Alright, so i managed to get myself a digital pre-order literally 2 hours before it was up, but was unable to play the game until the official release on the part that it took me 18 hours to download it. Pushing that aside and not letting it get in the way of my actual gameplay i started it up (after the 3 hour patch). After my review I'll give an overview of my actual opinion of the entire game in a quick nutshell.



Short Overview

This is going to be my first impression, even though it is shared by the friends i have that play the game. I am going to look at game play, class system, questing, pvp, and leveling. I'll also be adding in a little about customer support.

GAME PLAY

This game plays in third-person overhead view so that you can see your entire character and the world around him/her. From first glance it looks very similar to WoW. It is your staple fantasy land MMO, you have your orcs and goblins (AKA Greenskins), the dark elves, and the chaos (who are pretty much twisted humans), those are the baddies. The good guys are Humans, regular elves, and dwarvess. You start off with a few skills that cater towards your certain class, when i first saw them i thought that they were only way to attack with my melee weapon until i saw the "auto-attack" which happened every 5 or 6 seconds.



CLASS SYSTEM

Unlike most other MMO's I've seen there isnt a base set of classes that certain races of the game can train to be, instead there are roles that are filled by the classes from each race. For instance, the healers for each race are all different. The dark elves have a dual wield debuff healer, greenskins have a buffing healer, chaos have a damaging healer, humans have a tank healer, regular elves have a damaging healer, and the dwarves have a AOE/DOT/healer. So even though the role is filled, each one as a little bit extra to add on the side. This i believe is where WAR shines, its class system is dependant on filling roles but allows player to be flexible with what other attributes they want their character to have. So hoo-rah for having a well thought out original idea in a world full of copies.



QUESTING

Questing in this game is just like every other questing game; do this, kill that, bring me these. However, they introduce a new idea Public Quests. PQs are 3 stage events that someone can just join in. They aren't instances or queued areas, it just in the middle of the game there will be this quest that you can do over and over, best yet is you can join in and leave whenever. The looting is a bit different too, there is base loot that you can get from monsters (however infrequent) but at the end of the PQ if you helped out enough you get into a loot bag roll. Whoever gets the highest gets the best loot bag and so on and so forth until there arent any left. If you participate a lot and then you get a bigger bonus to your roll then someone who sat there AFK the entire time, and if you miss out on loot, you get a bonus for the next roll for that too! All in all public questing is what makes this game unique and a lot of fun.



PVP

Or should i say RVR? This game has its divided good/bad sides where good fights evil. There are servers where you can go anywhere and kill a player from the opposite side then there are servers where you can only do so in contested areas. That is pretty standard, however they have these RVR fights called scenarios. Scenarios are pretty similar to battlegrounds in WoW (for those that have tried them), and are pretty much objective team 1 vs team 2 games. Depending on where you are is what type of objective it is, however most i played were territory (which i ever so hate). With these scenarios however you are shunted if you are a low level character because automatically you will have your stats boosted to where they would be at if you were a higher level, however if your gear is bad then you are just a bigger chicken. Even with good intention, it is still a very skill/gear based PVP system, however it gives players a chance when fighting against someone a few levels higher then they are.



LEVELING/SKILLS

Leveling in this game is similar to most, gain enough xp you gain a level. First few its just a stat increase but later on you get specialization points. The levels in this game seem like there is alot of time inbetween them where, however just about every level is awarded with new skills for you to learn. Which is nice, but gets a little hectic on what skills you want to use most of the time(which is manageable if you look at your core masteries and choose your route early).

Customer Service(from personal experience only)

Its EA, its absolute crap. I was only able to play this game for 3 days because my password kept not working. Which would have been fine I'm human i forget, but after doing the password recovery 4 times (seperate occasions) and typing my password EXTRA slow so that i got it right, or even using a simple word so that i wouldn't accidentally mess up, i was still unable to play the game. So i attempt to contact customer support, where im confronted by a log in screen requesting my EA account. I try and fail, so i try to get my password recovered, wrong username, try to get my username recovered and they never send me an email. So i had to get a friend to look up their email for me so i could try to get this resolved.

7/10 FOR GAME ORIGINALITY, I RECOMMEND GIVING IT A WHIRL WHENEVER THEY COME OUT WITH A FREE TRIAL, HOWEVER THEY LOSE 5 FOR DISGUSTING CUSTOMER SUPPORT, SO ALL IN ALL 2/10 personally i'd recommend if you have yet to get it wait until they fix shit and put out a free trial.



Personal note:

I thought this game was impressive even with the bugs it has (it just came out so i expected bugs). However with EA being the backbone of customer service I will not be recommending this game to anyone who hasn't already gotten it.