Overall I liked the WAR beta and I'm going to play the game for a long time. However, here were the things I didn't like.
- The UI is very busy and the whole experience is very overwhelming at the beginning of the game. There are important UI components that I wasn't even noticing until I had spent nine or ten hours in the game. You end up mousing over every small component on the UI to learn what the UI does. Not very user friendly.
- Same thing goes for the game in general. The idea of going into a scenario at level 1 is awesome, but the actuality is really overwhelming because there is too much to do. What would have been nice is to introduce one new thing every level or two until you hit level 10. As much as I want to try out crafting I never got around to it, I was just trying to keep up with everything else going on. Ditto the tome, everything else was happening so quickly I never really got a chance to check it out.
- You get a new skill every level, which again I thought was too much too fast. At level eight I thought I had "caught up" with learning how to use all my skills, only to discover that I hadn't learned my four most recent skills.
- There seems to be some variety in gameplay for every class, but every variety seems to be "clicky".
- I'm sure this won't happen at release, but in the beta I would get like five or ten surveys an hour. I like the idea of surveys, but please, no more than one per hour.
- I tried to Dye an item but nothing really happened. Maybe I'm just dying the trim of the item? Either way it was unimpressive.
- It's hard to see party members on the mini-map, and if they are out of the area there's no indication.
- This is an issue because when you join a PQ I found no indication of the zone or level of the party. All that's indicated is a "time" for the group, the time it would take to run to that group. So you see "4 minutes", and that could mean four minutes across your current zone, or four minutes back to a PQ in a lower tier. You have to join the group, check their levels, and then stay or quit.
- Semi-frequently, mobs run away with low health and get far enough away to reset. The running away thing I can handle, the reset is very annoying.
- I remember Mythic saying something about when you die they want you to get "right back in the action". You don't get right back in the action, you have to run back from the graveyard just like in WoW.
- Speaking of broken promises, I was always under the impression that if you killed a mob before you had the quest, you would "bank" credit for the mob when you got the quest. It doesn't work that way, this only works for these "kill collector" quests, and actually you can't even "get" those quests until you've completed them. This is a big disappointment for me, as I was hoping WAR would finally be the MMORPG to give backtracking a nice firm kick in the behind.
- As I feared, it's often hard to get a scenario group, and it's very hard to get a low-level RVR group.
- The "find on ground" quests need the WoW upgrade where they show the question mark or whatever even on inanimate objects.
- Speaking of question marks, it took me a while to decipher WAR's "new and improved" system for this. If an NPC has a quest for you (repeatable or non-repeatable) he has a yellow open book over his head. If he has a quest you can complete, he has a yellow open book over his head with a difficult-to-see checkmark on it. When they have multiple quests on a list I have trouble telling which is complete, incomplete, or unaccepted.
- I was still getting booted, and on at least once in my ten hours I had to quit because the lag had become horrific
- PQ's are a nice addition, but they're also yet another thing I'll never be able to enjoy at the odd hours I often play, since nobody will be on.
- The number "3" unbinds every time I log on to the game, which is more funny than annoying.
- I was playing a "losing" PQ, competing against The Greenskins. All of the sudden they won the first chapter and the whole PQ went away (presumably becoming destruction-only). I'm not sure how I feel about that, but fortunately there was another order PQ nearby.
- In all the time I play, I never do find latency or framerate on the UI, or figure out how to display a title on my character.
- There's a lot of quest clutter because half of your quests at any given time are "travel" quests, which take a lot longer than normal quests (and obviously take you away from your current questing area).
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2 comments:
A very useful list, thanks for compiling it. I wasn't as put off by some of it (like the frequency of skills since many of them were morale ones), but I don't disagree that they're all something to think about
People worry that the PQs will be dead after a few months. Thats certainly possible, and a legitimate problem.
On the other hand, is there really ever a time when a zone on a well populated server is really dead? There will always be a surprising number of people in a zone at any given time of night as long as its not some PITA zone to get to or something.
And you could always advertise on the lfg channel for people; somebody is bored and has an alt that needs to get that pq done.
So it would seem to me that at worst, getting a PQ done would most likely be about as hard as getting a group for Deadmines or something. It can take a while, but not too bad as the worst case scenario.
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