Comments on: Mark Jacobs On Starting A WAR

By: Frye

Frye — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 11:48:25 +0000

I, for one, didn’t have a smooth start. For me the game is choppy, despite upgrading the ram to 4 gig, to the point of being unplayable. (i DO meet the hardware specs by a long run). In RVR situations the game gets so unresponsive that it plain and simple gets me killed. After some googling it’s clear that thousands of people are suffering from the same issue: silky smooth frame rates as long as i don’t move, reduced to a slide-show whenever traveling or some enemy walks into view. I really wanted to like the game, the NPC’s do their own thing (instead of the ‘statues’ in wow), i love pvp, a whole world to explore; its my kind of game. But the client refuses to perform well on my machine.
(AMDx2 5600, 4G, 9800 GT), in fact it uses only slightly more than half my processor resources, half my RAM, and 1/4 of my GFX card and still lags. Explain THAT, Mythic! No wonder they didn’t bother with a forum.

By: mpk

mpk — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 11:25:02 +0000

Going back to the WAR/WoW comparison, I think the instant feel of deja vu you get upon starting a new character was a very calculated but deliberate design decision. After all, you’re chasing the second spot, as he says, but all the press is about how WoW-like WAR already is , well before anyone has seen it outside of the closed beta then there’s a good chance you’ll get a significant number of WoW players coming to have a looksee. Having everything feel like WoW almost straight away made me feel very comfortable in the game and it’s been nearly two years since I cancelled my WoW sub.

By: malkav11

malkav11 — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 22:53:17 +0000

It’s different enough in the ways that count. Yes, at first blush, it looks a lot like WoW, has a similar interface, and so on. But a couple weeks into playing it, there’s no confusing the two.

By: Arathain

Arathain — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 22:15:23 +0000

Yeah. The question is not “Why would they do that the exact same way?” but “Why wouldn’t they?” If you have a tiered system for items why wouldn’t you use a colour scheme that’s instantly understandable for a big chunk of your player base?

By: Meat Circus

Meat Circus — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 17:45:18 +0000

@Plant42:

Why change it for no reason?

Minimising the cognitive load for WoW players trying out WAR is a perfectly noble aim as long as it doesn’t prevent you from doing the new stuff you want.

There are twelve million people out there who grok the grey->white-green-blue-purple-orange loot hierarchy. You’d need a bloody good reason to change it. “We just want to be different” is not it.

Like it or not, the WoW way has become the de facto standard way.

By: plant42

plant42 — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 16:48:58 +0000

I know WAR got a lot of flak for uh… ‘reappropriating’ WOW’s art style so I was prepared for that in the gameplay movies. What shocked me was that the entire UI was the same. Same map in the upper right, same health/mana bars in the upper left, same size/style item icons, same character screen. Same interface for trading and buying/selling equipment.

There’s almost nothing there to differentiate it. I mean… I’m watching a video showing a guy jumping into a RVR match, and the voiceover is talking about how you’ll “start out with a basic level of equipment – a few greens, a few blues…” I mean come on – fine, the art styles are similar because Warcraft was originally built from Warhammer… but they ripped on the same damn colors for items? The entire UI?

By: Marcelo

Marcelo — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 15:22:25 +0000

We get it! WoW!!! can you please gimme something that would make me want to continue to play WAR now? Very Underwhelem, maybe it’ just not for me.

By: araczynski

araczynski — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 12:06:05 +0000

just the eclectic art style/direction/graphics/whatever make me cringe every time i see a screenshot of this game. i doubt i will ever touch it.

By: rei

rei — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 10:46:41 +0000

KG: You may see UO as the rule, but if I had to place it in that particular continuum, I’d say it’s more the exception. I suppose it’s a half-full half-empty issue, but if Paul Barnett isn’t all sunshine and lollipops about EA, I don’t know why anyone would be.

GOA did it with Dark Age of Camelot and they’ve done it really well. They’ve done it in a very European way, but they’ve done it very well, and it’s more of the same. EA couldn’t have done it, what the hell would EA know about it? They know nothing about launching MMOs in Europe, unless it’s spending lots of money closing them down I suppose.

By: Dexton

Dexton — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 10:04:48 +0000

@Esha, I think they are cloning Karak Hirn, which means if either the RPS or a significant amount of the other players move to the new server, the queues should ease up. So yes there is hope for people wanting to play with Rock Paper Snotling, but it will depend on how many stay and how many use the new server when it comes online.

By: Arnulf

Arnulf — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 09:52:08 +0000

Can you give that figure?

MJ: No; publicly-traded company. Wish I could. But I can say it was about 50 percent higher than what we had in Camelot.

I never understood this. No MMO-company ever releases exact figures how many (active) players are playing the game right now.

Actually it’s driving me nuts. It started back then with UO and Planetside. They would give vage references like this server is really full, but that one is almost empty but never hard numbers. I think for a very very short time SOE gave numbers like over 1000 players on that server for Planetside, but stopped doing that for some reason.

Can someone explain that to me, please?

By: fanciestofpants

fanciestofpants — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 09:24:13 +0000

Absolutely loving WAR so far, they should be proud. I was going to go back to Wow to try out wotlk but I’m seriously not feeling it anymore.

Just need more people on my server to kill. Join Lustria(AU) people!