Believe it or not, I've never played WoW or Everquest, so someone else will have to provide comparisons with those. The only other vaguely similar game I've played is Runescape. The graphics in Warhammer are obviously way better than in Runescape, but the Runescape quests were more interesting and creative. The Warhammer quests are far too often of the "Go somewhere and kill eight fleshrender harpies" variety. However, Mythic has done a great job of making the public quests (group quests) work in such a way that you can do the group quests without ever having to sit around waiting for a group. I really, really enjoy that.

The public quests typically seem to have three stages. In the first stage, you have to kill off, say, 100 dark elf NPCs. This stage is untimed; whenever the 100th dark elf is killed in the area, the second stage starts. In the second stage you typically have to kill some small number of much tougher NPCs, and once you complete that, you have to kill a really tough boss who is effectively unkillable unless you have a strong group. The second and third stages have time limits, so if you don't have a suitable group around, the time will run out in ten minutes or so, and then it's back to the first stage. Meanwhile, there are numerous private quests that take you into the public quest area, so a lot of the people there are actually there on private missions (to kill 8 dark elves, pick up some item off the ground, or whatever). Typically, I go around doing private quests, and if there are a few other players in the area then we'll all shift gears and start doing the public quest.

I'm enjoying Warhammer quite a bit. It seems to me that they've really made the PvP part work well (although nowadays it seems to be called RvR, "realm vs realm". It's very easy to get PvP when you want it, and to avoid it when you don't. Going in, my main concern was with death penalties (i.e. when you die, do you lose levels, do you lose equipment, that sort of thing). As happens, death is nothing to be feared - all you suffer is a temporary stat loss, and you don't even have to put up with that if you pay a little money to an NPC healer. In RvR, both sides are fighting over a certain objective (kind of like capture the flag), and if your side is currently controlling certain "flags" then everyone on your side gets a 5% bonus to xp, gold, etc. in that general area. If the other side controls them, you get a 5% penalty. If neither has control, then you just get your regular 100%. The bonuses and penalties are small enough so they don't tilt the overall game balance, but +5% is always better than -5%, and it's always nice to see an announcement that your side has captured one of the "flags". In general, it seems to me that the good guys and bad guys are in control about equally often.

There's obviously a lot more to the game than what I've mentioned here. The "tome of knowledge" is a particularly nice feature - it basically tracks all the exploits in the history of your character. You can earn things like titles based on what you do (whether it be killing lots of a particular type of NPC, getting yourself killed in some particular way, completing a lot of quests, earning money, or silly stuff like clicking on your own character 100 times (this grants the "Ow my eye" title). You're always reaching some milestone or another, and I enjoy seeing what my latest tome accomplishments are.

As far as a DGate guild goes, I think the prospects are very unlikely. I don't see much point in having a guild that can't regularly field a bunch of people of similar levels in the same area, and a DGate guild will probably never be able to do that. However, that doesn't keep you from teaming up with friends and doing stuff together when the opportunity arises.

Anyway, those are my thoughts for the moment. For me, the bottom line is that I'm enjoying it. image

Last Edited By: Audun Kell Sep 30 08 10:48 PM. Edited 1 times.