Thanks for the explanation! While I'll occasionally do battlegrounds in WoW, I much prefer the arena. From the way you describe it, Warhammer sounds like it's a bit too simple.

It has a free 10 day trial, and the patcher works well. I was able to download/install the entire game overnight (I had played the game for a couple months a while back, and they had just released an update that was about 80 pages of patch notes).

Zaole wrote:

It's extremely easy to learn, and the graphics are cute in their own way(and comparably better than WoW's).

Warhammer's PvP is very casual-focused; there's no extremely competitive, small-group battles like arenas in WoW, so which game's PvP you'll prefer comes down to if you like battlegrounds or arenas more. If you love battlegrounds, Warhammer's the game for you. You can level up from the moment you log in straight to the max level by simply queueing up for PvP battles, and you can queue for all in your level range from anywhere. Additionally, the game boosts you to the average level of that PvP match's level range so there are no huge level discrepancies.

That being said, I prefer WoW because I like the really hardcore, competitive fights. Warhammer's a lot less balanced and thought-provoking.

This is only partly accurate I would say.
Mainly the part about WoWs PVP. It is just as easy, uncompetative, unbalanced and casual as WARs PVP.

Anyway. WAR was a game that was released about 1-2 years too early. Like most MMORPGs apparently.
The game drastically lacks balance, some classes are simply inferior to other, similar classes in every single way possible.
Also, the game focuses heavily on PVP, which as someone said, is not that great. However, the game focused way too much on PVP, and totally neglected the PVE side of the game. The PVE side of the game has some good ideas and parts of it are very impressive compared to WoW, but, there is simply not enough PVE stuff to do, and after level 8 or so the amount of stuff to do drastically drops and becomes highly repetative.

The game is more or less a WoW clone with focuses more on PVP and less on PVE... But it totally screwed up the PVP side of the game.

Warhammer is a good game.

First things first, the visuals are nice. The colors aren't as saturated as many MMOs, and a lot of the countryside fits the theme - wartime. Aside from that, I think the graphics are very well done and the animations are smooth, spell effects are nice.

We'll tackle PVP first - PVP in WAR is well done. The balance issues aren't as greatly exaggerated as the claims I've seen so far, but nonetheless check up on your class before you commit to it. I played an engineer early in my WAR career and it was effectively a waste of time, as other classes we're outgunning my damage by double or triple in some cases, and my AOE utility as an engineer was less useful in the "battlegrounds" that I attended - so I recommend research on the classes.

The PVP mechanics themselves are very solid. There are three unique "battlegrounds" for each bracket, brackets are 1-11, 12-21, etc. When you join a battleground, you're automatically boosted to level X8 (18, 28, etc.) and have stats correspondingly boosted. You won't have the abilities of the higher level characters, but you'll still have the statistical stamina - which is nice. You can queue up for a battleground at any time, from any location. This means, for PVE, you can queue up while leveling. When you get the chance to join, just find a safe spot and jump in. When you get out, you'll be dumped right back where you were.

Each leveling zone has a primary PVP focus point, to funnel players towards the action. The objectives vary from zone to zone, but general involve point capture and holding. In every zone, there is a major castle. When your faction owns (did I mention this uses the Order vs. Chaos methodology as well?) this castle, you can access higher end equipment merchants and a few other NPCs and bonuses that I can't recall presently. There is one problem with these objectives - typically you have higher level players in the area making it harder for characters of the appropriate level to be effective there. WAR tried to mitigate with a "chicken" system, which turns a character too high a level into a 1 hp chicken creature. However, they set the level limitation far too high, so characters up to 9 or 10 levels higher than the zone's highest end levelers can still come in and ruin the fun. I hope this is addressed at some point.

And the last thing I'd like to mention about PVP - it's very good experience, especially if you can win consistently. WAR is unique in that you can select which way you'd like to level - and not just selecting between PVE and PVP. You can actually level just by killing similarly leveled characters "out in the wild" (world PVP) and net thousands of experience a kill just running around the oppositions area and picking off questers. For one reason or another, this behavior isn't very popular so it's not much of a problem when leveling, interestingly enough.

PVE in WAR has two particularly revolutionary features that I would definitely love to see implemented in upcoming ORPGs. These are open parties and public quests respectively.

The first - open parties - means that whenever you form a party with your friends, it is considered "open" unless you manually designate it as closed. Open parties can be joined by any player at any time. If you're anything like me, your first reaction is: "Wait, so idiots can join my party any time, without my permission?" It's not bad. You can still kick trolls at any time. The good thing about open parties is that, when doing routine quests such as "kill X monster" you can pull up a list of open parties in your zone, sorted by distance from you. You can then select an existing party that is already doing the quest, and join up. This allows you to get in on the monsters killed, since each kill applies to all party members. This makes questing much more enjoyable due to increased speed, but it ALSO makes partying much more enjoyable. The nature of parties in WAR, because of this addition, is very free-flowing. There are no nasty goodbyes, no annoying whispers, and very little worries about bad PUG members. You join a party, kill a few creatures, possibly start a conversation, or just don't bother, then leave the party a few minutes later. Nobody is mad, and it leads to a much less stressful communal feeling.

The second revolutionary feature is public quests, they are awesome. A public quest is a quest that all characters in the area participate in automatically. They usually have a basic "kill 60ish of X creatures" initial objective. So as players are completing their own individual quests in the area, they are also completing the public quest. After this first stage is completed, there is usually some cinematic event and then a new objective is laid down. The most common is to kill 10-15 "elite" type creatures that show up. The last object is generally a boss meant for 5-8 people. Many public quests follow this general formula, but a good portion have unique and much more interesting objectives. It's definitely something to take a look at.

The rewards for public quests are participation based, so the player who was there for the longest and contributed the most killing gets a bonus to his/her "loot roll". After the bonuses are handed out, random rolls are performed, and then players are awarded a prize chest based on what ranking they got in the rolls. Usually there will be a first place bag, a 2nd-4th place set of bags, and then some common rewards for everyone else. The prizes themselves are equipment, crafting materials, a gold prize, etc.

All in all, the public quest and open party systems combine to great communal effect - getting players together without the use of a boring, cheesy interface or screaming for an hour in a major city. This allows you to advance your character and optionally make friends and socialize.

I would recommend WAR twofold. 1) You are a game developer working on a solid ORPG. Experience the concepts in this game and allow it to influence your concepts to improve upon your existing framework. 2) If you're getting tired of WOW, or don't have the time commitment that WOW requires, play WAR. The time commitment is MUCH lower, and the majority of the exciting content is NOT at the end of the leveling grind - but rather sprinkled adequately throughout the game.

Whoa, thanks for the in-depth explanation Polatrite! You've given me a really clear picture of the game, and I've decided to try it out. Just downloading the 10-day free trial now :)