Oranges and Bananas

Hi Gameriot.

It has come to my attention as of late, that many gamers here have decided to bicker and yell at each other over who is a "fan boy" of this game or that. Now although I am not a "fan boy" of any game (thereby totaly destroying my credentials, right?), I would like to shed some light on what exactly my thoughts are in regards to the whole "Warhammer vs Wow" discussion (from the Warhammer perspective) that is currently taking place.

Now I know you've heard it all before, but it is important to know my backround of gaming to be able to understand my views on Wow and Warhammer. My first MMORPG was Final Fantasy XI: Online, followed by Everquest 2, and subsequently World of Wacraft. I have been playing MMORPG's for a while now, and have aquired a lot of knowledge about them over the years. This post, though, will be about my opinions on War, and why there is no reason for people to be yelling at eachother over who's dady can beat up the other ones (War vs Wow).

To begin, I would like to mention that I have played World of Wacraft for 3 years now, and so far experianced the Preview Weekend event Mythic organized, and its still ongoing Open Beta. Now that that's settled, let's get on with it.

Warhammer Online: Gameplay~

In this section I would like to tell everyone about my experiances of the game so far as a whole. Starting with its combat system.

Combat: To not spend hours rattling about something everyone has heard about, everyone should know this. The combat, no matter what anybody says (I've heard people telling others to simply adjust and accept the way the animations and buttons respond to your commands) is not up to par with World of Warcrafts, and if it was, I don't believe Mythic would be continuosly making moves to improve upon it. This is the core of their game, and should require the majority of their attention. It will in the end allow the rest of their amazing game to either be enjoyed, or forgotten among the midst of their combat system literaly pulling people out of the experiance with the bugs. Sort of like a baby crying in the middle of your movie at the theater. This needs to be improved upon, BUT, and let me stress this highly, it is NOT the see-all end-all reason to not give this game a try.

First of all, it is not all that bad really. Yes, it does remove the immersion of the game everytime your character makes an animation before the spell even goes off, or if you have to hit a button a couple of times for the spell to start occasionaly. Yes, these things do happen, but after just a short while you begin to not notice them, or rather, simply put your attention eslewhere, ignoring the obvious flaw out of sheer inability to do anything about it. But no, it does not completely ruin the game. You get used to it.

The game itself, is beautiful. There are so many fine details involved in it I can't even begin listing them all. You are never bored, there is always something to do, and it's always fun. There is no "sitting around shatt all day", or "doing dailys and joining numbpits, oops, i ment battlegrounds". There is always something to do, and always people there to do it with. Public Quests really are quite fun, the pvp areas are NOTHING like world of warcrafts, and therefor don't imply any of wow's other characteristics for these areas (mainly A: being empty, and B: being useless and boring). These areas are fun, and lots of excitment is to be had, whether you are laying siege to a keep or castle, or just taking the docks or town into your control instead of the enemys, using cannons to fire upon them after luring them down the beach.

As far as characters and class's go, I can honestly say not a single class looks like a bore, and all of them are accompanied with wonderfull looking character models. The professions in this game are also quite different from World of Warcrafts, for example such things exist as Butchering, and Scavaging. It is not like Wow where you simply gather mats, then create an item with those specific mats, you get to experiment, and can create many different concoctions under your own ideas of which ingrediants to use. Many of which ingrediants, are grown with the Cultivating skill. It's all very different from World of Warcrafts crafting system, which makes it a horrible game to compare to it, since like the title suggests, these two games are like Oranges and Bananas my friends, oranges and bananas...

So stop calling eacother "fanboys" of this game or that, after all, you are all just gamers enjoying a game, and it's getting old. It would be as if as a chess player I were to call someone telling me blackjack was fun, that that they were a blackjack fanboy and that my game is better. Both are good, and nobody is forcing you to play the others game. So stop being so childish, it's a almost as much of a waste of time as it was for me to type out this article for people who probably are too caught up to care.

Oh well, here's to trying

See you on the battlefield...