I love those little green bastards but I have a billion of them to paint.. (Okay, a billion might be a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.) Over the years I have had Necron, Tau and Orks as my 40K armies, and Orcs & Goblins, Skaven and Tomb Kings as my Fantasy armies. I played the role playing game for years and really preferred it to D&D or any of the other traditional role playing systems..

I tell you this so that you will come away with the understanding that I have a pretty good idea about the Warhammer universe and to convey to you how absolutely excited I was about Warhammer Online, Age of Reckoning. I had long thought this universe was ripe for computer games.

I was proven right when Blizzard pretty much raped the Warhammer universe for all of it’s games — but that’s for another post..

Needless to say, after doing a lot of looking, I’m a little disappointed in the direction the Warhammer Online game is taking. Firstly, it looks terrible. The graphics look extremely “Last Generation” in my mind. My first thought was, wow.. it looks like Dark Age of Camelot. I then learned it was being put out by the original DAOC creators.. that gave me a chuckle, and worried me. If their mark was to make a game that from launch looks 4 or 5 years old, then kudos boys, ya did it. If you’re intent was to make a modern looking game then you failed.

It has a wonderful Cinematic Trailer but that doesn’t tell you anything about the game play — and that trailer is over 2 years old at this point..

It really looks like they are trying to duplicate Blizzards World of Warcraft art style, all the while blizzard is basically using clones of their intellectual property.. It’s just sad. Especially considering one of the Q and A presenters when asked how they would deal with competition like World of Warcraft responded, “Kill them!” But.. you’re imitating them.. OH.. I see.. kill them, then you can say what you’re doing is original.. Got it.

More over in the modern era of dual and quad core machines they are intentionally keeping the system spec’s dreadfully low. They haven’t released the system requirements yet, but I bet you I could play it on my phone.. It doesn’t look any more advanced than Everquest 1 was.. To be honest, World of Warcraft actually looks a little better.. (I shun myself for saying that.. ) The Beta footage of Warhammer Online looks extremely lack-luster. They are talking about not wanting to make users need “liquid cooled super computers”, but from the looks of it don’t come anywhere near close to that. They may be very high poly count models, but they use the blizzard art style and thus they all look flat with sharp corners in an almost cartoon style.

During the Q and A session one of the devs was bragging about how he plays it on his old laptop and has zero problems.. *sigh* I can’t help but feel the game industry is going the wrong way here.. This is yet another case of “Blizzard did it so, it must be right!” I’m not saying go extreme high graphics like Crysis or Vanguard, just more than WoW cartoon blockiness.

They claim to be looking to the future, but it doesn’t appear that’s the case with regards to the LOOK of the game. Now I will be the first to stand up and say that game play ALWAYS comes first.. But why start with it looking old and outdated?

I do appreciate that they are looking to the future with content though.. they have 2 years of content planned to include the first 2 major patches, as well as being in planning and pre-production of the first expansion.. that’s nice.. That usually means they have budgeted it and that the game wont be here today, gone tomorrow. But, When do we get a graphics update? (Even World of Warcraft desperately needs one at this point and is my major sticking point with Wow. I hate the look.)

They are all proud about how their game doesn’t start until you have gotten to the end of your leveling. Meaning, you play the game from 1 to 50 and at 50 the game “really starts”. They tout that as being original and exciting when that’s EXACTLY what World of Warcraft does, the WoW game doesn’t start until you get to 70.. Period. All the grind to get there has nothing to do with WoW.. Its actually true of most games..

They are excited about all their “unique” advancement systems, but none of them sound unique. WoW gives you all the armor stuff, EQ1/EQ2/WoW gives you the alternate advancements and traits.. D&D Online gives you stat advancements.. City of Heroes gives you the badges, awards and trophies.. etc.. It’s been done. Move on.

And what the hell, if you want to customize the look of your character above the standard 2 or 3 sliders you have to buy the special copy of the game?! Fuck you! That’s just asinine and is the first HUGE red flag for me. Talk about nickel and diming the hell out of people.. I can’t think of anything that will make me not want to play the game more than being forced to play the same looking toon someone else plays simply because I didn’t want to fork over the extra $40 to get the “special” edition of the game. I want to be able to customize and I should be able to using the standard edition of the game.

It really seems the ONLY thing that Warhammer online has going for it is the realm versus realm, and player versus player game play. To be honest, I could give a crap about that. I didn’t enjoy it in DAOC, and I don’t know that I’ll enjoy it here. From what I can see, it doesn’t look like they have any end game PVE?! Are you kidding me? Of all the shit to NOT copy from WoW or EQ, you miss this one?

In the end, if I wanted to play world of warcraft, I’d play world of warcraft — if I wanted to play DAOC, I’d play DAOC. I have yet to see anything that makes this game stand apart from blizzards blatant IP theft of the Warhammer Universe or DAOC.

This game seems like nothing but DAOC 2 using the Warhammer IP. And that’s sad, it could have been so much more. Games Workshop, you should hang your head.

It’s a good game, and a good starter game for those who aren’t really sure about the whole MMO scene. It’s very simple to play and enjoy, and doesn’t bog you down with many of the more complex MMO aspects. For new comers to the market, its perfect. It’s how I got my wife into MMO’s and now I can’t get her away from the computer.. heh (“I just have this one last quest to do..” “Uh huh.. sure honey.. ” heh)

After a while I moved on to other games, but found myself reactivating my account from time to time to give it a try. For a while I played my City of Villains character almost exclusively until it once again just tired and I moved on.

Well I’m back at it. They have added a lot of content and depth to the game that really is interesting. Firstly its not like your more modern / typical MMO in that there aren’t characters standing around with question marks over their head letting you know there is something to do. Lets be honest here, World of Warcraft is a good game but its seriously “dumbed down” in that it almost holds your hand while it plays itself.

City of Heroes hearkens back to the days of EverQuest 1 whereby you didn’t know if someone had a quest or something for you unless you talked to them. Accomplishments were hidden from you, and thereby meant more to you when you actually accomplished it.

Death in CoH means something too compared to modern day MMO’s. CoH has debt! Now I played Ultima Online and EverQuest 1 for years, so extremely painful death was the norm for me. In UO each time some naked PK ran up and killed you, you lost EVERYTHING! It sucked. In EQ1 though they changed that a lot in that you just had to make a corpse run and lost exp. But you didn’t lose your stuff.. When CoH came out and they made it so you just got a little bit of debt, I was stunned. They made death meaningless.

HA! Look at what modern games do. In the most recent MMO, Age of Conan, death means absolutely nothing. You just get shot back to a respawn point.

But I get side tracked — the CoH is a good game and I’m finding I really enjoy the new Rikti invasion stuff and I hope they will let us “counter invade” at some point. It’d be really cool to go to the Rikit homeworld or whatever and attack them back!! (maybe you can do this already and I just havent gotten to that content.. I dunno)

Something else they have added to the game is a pretty thorough marketplace and crafting system. I like that — thats pretty darn cool. Well, one of the tricks of old is to watch your prices on that market. I mean I dont understand why players, in game after game, will put stuff on the market below what they could sell them to the merchant for!!

I spent about 4 hours last night just running goods from the market to the local merchant to sell. People would put stuff on the market for 10INF, that they could sell to the merchants for 4500+INF. Seriously.

In 4 hours I made 2 million INF which just goes to show you, super heroes is st00pid. Or lazy. I prefer to think of them as stupid.