State of the game: Warhammer Online

Then there’s the lingering bugs and glitches that still haven’t been fixed, despite a commendable and diligent amount of post-launch patches. Mail is still hideously slow, for instance, or simply downright inaccessible. Every other time we log on much of the world fails to load, and then a minute later we crash back to the log in screen. Character animations can easily break, and while we do get the idea behind making gear for each class conform to a certain look and feel, it still feels kind of limiting to not have the same degree of freedom in how our toons look as a title like LotRO.

Plus, the more we play, the more obvious it becomes that the PvE questing is a real afterthought. As fellow WARer James Matson puts it, it’s basically a very fancy lobby to mess about in while you’re waiting for the next instanced battleground to pop. Similarly, crafting is so shallow as to be almost non-existent.

When WAR works, it’s a stunning achievement, we have to admit. When you have a strong group of players struggling against another group, the classes exhibit an incredible degree of balance, and the RvR encounters and scenarios are nicely designed. But, again, it comes down to that gameplay being reliant upon finding those players.

So, the question is, do we stick with it? We have to admit that we were tempted to let our subscription slide, and would have done just that were it not for the news that there’ll be a world event allowing players that complete a number of changing daily quests to have early access to the two new classes being introduced into the game. The event, called ‘Heavy Metal’, will last from November 17 until December 1, and here’s how it works, straight from the game’s newsletter:

When the Heavy Metal live event begins on November 17th, players who log into WAR will see a new tab in the Tome of Knowledge. Clicking on this tab will open the Live Events page, where each day we'll place a new daily task. Completing these daily tasks earns influence, just like you'd earn in a public quest. There are rewards for Basic, Advanced and Elite influence, culminating in the ultimate prize: the chance to play WAR's new classes a full week before they're released to the public! This last reward won't be easy to earn, and players who want to get to the Elite level will need to log in each day and complete on the daily event.

The two new classes – both tanks – are the Knights of the Blazing Sun for Order, and the Blackguard for Destruction. We were very sad when it was announced the Blackguard weren’t making it in at launch, so perhaps this event is good thing.

We’ll give the game another month, by the look of things.