I’ve been playing Warhammer for a few days now.  I have about 19 hours put in on a Dwarf Engineer.

The launch has been pretty smooth.  Some queues, but nothing horrible.  Some crashes, but better than the first week of WoW (I played at launch), although I do feel like LoTRO had a smoother launch.

I really enjoy the lore and the atmosphere of the game.  Mythic did an excellent job of making each zone feel like an actual war is going on.  Going from one encampment to another, I can watch NPC skirmishes happening with orcs and goblins charging dwarven lines.  Really makes the environment feel more dynamic than I was expecting.

The quest progression in the first tier is well designed and did a good job of moving me from the starting area out to my first public quest and then on to the next area with multiple PQ’s and more varied quests.

The quest design broke down a little when I got to the second tier, the Marshes. Yuck.  So far I’m not liking the Marshes.  After I finished all of the tier 1 quests, I moved to the Marshes to complete my last two quests.  This seems a bit early.  In tier one I only died a few times and that was almost always my own fault.  In tier two I died a lot more.  A lot.  As in it got annoying.

The difficulty levels of the quests in the Marshes seem uneven.   Some are solo-able and some are not.  There’s no indication of which are which.   Some of the quests I got at the first dwarf encampment were okay for my rank (which was 11-ish) and some I needed to be higher, but there’s no indicator on the quest of what the target level is.  It’s pretty annoying to trek out into the swamps toward a quest area only to find that the mobs I need to hunt are too high for my current rank.

As I moved out from the first to the second dwarf camp in the Marshes this became more of an issue.   Several times I had to skirt areas and hunt around a little bit for the one quest I could actually complete.   A couple of times, I was only able to complete a quest because a higher level had just come through and cleared out the mobs and I was able to run in and pickup whatever glowing item I was supposed to click on.

I may be spoiled by LoTRO, but I think adding a rank indicator to quests would go a long way.  Especially for some of the quests that send you to a new area or zone which you may or may not be level appropriate for.

I’ve got some more to say, see part two in a couple of days.

Warhammer Impressions
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