The drums of WAR are loud in my house....

I'll have to admit, I have neglected anything WoW related for the past few weeks and have been going whole hog in the Warhammer Online Beta. Not multiboxing it or anything, just running around as the forces of chaos, slaughtering the weakling Empire and the occasional elf or dwarf that stands in my way. It's gotten to the point where I am pretty much sold on the game, and have reserved it so I can get into the live head start on Monday. I have a few personal friends doing the same, so I will try to get on the same server as the rest of them.

That leads to WoW, which the decree from on high states I will not be paying for both WoW and Warhammer at the same time, at least not all 5 accounts. I don't know the path that I will take, but right now I am planning to cancel at least 1 account untill the expansion comes out. Grinding dungeons for loot or leveling up yet more people through the same exact content is starting to wear down my senses, and WAR brings a fistfull of excitement I haven't had since I have started multiboxing.

The real downside is that Mindy refuses to play. She tried the beta for about....10 min and decided it wasn't for her. It's going to hurt on the enjoyment when I can't play with her, running around the countryside pillaging defensless townsfolk for no reason.

Anyways, since It's been awhile, I wanted to make this huge ginormous post on the differences between WoW and WAR, both good any bad.

So.....lets start with the bad.

The BAD

1. The graphics. In my opinion, it's not as good as WoW. I am comparing the two at max detail. Of course, there is a chance that the graphics we have seen in the beta are not the finial graphics, those bieng unlocked for the full release. But as it stands now, it's not something that I would write home about. That said, WoW's isn't exactly Crysis quality either, but out of the two it comes out on top, mainly by having just better polish.

2. Stability - I kind of wrap up this from anything from CTD's to unkillable mobs due to bugs to the game not loading properly. I haven't encountered a lot of this stuff. In fact, it's been pretty rare and it's gotten fewer and fewer as I have played on and patches made. The main killer right now is taking a flight between zones, where it occasionally won't load, forcing to kill the game and restart. Annoying.

3. PvE - By itself, with the questing, is fairly weak. The mechanics are basicly stripped strait from WoW.

The Good

1. It is different - Everything is something new to me. Sure, a lot of the mechanics are the same, such as "go to this, kill X to obtain Y, and come back". But while that keeps the gameplay familiar, all of the cosmetics are different. The classes are all different. The lore is different. What your fighting against is different. The enviroment is different. All done in a good way.

2. Public Quests - There are little area's scattered around the world where you can perform a Public Quest (PQ). In this area, as many people can participate and everyone gets a chance for some good loot. You do not need to be in a group to participate. Each PQ has usually 3 stages. First stage can be solo'd, and generally requires you to kill a bunch of mobs or destroy certain things. Once you hit the second stage, you have to start fighting Champions (think elites), making it very much difficult to solo with any class, but 2 or 3 people can do this without worry. The final stage is where a Hero (boss) comes and you got to take it down, and your going to need around 5 peeps to do it. Once you finish the boss off, everyone gets a score that is based off of how much they participated. That score is then paired up with a random dice roll. The final score determans who gets the phat loot from the boss, and usually your looking at like 4 people. The loot generally consists of Green quality gear that is above average quality than what you normally can grab at your level.

3. Influance. This goes with the PQ's above. Every PQ is tied to a chapter. Not every chapter has just one PQ, most of the time there is 2 or more. Anyways, when you kill mobs and participate in a chapter's PQ, you gain influance in the same way you get exp. There are 3 tiers of influance, basic (a potion), advanced (average equipment for your class) and elite (excellent equipment for your class). Once you gain enough influance to reach a tier, you can go to that chapter's Rally Master (inkeeper like guy, you set your binding (hearth) to him) and grab a reward. You can only have 1 reward per tier per chapter. So, basicly you can just grind the first stage for each PQ in that chapter and eventually get Elite, netting you some awsome gear.

4. RvR - This is a big point. The meat of WAR is it's PvP aspect called Realm vs Realm. This is done in a few different ways. First, there are seperate tiers (lv 1-11, 12-21, 22-31, 32-40 I'm guessing). Each tier has 3 scenarios (battlegrounds) that are tied to each racial paring (Empire vs chaos, Ork vs Dwarf, Elf vs Dark elf). Participating not only nets you experiance from killing players (unlike WoW), but you also gain Renown (think like another, parralel form of XP level). With Renown comes Renown points which you can spend (think talent points), and Renown gear you can buy (think Honor rewards). You buy this gear with regular cash, your renown level and your normal Rank (regular level) determans if you qualify to purchase it. There are generally two tiers of gear within each renown tier (so far).

Also, you have RvR spots scattered around the world. Entering them flags you as a particpant automaticly (like on a PVE server and flagging yourself PvP). Usually there is quests in there that you have to accomplish, making them generally populated with players. Unlike Scenarios, there is no balancing numbers wise. A horde of 50 orcs can come in and stomp all over your band of 1, and there is nothing you can do.

On the higher end (t2 and above), you have keeps and castles that are scattered about. These are also RvR areas that you must take, hold, and defend. This is important, because from T2 and on, if you want renown rewards, you have to purchase them in these keeps, and you can't do that if the enemy has them!

Lastly, every scenario, castle, keep, and player kill contributes to your side's war effort. Once it gets strong enough, you can assult the capital of the opposing force. Coolbeans.

5. Accessibility to RvR - This is what keeps all the neat stuff I just said neat. You see, unlike in WoW, there really isn't any level disparity in any RvR. Even as lv 1, you can enter a scenario and participate. Once in, you are buffed to lv 8. All of your abilites and stats are buffed to 8 (unlike WoW, your abilities/spells increase in strength in each level. ie: once you learn fireball, you never get a new rank from the trainer. It increases in power each time you rank up). The only think that doesn't level up is your equipment, which can be painfull since your now lv 8 with a lv 1 starter sword, going up against potentaily "real" lv 8-11 players who have decent quest/PQ/renown gear and more abilites than you. However, you can still kill them. It's nowhere near like a lv 1 vs a lv 11 in WoW. You will always be no more than 3 levels lower than the max rank in RvR. Even the open RvR areas like keeps or whatnot will buff you to the appropriate level if your below it.

Oh, and because you gain XP from killing players, there is no Twinking, or at least, no permanent twinks that remain in a bracket except the last one.

5. Lore - I'm a big fan of lore because it makes horrible games decent, and good games great. WoW has excellent lore, and so does Warhammer. It's not quite my favorite (Warhammer 40K universe is the best lore I have ever gotten into), but it's deep and rich with all kinds of stuff. The tomb of Knowledge is awsome that fills out everything that you do, and details anything and everything. It does a lot of other stuff too, but the lore portion is what sticks out in my mind.

6. The Races - Last thing that I like is the individual races of the game. Each one has a distinct personality and fills it's nich with reverent fevor. Take the orks for example. Unlike the Orcs in WoW, these beasts are virtually a complete opposite. Where WoW's Orcs are intelligent, honor bound, tightly organized and fiercely loyal, Orks are just crazy baby eaters who just kill until they are dead themselves. They are all pretty stupid, but smart in a preditory cunning kind of way. And they speak in a southern brittish slang and treat nothing seriously. If your dead, appearently your "lazy", and I've never cracked up so much seeing a big brutish ork say "Oi Oi Oi". The only thing that I think that is similar is that both favor Shamanism, but it's a loose connection at best.

Then there is the Chaos people, humans who worship the dark Gods for favors and power. In WAR, the player character's particular God is Tzeentch, the god of change. Evil to the core, all people that serve chaos are murderers who crave power. Unlike Orks, they retain (usually) thier intelligence. They use the undead, sorcery, and mutations to augment thier forces. Very nasty.

Lastly there is the Dark Elves that round out the forces of Destruction. Think what normally elves are, self centered and prude, then merge that with dark sorcery and sadism/masochism on a level that surpasses the chaos worshoppers.

And then there is the forces of order, Human, Elf, and Dwarf. But I could care less about them. For Chaos!

So, that raps up my look for Warhammer. I wouldn't say it's better than WoW, but it is different, and it gives a shock to the system I haven't had in a while. We'll see how things play out in the next few days.