A Disgruntled Critique

It has been about a week since I've logged into Warhammer. Am I shirking my responsibility to the experiment? I don't think so. Our group spoke in class today and everyone pretty much agrees--Warhammer sucks.

We've run a few interesting experiments that have yielded even more interesting results. But one thing is missing. I'm not getting sucked in. I've played two MMORPGs before, Asheron's Call and Dark Age of Camelot, the latter of which was made by the same developer, Mythic. They had something that Warhammer is missing. What is it? I'm not positive, so I'm going to try to talk it out.

I remember spending hours on end in front of my monitor, questing and adventuring in new and fantastical locales, exploring dungeons and searching for the coolest and most powerful loot I could find. The only problem is, I don't remember that in Warhammer. Warhammer feels empty. It feels like an incomplete game. It tastes like a chocolate covered strawberry with the inner strawberry taken out and replaced with toothpaste. It's as if the developers looked at past MMORPGs, said, "This all seems a little much...I don't think people care about all this extra stuff." Well, newsflash, Mythic. We do care about the other stuff.

What other stuff am I talking about? A coherent narrative! Hell, even the illusion of a narrative! A vivid world to explore! Other players! I stumble upon an abandoned farm with zombies walking around and the public quest font pops up and says: ABANDONED FARM, ZOMBIES KILLED 0/50. That's not fun. That's not even trying to hide the grind. The developers probably looked at the entire range, the entire spectrum of experiences that people have had in past MMORPGs. What did they see? Player versus player combat, dungeon crawling, soloing, exploring, crafting, economic pursuits, social interaction, blahblahblah. What did they decide to do? Cut out EVERYTHING except PvP. They didn't cut it out completely, of course. But they put an absolutely pitiful amount of effort into everything other than PvP.

When I played Asheron's Call, I would just choose a direction and head out into the wilderness. Would it be trees after trees, goblins after goblins? Some of the time. But every now and then I'd stumble upon a well that I could jump down and find a secret dungeon, complete with a peasant's corpse and his bloody journal describing how he fell, broke his legs and died down there. Or a random portal a few miles outside of town that dumps you out on a snow-capped mountain on the other side of the continent. There was a feeling that an artist had gone over the landscape with a brush and added unique little quirks, a bit of love, a special uniqueness.

I DON'T FEEL THAT IN WARHAMMER. It's basically a first person shooter, only it's third person and it's incredibly annoying to develop a character high enough that it actually becomes somewhat fun to play. Organized, fifteen minute instances of PvP, and then everyone goes their separate ways. It's like fighting in an arena. There is no role-playing. No one talks to each other, no one discusses strategy. What's the point of a massively multiplayer game if everyone acts like an artificially intelligent bot? I'm just as guilty. As a Bright Wizard, my role is to launch fireballs. Repeatedly. How do I do this? Hit '1' on my keyboard. Repeatedly. There are no tactics! There is no thought! It's mindless and it's stupid and I'm not even remotely addicted. In fact, I'm the opposite. I'm disgusted. I can't believe I thought this was a good game for first two weeks or so.

OH! One more thing. HUGE pet peeve. The respawn time on mobs is like five seconds. Seriously. You kill a zombie, move a little deeper into the abandoned farm, and that zombie you just killed has respawned right next to you and begins attacking. Only you've already begun attacking the next zombie. So it's 2v1 and you die instantly. This has happened to me maybe ten times. It's great that Mythic wants to make sure there is never a lack of things to kill, but with the servers as empty as they are, I think they have more important problems to worry about.

There is one thing I do have to give Mythic credit for, however. Server transfers! There has actually been so much of a flight back to WoW (and real life, but probably most WoW) that the thirty or forty servers that they initially had running have all ended up desolate and depopulated. Rather than continue forward in denial, they've been allowing free character transfers to more populated servers, in an attempt to bolster the population levels and thus social experiences of the remaining players. How sweet of them. Desperate, but good intentioned.