Some nice innovations and the first truly worthy competitor to wow but still fundamentally flawed in a number of ways.
And war, most certainly is the first to 'almost' be as good as wow. At least in some aspects but at the end of the day we all know blizzard basically owns the mmo market.
Right away I liked the overall art style and look of the game over wows but then I am a tabletop Warhammer fan so the world has always been special to me. Every race in game is well represented; the orc quest areas in particular are quite fun and hilarious at times.
The combat works well, and actually having to worry about player to player collision adds some nice depth to the realm verses realm situations but if like me you're not into pvp so much it wont really effect your opinion.
Most of the classes are fun to play but then that's kind of where the game starts to get problems. See unlike wow this is yet another mmo where each class doesn't quite feel unique enough.
Mythic claim that the 4 classes left out of the initial release weren't unique enough, which is a worry considering how similar the classes that remained in game feel.
Ranged dps does ranged damage, melee does melee, healers heal and tanks tank. Maybe things change in the higher levels but from my experience, leveling one melee class felt exactly the same as leveling another melee class.
And that brings me to yet more repetition, the quests. Heck the entire pve system is just one big repetitious system of doing the exact same two things a thousand times over. You are either clicking on items on the ground or killing things. I'm serious that's ALL you do in pve in war.
In wow you have kill quests, escort quests, quests that involve following npcs, quests to bomb things from the sky, so on and so forth. Variation; wow has it, war doesn't.
I understand that warhammer online is a player verses player focused game but when the majority of your player base isn't going to be doing that most of the time there's going to be a few issues should you not work hard enough on making it compelling. I went in to this game expecting some kind of awesome lore filled experience and instead all I get is 12 year olds wanting to kill me and buckets of the same crap.
So yeah maybe I'm not the kind of gamer suited to this game, pvp isn't my cup of tea but I figured the game would still be fun if I didn't do so much of that. Guess I was wrong because by level 24 I was bored out of my mind. All I could think was 'man I need to get back to wow asap'.
Not much else to say really, the idea of the pqs is nice and works well because it's so convenient but really, blizzard had similar features in wow long ago, they just never took off. So if anything good comes from war I know that at least a few of its ideas will make it into wow sooner or later. In fact some are already in it, like achievements.
And when lich king launches it will also have the ability to allow players to que for battle grounds anywhere in the world just like war. In fact blizzard is even revamping pvp in wow to allow players to level from it, they're also adding more world based pvp areas, again, just like war. War's unique feature set is getting smaller and smaller. It won't be long until everything good in it is in some form in wow and the only people still playing are the hardcore fans and the wow haters. Still good luck to them, they'll need it.
It's a shame that warhammer online turned out so, disappointing for me and my friends. We were all planning on quitting wow for it but I guess that didn't happen. I guess you should only believe so much of what developers promise you. Paul Barnett of Mythic Studios talked about alot of cool things a year or so ago that were planned for war.
Like dynamic quest tracking, hidden secret areas for example. Neither of those things made it into the game. Honestly I just don't think anyone should bother making fantasy mmos anymore. Blizzard are always going to be better and lets face it gamers can only play one mmo at a time, why would they play the second or third best ones when they can play the best of the best?
While I realize war probably will stand on its own legs for a while, I can't exactly see it lasting like wow. Nothing is like wow. Wow is a cultural and social phenomenon for our generation, nothing can compare to it.