Played Lately: Warhammer Online

• The blame for today's post can be shared equally by Jayedub and Snafzg. They are the ones responsible for me not playing much Champions this weekend.


• In the last month or so, there has been growing sentiment that maybe Warhammer Online deserves a second chance. Or third chance in my case since WAR wasted its second a few months back. Although I had fun running through tier one solo that time, the nearly empty server was enough to drive me away again.


• Sometime Thursday night, I figured it couldn't hurt to reinstall just in case. So I dug out my collector's edition, let it run over night, and swapped disks the next morning. (It's not like I was going to use my computer while sleeping or at work.) When I got home Friday night, I remembered that you can't patch the game unless you have an active subscription. Jeez. I decided that maybe it was time to look again. Mythic has done so much to the game in the six months I was away. Might as well take the plunge. Fate must have been on my side though, since the account page informed me that I was eligible for the ten day Welcome Back trial. There was really no point to not signing up in the face of all that.


• As has happened each time I've tried to get back into the game, I've forgotten exactly how to play my character again. This isn't a tragedy since I love rolling new characters and the tier one zone are still considered the high point of the game. Here Mythic doesn't disappoint. With all 24 classes back in the game, there is a lot of variety for every taste. For me, though, I've had enough of Destruction and decided to return to the class I originally wanted to play: the Witch Hunter.


• When I arrived in Nordland, it was nice to see the hustle and bustle new characters running around the world. I was able to jump right into the quests. Public Quests occasionally drew attention, though I've only been able to complete one Normal PQ and none of the Hard rated ones. Best of all, scenarios were popping (ugh, I don't like that term) with some regularity, even ones that weren't Gates of Ekrund, the focus of this PvP holiday weekend. And the RvR was alive and well with warbands fighting over the various objectives. It wasn't opening day, but it also wasn't the vast emptiness I remember from six months ago.


• The Witch Hunter is quite familiar though the exact details of play are only slowly returning to me. There is fun to be had running around, cutting up people and beasts, shooting them in the face, then continuing on to the next red splotch on the map. The game looks great, even at the default settings. Since I previously had to turn down details to get it running smoothly, it seems like an extra six months have helped that. What hasn't improved is the responsiveness of the combat. I can barely tell which of my abilities are going off at any one time. WoW, and now CO, have shown that doing this right really drives the experience. The ability lag disconnects you just enough to break the feel of combat.


• So far, that's the only issue I've had with the game. I was able to clear tier one with my fill of RvR and quests and moved on looking forward to tier two. Whether this subscription will continue past the ten day trial, I can't say. I'm sure it will all come down to how active RvR and scenarios are this coming weekend. At a minimum, I'm pretty happy that I gave up the hard drive space to take WAR out for a another spin.

---

© 2009 Marty Runyon. All rights reserved.
If you're reading this on a site other than Bullet Points, be aware that this post has been stolen and is used without permission.