Warhammer Online goes live, accepting retail customers, Sunday at 4am PST (7am EST). That’s little more than a day away from now and I wanted to give you guys my thoughts on the things that I want, and WAR needs, to see fixed before or very, very soon after launch. For those of you sitting on the fence waiting to nitpick everything when deciding if this game is ultimately for you, this is a great list of the top most nagging issues. I’ve been keeping this list for the past few days and will cross-out the things which have been fixed or addressed.
Combat Animations – Much better now that they patched in more and fixed many of the current ones. On my black orc for example, I am able to chain abilities and have the animations seem as though he were moving one to the other seemlessly. I still think several combat animations are needed for many classes.
Spell Effects – Before patch 4.1.1 I would have said they were pretty bad. Now they have added a few more and made some better. They still need to add more but they’re getting there. I would like to see some of the bland ones fixed before more are added.
Loot Window/Loot all – Fixed in 4.1.1. It was really clunky but has shown much improvement.
Graphical improvements – Blurring textures, muddy textures, lack of detail, lack of having the graphics look crisp and “bam!” (never underestimate the bam factor). In 4.1.1 the GPU slider bar was added but I have noticed no difference on a 8800gt 512 (2x in SLI). This apparently addresses some of the blurry textures and popping – which I have a lot less of now – but I see no more added benefit toward making the textures look better. I’m also noticing a few jaggedies that I wish were smoothed out. These range from character models to enviromental. Does forcing AA on work?
RvR Itemization – Mostly fixed in 4.1.1. I’m not liking how the RvR gear is so spread out now. I actually liked getting it all at level 11 and to fix the problem why didn’t they just move it all to level 12? No idea why they decided to spread it all out through the teens, essentially making it worthless imo. I have just been skipping over it now and replacing it with PvE gear. The fact that you can get MORE drops through PvP, more money, and an overall rvr itemization buff makes me happy.
Lag/region crashes – Lots of chat lag all day today. I was typing messages in and waiting 10 seconds for them to appear. During one period of time none of my chat messages were being delivered except for those in tells. I had to relog to fix this.
Group bugs and player bugs – Yesterday and today I’ve been getting a lot of “That player can not be found” bugs where I can not invite someone standing right in front of me to my group or guild. Then there was the problem with group windows disappearing when in warbands. Add on the bug where people were getting dropped from the guild every time they relogged and group invites being sent to other people when I invite someone … it’s a mess. It was slightly better this evening.
EXP Bug – I don’t know what it was that was causing this but for a while my Black Orc was stuck in some exp loop. I would kill a few mobs and gain exp but then I would kill a mob and actually LOSE exp. This occured in the Greenskin Ch. 8 area while killing dwarves on one of the boats. I promptly left the area and the bug went away.
Memory leak or high memory usage – WAR is using a LOT of ram now. Since 4.1.1 it’s a system hog. Alt tabbing or exiting the game takes forever as my system recovers from incredible ram use. Playing long periods of time magnifies the issue.
* Pathing – There are still some pathing issues with mobs behaving weirdly. During combat sometimes mobs will slide around and move. Ranged mobs have the most pathing issues that I have observed, often giving the “Your target is too far away” message.
* Item linking – There needs to be item linking in chat! It’s considered “standard” for mmorpgs now.
This is a decent collection of issues. None of which require a “miracle patch” to solve or a delay of the release date by any means. They’re not game breaking – they’re just annoying things to nitpick. I’ll add to the list as I can think up more. Additions will have a * next to them.
Yep, forcing AA clears the jaggies.
I found setting the Affinity (on multi core systems) to just 1 CPU early on stops the high memory usage.
Not sure if that will work for everyone but did for me anyway.
Hey, Keen. It’s been a crazy week at work (dayjob not TTH) and I’m not seeing where the 7am post is… enlighten me? I believe you, but want a frame of reference.
http://www.warhammeronline.com/ce_preorder/
LIVE GAME HEAD START
Whether you choose to join the fight as an incendiary Bright Wizard or a shadowy Witch Elf, as a pre-order customer, you’ll get access to the live servers before the game officially launches to help lead your Realm to victory.
Collector’s Edition pre-order customers will be granted Head Start access on September 14th at 7am EDT. Characters created in the Head Start program will carry over when the servers officially go live on the Day of Reckoning – September 18th.
This is not a graphics based game…according to what you guys have said all along.
Does it really matter if animations have some more frames?
Or will it help anything if textures get updated?
I have even noticed a lot of the textures and modeling looks like it is based on DAoCs engine. I wonder if they just went ahead and built on top of that like Turbine did with LOTRO?
Also, forced AA has not worked with ATI cards.
Jaggies and blurry textures all the way.
And it is really odd that my 4870 runs this worse than AoC.
As long as it is fun though, who cares eh?
Using ATI Tray tools with my ATI card and forcing AA works for me.
Biggest thing for me is spell animations, id like bigger more noticable animations when I cast simply so that I KNOW ive casted (Casting hots on my warrior priest is barely noticable in the thick of combat), I personally havnt run into many of the other problems, and I never experience blurry textures except when alt tabbing into the game or just starting it up, but everything “pops” in and I dont notice it again. Animations seem smoother than I remember and it doesnt bother me much, although more would definatly be nice, admittedly ive only played Ironbreaker, Witch Hunter and Warrior Priest.
There’s one bug or missing feature that “bugs” me, and that’s the inability to join scenarios as warband. If we choose “join as party” only those in the party of the one who queued gets the scenario queue. I’d like to see this be fixed as I’m truly looking forward to guild RvR groups more than anything else.
Besides the lack of /sit and /walk (had to get that in 😉 ), the thing that is annoying me the most is that it takes ten years and a day to exit out of the game. A bit less for just logging to the character screen, but still a huge amount of time.
Could this be simply because of all the resources the program is using?
‘RvR Itemization – Mostly fixed in 4.1.1. I’m not liking how the RvR gear is so spread out now. I actually liked getting it all at level 11 and to fix the problem why didn’t they just move it all to level 12? No idea why they decided to spread it all out through the teens, essentially making it worthless imo. I have just been skipping over it now and replacing it with PvE gear. The fact that you can get MORE drops through PvP, more money, and an overall rvr itemization buff makes me happy.’
I absolutely have hated the change in obtaining RvR gear, but I’ve heard it’s because many people QQ’ed in feedback about how they wanted to have goals for every level. Dumb. I loved getting a full set of gear when I reached X level, now essentially the renown gear is pointless. I had hoped the RvR itemization change would also include changing back the way you obtain renown gear, but sadly there is no indication it will be changed back. One of the worst changes I’ve seen them do.
It might be a memory leak, but if there is, it’s a nice and stable one. Growth stops at ~1GB on my system. (It increases or decreases a bit, but it’s all in that neighborhood.) That is half of my RAM, so – honestly – anybody at 1GB (or less) is in for a world of pain as swapping becomes how they run the game.
Honestly, I have no idea what they’re using the RAM for, and I have no intention of poking around in there (I don’t like mixing biz with fun, nor do I like the idea of angering the PunkBuster gods), but if I were to hazard a guess (which I like to do) I’m sure they’ll cut that down.
Hey, now I’m up to 1.007GB, and it’s hovering there. I wonder what’s going on in the game’s brain while my sorceress stands idle in an empty war camp? Balance issues (which I want them to address) will certainly take a backseat to memory leak issues, so don’t worry. This’ll get fixed eventually.
@Cedia: The slow time it takes to exit the game goes hand in hand with the resources the game has started to hog since the recent patches. /sit would be cool though simply for the ability to sit. 🙂
@Proximo: That sorta bugged me too at first but the more I thought about it the more it starts to make sense. I think they dont want one particular premade to be able to fill an entire side. They want, at most, half or a part of one side to be able to be premade to give the other team, if its a pug, a chance in hell.
I do see the benefits in not allowing full premades, but it was one of the things I was really looking forward to =(
Getting the RvR gear all at the same level created a very jagged gear progression and was a mess in my opinion. Someone just one stage up from you in gear progression was a good 10-20% more powerful than you were and it was very noticable. The new system is a much smoother progression and I think with a few tweaks it will be better.
I think the addition of RvR loot vendors to each outpost in the last patch helps make the RvR loot a little more useful again. Each time you level you can easily pick up another item to fill in any gaps you may have.
However, I too preferred the full set at Rx RRy method they were using before, as it created ‘milestones’ in your career that were something to strive for. Now that its all spread out it feels diluted and pointless like WoW. Oh, I guess we know who the qq’ers were.
Consider also that RvR gear is not meant to be the “best” through Tiers 1-3. Consider it to be an alternative gear progression for those that level in RvR instead of PvE. If you go both or just PvE route and max out influence, the PvE rewards will keep pace or outpace the RvR ones until endgame, I expect.
Of course endgame is a whole different matter, so from rank 40 onwards RvR gear is about all there is.
It’s a lot more fair now to those who haven’t kept up their RR that they don’t get stomped by someone who just bought the whole T1 or T2 set. Gearing up in RR6/8 was ridiculous before, I’d agree with the poster above that it’s worth 10-20% more power.
Of course, they need to do another itemization pass.. Str on Magus RR gear, seriously?
@Kalath: I agree on the itemization pass. They have most of the sorc gear set to wisdom. In my opinion, that’s a little silly.
@Ender: I agree, reluctantly, to some extent. It was rather jagged but now it’s (to borrow from Bildo) butter scraped over too much bread.
I really hope they improve the video options window. There are very few options there compared to most games. The ability to add anti-aliasing to smooth out all the jaggedness would make me happy.
WTB a way to link items in chat : )
As far as item itemization goes in RvR how about using this concept but spread it out in a different way.
In Tier 2 we have 9 levels during which players will be definitely be in the Tier 2 zones. We have 8 or so items and the same amount of weapons in every different set.
What if we had two possible sets one could wear throughout their Tier 2 experience. They would wear the first set from 12-16 and the second set from 17-21. They could stagger all of the items in the set across just those few levels, opening up access to several new items with just one player level up.
Example:
I have a High Elf White Lion. His name is FancyPants. FancyPants hits level 12 and begins to adventure into the wild world of Tier 2. Upon hitting T2 he gains access to shoulders, gloves and a trinket. Level 13 gives him access to chest and boots. Level 14 gives access to a cape and helm. Level 15 gives weapons and more trinkets. Level 16 is shields and/or offhand stuff.
At level 17 he gains access to the second set and can begin upgrading himself as he goes. Using this method, each level would improve your character with SEVERAL new items but still not give them all at one time. There would be plenty of items to keep someone happy but they would remain spread out.
Ideas? Comments? Did this make any sense?
Just downloaded in preparation for the EU Headstart (hopefully won’t be a disaster like the EU Open Beta) and on the Settings I found an option to “Click through chracter” which is a feature I am glad they have added!
The entire server situation. They keep limiting the number of servers so they hit high population and then get players to wait in queues instead of playing the game.
I don’t want to play the server queue game. It’s not fun.
Hopefully they have an easy guild transfer method available to entire guilds can be moved to new servers for free. Because this whole roll out as they max out thing won’t work. It hasn’t in the Open Beta, it’s been a damn mess. Dumb idea.
The biggest problem with spell effects is that even with visuals maxed, other players don’t see everything you cast.
It really sucks to not see when you’ve been healed.
This is not a minor issue IMHO, it’s a big one.
@ScytheNoire: They just added more servers to the list of CE head-start servers a couple hours ago. There are MORE than enough for the CE headstart. 2 days later they’re added more for the SE, and 2 days later more for the full retail launch. There are plenty of servers.
Something else forgotten is the auto afk cancel when you return and touch the keyboard.
Another is I see guild members logging off but I don’t think I see them logging in. Would also like to see a list of guildies online when I first log in.
Theres something I ecountered tonight on my marauder, where enemy players would strafe sideways and I couldn’t hit them it would say they are out of range or something even though they were right in front of me strafing…
While it is nice to have some of these things fixed I feel that the most important thing is to get the login/authentication bugs fixed first. Then they should fix the disconnection problems.
These are the 2 most important issues that should come before animation fixes.
Interesting, i haven’t had any of the login/auth bugs Chainmail. Can you describe more what happens with them?
honestly I had a long long list of bugs that REALLY bothered me till that 31mb patch shortly ago. Now the only bugs Im getting are the CTD when trying to use flightmaster while in a group, and occasional CTD while loading a scenario, btw in both cases, if you cntrl-alt-del when it happens before game crashes, then alt-tab back, it fixes it.. odd I know. But, I’ve been lucky my first CTD was like 4 days ago, and I’ve only had 5 ever, and I have never dc’d
there’s no way for left handed people to switch the mouse buttons
I wanted them to nerf that RVR gear, it had way to much resists, all the gear was making casters useless, but just like typical mythic they went well overboard and turned all the rvr gear into freaking vendor whites
@Bartlebe: That’s exactly what they did. There’s a set from 12-16 and a set from 17-21, requiring various renown levels. The problem for people doing PvE now is that they perhaps slightly overnerfed the gear and PQ/inf rewards are much better.
I really wish they would sex up the siege weapons in a future patch. They are horrible DPS compared to what a ranged character could be putting out in the same time.
I would love to see them have some added effects like giant spears pinning people to the ground, hellcannons throw people up into the air, repeater crossbows that interupt casting, etc. And please allow us to just target the ground rather than have to lock onto a player and praying they don’t move for 3 seconds.
Also the terrain and placement within the open world RvR areas needs to be looked at. Why is the Empire/Chaos so well designed with everything in proximity and then the Elf pairings so spread out and with mountainous terrain?
They need to make it so you can right click names in chat to whisper them or add as friend or what have you.