Warhammer Online First Impressions "Is It Worth Playing?"

"You can't be black as an elf, don't tell twitter!" Immediate belly laugh from me ROFL.

WHO was genuinely one of the best MMO experiences I've ever had. It had a huge amount of innovation for its time and had what I think is some of the best game design ever found in an MMO. The zones were handled very well, they were paired together at different tiers with one faction on one side and another faction on the other side, and then RvR areas in between. At the early zones the PvE areas at either end were large and the RvR areas small and focused. But as you got to higher tier zones the amount of space for PvE shrank and the amount of space for RvR grew until the final zone which had capitol cities at either end and then pure RvR in between. This eased players slowly from PvE content to PvP which is where the life of the game was, absolutely astonishingly well thought out design. Battles in later zones were over large open forts which you could hold or attack with 100's of players. Physical character blocking meant that tank walls lined the gates making an impenetrable barrier and healers could stand behind that wall and heal/buff it. The rogue DPS would try and sneak in behind the wall and wreak havoc with the healers and disrupt the whole mess, it was absolutely fantastic. Sweeping across the RvR landscape with 100's of you on horseback was a great feeling.

Other innovations like the public quests were also just really well thought out. You just rock up to an area where a PQ exists, it has a little mini story associated with it, which has a bunch of different stages of difficulty, normally ending with a boss fight. You could just dive in and start doing damage or heals or support and it'd auto add you to the public quest group, no need to faff about manually joining something it just threw you in there if you contributed in any way. Then once the battle was over you'd all roll for loot based on your contribution. Then a short while later the PQ would loop and open up again. Some of these had very large scale fights with many players, it was a real pile on.

Crafting was unique I really loved making potions and crafting things. The Tome of knowledge arranged all the games lore and meta info extremely well....it was just this extremely well designed and very fun to play game and it's a crying shame that ended in the way it did. Sadly a bit too dated by todays standards to pull me back in to the private server.

All is fine until you reach endgame at...lvl 16. The server has failed to attract new people and its playerbase is constantly shrinking. Devs have been caught inflating the numbers in their site. So, in order to make the player experience less boring in lower tiers, they merged t2, t3 and t4. Yes. So you will be a cannon fodder for all your days until you grind invader gear and get a spot in an "organized" warband. Discord absolute necessity, since it is an action intense game. GL if you don't have much time to play and you came late. Players who are there much earlier than you, will farm you. You are a PUG to them. Untrustworthy, new, non-hardcore etc.

The elitism and toxicity of that server is unparalleled. The big guilds organize events and fight each other for 2 hours or a bit more. If the enemy realm has the best guilds online get ready to get farmed and griefed HARD. The fact that most organized guilds play destro is a consequence of bad balance making on part of the devs. This is proven by the city score which is the end-game. 24 vs 24 in organized warbands with same gear etc. Destro win 3/4 in instacnes and more than 90% of overall city sieges. One dev, when asked aboyt this said "Working as intended" Wargrimmir.

If you have spent a few hours superficially looking at this server you will like it. Nostalgia will kick in as well. But when you get invested, and see how toxic the community is, how much they trash talk and hate each other, how they belittle their enemies and how arrogant the "famous" warband leaders are, you will get put off like so many others who have left the server. Anyone, no matter how dumb, new or even a troll can make a warband, and through his inexperience, stupidity or mal intent, lead it to many defeats and you have no right to doubt his decisions. Follow the leader!! No one elected them, and still they think they are something special just because they started inviting people. So, You have to leave the pug warbands if you want to have fun.

Then you join warbands in discord, with more experienced leaders. They cannot be online for ever though. This means, that your fun is HEAVILY dependent upon OTHERS. GL getting a spot fast enough in their MAIN warband before it fills up.

RvR is a mess. Zones can be a long stalemate for hours, even days. Kadrin Valley and Black Crag are the most hated zones, but devs didn't give much thought on circumventing this. It took them 2.5 years to fix keep lords resetting, which is proof enough of their pride and reluctance to accept criticism. Last time I was playing they have made some dumb decision to make ranged SH op af. So, ORvR, the main strength of this game. It is fun, but if the enemy has more than you, you just get roflstomped 90% of the time. There are griefers who exploit the stupid mechanics implemented by the devs. For example, some takes the ram from the keep and hides somewhere in the zone. You cannot attack the enemy keep gates, so you cannot lock the zone. Or the guy who has the ram, is retard, cannot place it properly, stays afk during the attack, dies irl and then you cannot attack the door. Oil is a joke, you cannot repair it and if it gets destroyed, you cannot put another for 2mins. So you have to use it EXACTLY the moment that the doors go down and the enemy tries to rush the defenders. This means that the enemy can pretend to attack, so you waste the oil and they can charge without fearing it anymore. Or...some idiot/troll can put it prematurely and waste any chance to contain the enemy assault after the doors go down. I guess the devs were bored to fix the "repair" function of the oils...

This has lead to changes in game play. You can no longer form these legendary shield walls under the oil at the keep door. You have to stand at the sides of it, the so called FUNNEL. This allows the enemy to charge in the middle of the room easier. How do you face that? Morale drops. Huge unmitigated damage that if synchronized can wipe whole swaths of enemies in an instant. So you coordinate 1 button and you have won 80% of the fight. So much skill in zerg fights.. yeah.

My next point. I remember small scale fights on live. They were much fun, atomic skill mattered and 1 player could change the outcome. they have tried to emulate this in ranked scenarios, but it is not the same. The feeling of randomness and unexpected is not there, since the population is so small, that you know the names of the prominent players and their ALTS. Now the ORvR is blob vs blob. Several classes have been categorized as useless in current meta. AoE spammers are the must, tanks have gotten one dimensional and boring since they have nerfed BAD their solo specs and healers are always in small numbers. So, if you play one, your leader will not allow you to change to another class so easily. If you get bored of it after months, gl. And I mean your leader of a good guild warband, who likes to win. This is no longer about fun guys. It is about prestige and fame. EGO.

End-game and scenarios. Some scenarios are okay, especially the pug ones. But match making is horrendous. Once I was in mid tier scenarios trying to farm some tokens for an event cosmetic. In 9 hours, I a total of 10 victories. In average a match takes 10 mins. Class imbalance and player incompetence can ruin your fun for days. City sieges. The most horrible game mechanic ever. You are locked in a 1hour+ battle. If you win, you are fine, if you lose you have to undergo this for the rest of the match. For what? Some royal medallions, so you can buy better gear. You get like 10 on average, and the total cost of 1 of the 2 royal sets is as far as I can remember 400? Someone can check the number, but my point is that your will have to grind HARD. If you cannot take that button spam, no fun experience and want to quit, your leader will black list your name, because you are OBLIGED according to them to undergo that shitty experience. Devs agree, and if you afk to just get some sucky medals, they don't allow you to queue for scens for 24h. Useless penalty, since noone really likes scens. Premades dominate them for hours, and you are just going to get farmed by them. If you are in a good premade, gj. But this is rarely the case. People have different schedules and timezones, and stars have to align so you can form a good group for some hours.

I think the current devs couldn't do much with such a game with 2 realms only. But city sieges being so long? I mean most of the time you rofl stomp or get rofl stomped. After some fights, the loser will lose the will to fight and it will be boring even for the winner. He will still have to wait for the warlords to walk and cap the BO' though lmao...And if the enemy has good PVE dps careers, it can outdamage the final boss AFTER all champs are down and win. Why do they even have stupid PVE mobs in a purely pvp game anyway??? Stupid design that has lead even more people to leave that trash.

This game was actually a lot of fun, I really loved how easy PVP was to get into. I wish more MMOs would be more PVP oriented.

I just want to say I played this game until its launch and official closure. The Siege of Inevitable City was actual official content, so was The Siege of Altdorf. Killing the City King was the ultimate goal of capturing the Tier 4 zones. As Killing them gave you the highest level of gear in the game, requiring 80 PvP renown to equip. When I played the game on my Intel Pentium D 2.8Ghz CPU and Nvidia 9600 GT the lag was so bad at the Forts that it was sometimes 2 fps, and while playing the game so many people would show up to the fort sieges the server would actually CRASH.

Nice review! I've just started playing with 4 friends in group and it looks pretty cool.

This game was good when it was called Age or Reckoning and there were average 3k players online at anytime. And the Game Masters were not free to create 'boosted' characters and bully real players and act like bums. You may say that it's expected since it's a private server but only mazohists would accept to play in a server where the average players online are just 300-400 and the majority of them are GMs and their friends.....

cringe

If you ever play this again I would recommend Witch Elf. After watching your time with Black Desert I think you would enjoy that one more.

river of piss xD

I was a day 1 player back in 2008, so many good nights doing the realm fights.

804k vies, 14k likes, 500 max players online (do not believe the site counter, it is fake). This says it all.

sweet i need to get this played the original back in the day! rawrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

So much nostalgia, kinda happy that others felt the same and kept it alive.

Private Server, where the worse people ever, were made GMs and do whatever they like. One server that is almost dead with less than 200 players already and most of them are GMs playing as players. The original Age of Reckoning was a great game , and many people loved it. 9+ years later, RoR is a dead game only for a small group of people, where scenarios are only with premade parties and RvR is only Pugs. But the worse.... their GMs,

Can’t get enough of this games intro music

I loved this game

Warhammer was the first mmo I played and loved the game back then. I Miss it's community and lore. Lots of fun and laughs playing as a knight of the blazing sun. I still remember to this day, I braced to for this huge black orc to attack and he just ran past me, to my surprise and humour to see a bunch of dwarven iron breakers in hot pursuit.

The choppa class didn't exist when the game released...they added it later and it became my favorite after the marauder.

This game is great

This game was incredible when it first came out. The PvP battles were absolutely insane. Sieging Keeps and conquering zones were some of the most fun times I've had in any game ever. The Renown system and Public Quests were really really cool and fun.

Shame we never got some expansion pack for this, Arch WarHammer would have played the Choas Dwarves, I would have the vampire Counts

Oml , the graphics of this and LotRO are soo crappy , I wanna play em but when I see how they look I puke a little in my mouth...

i bought it back when it was new. it had by far the worst, most sluggish feeling skills in every game i ever used. felt like whatever you press on your hot bar only happens a second after. is it still like that?

why i play this over gw2 WvW? well because in gw2 big massive fights revolve around one group of 100+ people going literally THROUGH another group of 100+ people, and you just smash few keys that put aoe on the ground. half the classes and 90% of specializations are not viable for guild-based WvW in gw2.

biggest advantage WAR has over gw2 is that it doesn't allow "clipping", meaning you cannot go through other players. classes are much better balances, and let's not forget how gw2 advertised "no more holy trinity tank-dps-healers". well as it stands right now in gw2 you have exactly that trinity. yes warhammer also has class balance issues, but overall it's much better balanced for massive pvp, because that's the main selling point of game. for gw2 main selling point is PvE, they pretty much gave up on WvW, and totally given up on pvp(small scale).

You should really try to get to level 16 so you can join in on the T4 RvR keep fights, thats when this game gets insanely fun, thanks for showing me this game, been hooked for a year now

when I saw the trailer way back in the day I fell in love and watched the game play trailers or w/e they were at the time. Saw the archer class and I loved the way it looked.
The aesthetic of the game was something I always liked but time went by and I never heard of it again. A shame. Maybe when I have no money to buy a different mmo I'll check this game out for the old timey sake.

i bought the $100 box set just for the exclusive racial options.

Please do another review of this now it’s been improved so much Great patches coming March 9,2022 it would be awesome!

I remember getting involved in the hype of this game way back when. Got into beta and instantly recognized just how janked out and dated the combat was, like hardlocked to targets and your character couldn't move without interrupting literally everything, it was bad. Before launch they'd cleaned up the combat a bit, added mobility but class balance was now a massive issue especially for anything ranged, particularly the dark elf and chaos casters. As the game edged closer to release it became clear that entire regions of the game and character classes were going to be cut for launch.

It was far too ambitious leading to cut content and Mythic completely failed to understand what made WoW's combat so enjoyable, otherwise everything else about the game was fantastic. Had they taken another year to properly complete the game, and really refined the combat systems it absolutely would have been a winner, unfortunately that wasn't the case.

I remember first buying this game back in 2008 if i am not mistaken ,it was a nice turn around from WoW since i was burned out ,but eventually the game within 2 years died

When I was researching RoR to decide if I should play, I ran across stories of people claiming to have been banned unfairly. It then happened to me once I started playing RoR, over a lighthearted joke made with good intentions, which was arguably not against the terms of service. The project leaders seem to be ban-happy and have odd personal tastes that you might not find predictable or obvious. My appeal of the ban was denied. Keep this in mind when deciding whether to invest in the long grind to get your characters ready for serious RvR.

games like this are so fun, but all the idiot genz derps are playing league of legends and fortnite, and a few various fps games. Games like this require actual thinking and not just pure mechanics and that's too much for the little walnut brains these kids have

"don't tell twitter" lmao and it's so stupid for them to make a big deal out of stuff like that. You're literally choosing race. Elves just aren't black lmao. Different races. Not racist for races to be DIFFERENT. It's racist to imply that one is superior or inferior to another. But here we are, 2022, and at least 75% of the world doesn't even KNOW the definition of the word "racism" yet they use it all the time...

it is clunky

This game has an outstanding 400 active MALE players. No females. All 400 people playing this are male, i want no part in a sausage fest game.

I remember playing this when it first came out - I was way to young to know wtf was going on, but i enjoyed what it was haha

Ive played this game when it released and it couldnt bring me past level 25
I got bored, but then again ive played wow since start and its really hard to find a better mmo then that nowadays.
Had hopes for everquest nexth but it fot cancelled and now my pc cant keep up anymore.

We need more ps5

I like the game but i don't know how too answers to the questions thet they give me.

Omg just found out about this. I was a top competitive dwarf healer in the first game

Who said you can’t be a black elf?! A lot can happen in 2 years

Oh you youngsters that discovered this gem now, it's something that no other MMO did or will reach.
The level of attention to detail, the pure joy of playing every single minute, yet they shut it down...
I understood the player drop was massive, but that was only because the engine was just horrendous.
If i remember correctly, the publisher decided to scrap the unreal engine and go with some super old one at the time because it was cheaper, which made the game both uglier and perform significantly worse.

This, among others, was one of the things that pushed Mark Jacobs away from studio.

Ultimately, the biggest mistake Mythic did was releasing the game with EA, knowing their bad reputation and the outrage of fans before the game even released. Any other publisher and maybe we would still play the original game to this day.

I wish this server still had the support, easily one of the best mmorpg experiences I've ever had.. Just a shame that once the content runs out, that's kind of it. And people stop playing since the endgame scenario is shit. If any mmorpg needs a reboot with almost the exact same mechanics and combat its this one. 2020 was a blast in lockdown playing this.. I just wish we had a game that could build off of this, I want more content, I would of played this for months 16 hours a day!

Nice to know Giants are in this, Giants are one of my favorite parts of Warhammer Fantasy

Fun fact: I am owner of name Legolas on this server.

PvP in this game was really good
I played it when it came out. I’ve actually played Warhammer Fantasy for like 15 years at this point.
I was sad that it was eventually shut down.

I might just check this game out! =D

I will install this again and only do PvE… to experience the entire world they built.

I played this game a bit as a kid, back then I didnt know much about english or warhammer fantasy, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. The ambientation was amazing and the character design so cool, everyone looked like a badass!

This is peak warhammer for me.

Sad this game doesnt exist anymore :( would love gw to make a new and modern warhammer fantasy mmorpg