WAR beta impressions

[imphat]

I've played war closed beta for some time, up till last weekend preview, and although it has some nice features I've noticed some things that might prevent warhammer online from being an MMO of success.
I'd like to know if everyone else who tried it feels the same way, so pls feel free to comment:

overall

The comparison between war and wow can't be avoided.. clearly a lot of things that worked in wow have been brought to war, which is nice imo.
The controls are pretty much identical, there are icons to indicate NPCs with quests, instanced bgs and dungeons, item quality, the fact that the items are not dropped on the floor but instead only represented by icons on the inventory and a lot more...
I gotta say that as a 1st impression, WAR feels like WoW, which is awesome imo.


good points

apart from that, WAR is not a WoW clone. In many aspects it feels like WoW improved.
Many wow design problems, such as no world pvp, have been addressed on war. So far I believe these are the major improvements:

• world pvp from the beginning
• pvp rewarding experience and loot
• city take over grants bonuses (in wow raiding another town is a waste of time)
• quests are automatically annotated at the maps (just like new wow quest mods)
• parties are open by default, which prevents people competing for the same mobs on a particular quest
• public quests instead of camp the elite and pray for the other group to die

there are a lot of other new things such are a better class design (specially for healers) and a way to measure effort and rewards given by effort (even if u r a healer or tank)


bad points

1. the game user interface (bars/text/chat) is terrible.
I mean.. its fully configurable, but it is awful anyway. The chat is unreadable, NPC names are like red over black (lol), the spell icons are too dark and the way the game displays out of range or spell cooldown is just wrong.
To be honest WoW original interface is not that great either.. but WAR's is way worse. It feels like they've tried to bring some of the most famous wow mods into it but failed miserably.
Good thing is that WAR is going to support mods just like wow, so hopefully this wont be a problem after some time.


2. The game feels weird.
Apart from the UI problems, only by moving the character something doesnt feel right. It's hard to explain, but it's the same difference between age of mythology and warcraft 3.
On warcraft 3 everything seems like it's in the right place. When you move your units they respond well. On the other hand, when I play age of mithology or let's say, tiberium sun, I feel like something is missing. The feeling is just not right.
I've go the same feeling playing WAR. Everything looks ok, even with low graphics the game looks nice but there's something fishy about the movements. It feels like the characters and spells don't belong to the rest of the game.
Maybe when the graphics are boosted this will get better.. not sure ;/


3. There's a huge problem regarding casting and global cooldown
When I played melee classes everything was working as intended, but for spells I've noticed some weird behavior. When casting a 3sec spell, with a global cooldown of 1.4sec (the interface displays 2sec, but it's actually 1.4) it is to be expected that the gcd will be over when you finish casting. But, for some reason the game client kept giving me a msg saying that I couldnt cast another spell for about another second or so after finishing the 3sec cast, and I'm really not sure why.
This feels really wrong when playing any caster class. I've read some forums and it seems a lot of people were also complaining about problems related to spell cooldowns, so I hope this will be fixed by release.


to sum up

war seems nice in a lot of ways.
It seems its might be a game for those who are tired of wow as it is or dont have the time to actually keep up with wow raiding.
Since daoc had a really good pvp system, I believe war will have even a better one. The best aspect in the game is exactly how pvp is incorporated from the beginning, with skills, quests and everything.
What might happen is some lack of content, but I'm pretty sure there will be more to do in comparison to running strattholme and scholomance 10 times a day (as of wow release).
Not sure about pve raiding, but it seems its not going to be the focus of war.

What really concerns me is that, although war is being released as a change of pace and way improved mmo, they might fail in providing the game a decent interface and gameplay so it feels comfortable to be played. In this matter Blizzard seems to be unbeatable by the time, but I hope mythic can, at least, make something playable by Sept 18th.

[Unleashed Rampage]

This game looks ownage haha.