Putting the polish on WAR

Overall, Warhammer Online has really impressed me with it’s classes, content and gameplay.

But there are definitely a lot of little bugs still floating around and a lot of rough edges that could use a bit of smoothing out.  Mostly annoyances instead of gamebreakers, but worth looking at now that the game is in full swing.

Tobold just covered one very well today  — the slapdash Auction House interface.  Yes, it’s better than a lot of MMOs but still majorly behind its chief competition. 

Here’s my list of little things that could do with improving:

– Chat interface.  Let people link items in chat.  Provide a right-click menu when you click on someone’s name in chat that lets you do common things like whisper, reply, etc.  People everywhere are crying out for improvements to chat.  Snafzg at The Greenskin says item linking is #1 on his wishlist. Blessings of Kings looks at other chat box issues.

– Mail.  Remove the delays.  Allow players to inclule multiple items in a message.  For super bonus points, give players a drop down list of common names to mail to (so you can do things like mail to alts quickly).

– Inventory management.  Make moving items betwen slots more responsive, there’s a definite lag now. That applies to the paper dolls slots and bag slots.

– In-game gamma control for video.  On one of my video cards WAR is fine, but on the other it is way, way way too dark.  In most games, that would be no problem, I’d just tweak the gamma in the game’s video settings menu.  WAR doesn’t have one.   I have a kludgey work-around, but it shouldn’t be necessary.

 

Where is this troll really? Not right here!

– Bright Wizard visual glitch —  As long as I’m complaining,  I have one significant visual glitch on my Bright Wizard. He has a CC spell called Fire Cage that locks an enemy in place for a short time. However, if I cast it and then I move away, most of the time the enemy appears to come right along.  I can tell they’re really still tied down at the original spot because if I run far enough and try to attack them again, even though they appear to be right on top of me, I get the “target is too far away” message.  This glitch happens quite often on multiple computers with different video cards, so it’s hard to imagine its an issue with my computer.  The Dragonchasers website reports essentially the same experience.

And for super-picky stuff:

– Pathing on birds.  I don’t know how many times I’ve run into birds frozen in the air.  Clicking on them sometimes unfreezes them and then they start flying again.  It has no effect on gameplay but it does break my immersion a bit.

– Server character details. At the point in the login process where you see the server list, I often notice that it incorrectly displays the number and type of characters  I have on a server.  For example, I have 3 Order characters on Server X, bu it might display “Server X (3 Dest)”  or “Server X (1 Order).”  Again, it’s not a big deal — I know how many characters I have and where they are — but the first time I saw this I panicked and wondered if they’d gotten wiped somehow.

Did my Averheim characters really defect from Order to Destruction? Nope.

– In-game FPS display.  It would be nice to know how changing different settings adjustments would affect my performance in WAR.  But WAR has no in-game FPS display. 

Now that the retail product is out, other bloggers are putting together their lists too. 

Here’s the fix list from A Wall of Text.

Boathammer has a list of fixes and improvements too.

Esri at the White Lion Blog has her “Fix This Now” list.

Overall, I’ve been pleased with the way Mythic has been trying to address customer issues, including their latest fix –which should reduce or eliminate a repeated wait in a login queue if a player’s game ever  crashes.  Here’s hoping that they maintain their zeal to finetune WAR and eliminate customer annoyances.