If you played in the preview weekend, abuse me in the comments!