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Old Screenshot Brings Back Memories of Warhammer Online

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I found this picture randomly in a directory on my hard drive and was immediately inspired to share it with you guys and reminisce about the… good old days? Well, perhaps not so good, but they were certainly the old days.

Looking at this screenshot, I’m reminded of a lot of awful things we went through in Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. Those were certainly some of the worst days due to how hyped we got, and how far we had to fall. That said, I do have some fond memories.

I remember how much I really, really liked that Shaman class and the WAAAGH! magic. The AoE healing everyone did was stupid, especially for PvP, but the class itself had fun mechanics. I’m also reminded of how fun and unique the races and classes looked, and how neat it was to equip trophies and see them appear on your character.

The dungeons were terrible. The RvR was a zerg fest with small maps. The crafting system a complete and utter joke. The balance was completely shot. The world was truncated and linear. The leveling and character progression a grind. While almost everything ended up being a flop, they did manage to capture that Warhammer feeling for me.

Anyone have memories — fond or otherwise — they’d like to share from WAR?

  • I remember the hype my friends and I had going into this game – we were all big DAOC fans and this was going to be the hot new thing in this game style. I remember it was quite fun at first, then just this growing unease, then turmoil about all the problems it really had. God, that RVR, let’s cram 100 players into a tiny area and have them go nuts!

  • I accidentally stumbled across the discs for the game a few months back. Bought back some memories for sure. I recall being mind blown by the public quests as they were kinda a new thing in those days.

    • I remember being unimpressed with them overall as a mechanic, because they weren’t dynamic (just scripted and reset), but I liked how they were built into the world. I remember the first PQ in the Greenskins area with that giant. That was pretty cool.

  • W:AoR was the pinnacle for me. I played an engy and would spend my days off hooking up with Duvent’s crazy pug warbands. The game was completely brilliant and completely broken and honestly only vanilla WoW’s AV and lotro’s the moors ever came close to capturing that spirit of large scale warfare.

  • I have fond memories from WAR, though I will admit that it was mostly broken and I left it in frustration there was still something epic about the world, the races and classes, and some really great ideas with less great implementation.

    • You should give reckoning a chance, good way to relive WaR. I made a few alts there to relive tier1-2. Fun times.

      For me one of the best me memories in War was actually playing with you guys during the beta. I remember playing a chosen and we had a guild group taking a keep. Fun times.

      War Shaman is still my favorite class in all the mmo i played.. and thats a long road back to the uo days.

      Now you just gave me a mmo itch. Gah

  • I like Warhammer Online. Particularly the instanced battlegrounds and especially the Squig herder. The ope-world PvE was ok and the RvR was fun when you could find it although no matter how small the maps may have been I still spent more time looking for a zerg to join than I did zerging.

    The crafting was horrific though and the main cities were a nightmare. Overall it just felt unfinished – which it was.

    • Squig Herder was a cool class conceptually. I remember the hype of jumping into a squig and taking control, bouncing around. Another very cool class.

  • The unreal hype that came with WAR was really next level. Both a master class in marketing and the biggest cautionary tale in promising too much and not delivering. ‘Bears bears bears’ and all that.

    I thought the leveling in WAR was excellent, especially because of the introduction of PQs. They just had no end-game that worked, and balance was so laughably bad at the cap. Pretty amazing considering you had people with DAoC experience working on it, yet they screwed up what DAoC did well.

    I think the saddest thing about WAR is it used the IP pretty well (just not in grouping the races into two piles, that was dumb), and the Warhammer IP is a true gem that deserves better.

  • The way you could level up and gear up via short pvp matches and battlegrounds was brilliant.

  • I liked the setting, the idea and the fresh classes. (I played a marauder)
    But this game was so broken. No one knew what the stats on gear did we all just assumed. Turned out it did next to nothing or nothing at all.
    It was just another broken feature.

    I did one i believe 30-40 man guild assisted instance and… it was a let down.

    After lvl 30 the game became a chore and annoyed me. i think I made it to lvl 33 before i walked away.

    I liked the instanced pvp. The outside world pvp could have been fun but the realm I was on had 3 times as much order compared to chaos. So that was no fun.. an exception here and there of course.

    I remember it as fun, but broken and in some places uninspired/boring game design.
    This game would have been so much better had they developed it another year or 2.

    I still got the collectors edition. The artbook and comic book are quite nice.
    Also got the pewter miniature in its packaging.

    War you could have been so much more…

  • This game ruined following game development for me. As a DAoC vet I was so stoked for this game, I bit on everything they said hook, line and sinker. The saddest part was that it was really close to being a good game in a lot of ways.

    The worst for me was the way they implemented the open RvR or PvP lakes. Population imbalances, huge performance issues and crashing with large battles, zone borders in the middle of zones, keep swapping, empty lakes due to scenarios being better at rewarding renown, no PvE objectives for spontaneous PvP, etc. I could go on and on.

    In fact, when I left the game I wrote Mythic like a 3 page letter explaining what I didn’t like about it, how disappointed I was, felt like I was lied to repeatedly by their marketing, etc., and submitted it through their feedback form. Never done anything like that before.