a copy paste from another forum
sums it up nice for me
post is called review Meh from mmorpg.com
Sum up my opinion in one word: meh.
Nice graphics, most are higher res than WoW (with some glaring exceptions which hopefully are temporary, otherwise they'd ruin the overall look). Captures the warhammer style perfectly. Performance is decent, runs quite well on a nice rig with some hitching, usually due to sudden loading of a huge number of PCs / NPCs. Distant terrain textures look pretty awful (unless there is a hidden option to change this, i have everything maxed).
The biggest problem is the gameplay...mostly the combat system. It has this disconnected, artificial and clunky feeling to it...hard to explain it exactly, but to me there's 2 big issues. One, the animations and effects are REALLY POOR. Characters stiffly attack eachother with some puny little poofs and explosions to mark hits. Spells are a little more elaborate (BW AOEs are cool), but otherwise nothing great. Character movement / combat animations remind me of Vanguard at launch. Taking a comparison from WoW, character movement there is very fluid, I wouldn't be surprised if it was motion captured, even. EQ2 also...the detail and elaborate, fluid motion in both games is a major point of immersion.
Second, combat is essentially a button-spam. There is no real sense of danger, or strategy, or challenge. Hit that one or two attacks until you kill your enemy, or run out of AP (if you do, autoattack for a few seconds, and repeat). You'll get more attacks / abilities as you level up, but they don't feel any different. Its basically a "whack-a-mole" system. Perhaps this turns around entirely above 20, but its hard to imagine why that would happen. Overall, its boring, and although I know low-level combat is supposed to be easy & forgiving, most other games I know of are a lot more dangerous for newbies, and require much more careful timing / management that WAR. People accuse WoW of being the same kindof 1 or 2 attack spam, but i don't know of anybody that can play that way successfully, even at low levels, without dying quite frequently.
PQs...don't feel strongly either way on them. An interesting feature that encourages people to get together and bash some mobs in a small space with little risk.
RvR, scenarios: Lets be honest, these are battlegrounds. Take the first one i did as Chaos, Nordenwatch (sp?) Might as well call it AB, with 3 bases and a shorter resource timer. My understanding is that this type of thing is the major focus of endgame...if so, I wll pass, as I have spent more time in AV than any human should and can't realy take any more of that kind of thing.
I think, overall, that the game is far too easy. I have died exactly once on 6 characters, due to falling a large distance (losing 3/4+ health) then being attacked by several mobs. Most places i want to go i can just train right through mobs to get there. I barely look at my HP b/c i know nothing will happen to me. Its the ultimate refinement of the WoW-style, western MMO--super easy & fast progression--combined with an endgame that is essentially endless battleground-style RVR. Yawn.
Summary: It's a perfectly competent WoW clone, that will be successful, at least in the short term, because of one thing: It's like WoW, but it isn't WoW. I.E., it will attract the WoW crowd that is bored with the game at the moment but until now couldn't find anything remotely competitive.
I feel little motivation to continue. Combat is boring, in PVE / PVP. The combat system itself feels wrong, unnatural, clunky. There is no sense of challenge, effort, peril...anything that makes a good GAME. I'm rather dissappointed, I had some high hopes for this one. Should have a bigger launch than AoC, then settle towards a respectable, but not dominating population (500k-1mil). Not bad, but not great. I likely will cancel my pre-order, since its unlikely i will want to pay for the game if i'm already disinterested in the beta.
Numerical rating? 6, maybe 7 out of 10. Letter grade?
FLAME ON!
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