Lot’s Of Changes In Warhammer
Posted by Stropp on September 6, 2008So. The preview weekend has once again started.
I logged in last night a bit after 10:30pm my time to see what was going on. I ended up finishing up a little after 1:30am.
You can see that over the two weeks since the last preview weekend, the Warhammer Online team hasn’t just been sitting around drinking coffee. Although, I suspect that large quantities of caffeinated beverages have been consumed. Warhammer almost seems like a different game.
The first thing I noticed was the user interface. Mythic have made a lot of changes here. Some user interface elements have moved position, changed color, or now use different icons. It looks quite a bit neater.
The Tome of Knowledge has also had an extreme makeover. Rather than using links in the text to get pretty much everywhere in the Tome, there are now a lot more bookmark tabs on the side of the tome. There are also a few new entries, such as armor sets that give you a Tome view of the armor sets for your class. Of course you have to find them before they appear in the book.
Now to combat.
Pathing for NPCs has dramatically improved. Now when I attack from range, they come straight for me, which is the way it should be. However, I noticed on a couple of mobs that there was an appreciable delay before they reacted. Not sure if this was intentional, bug, or lag. I wouldn’t have noticed it if not for the issues with the previous weekend.
The combat controls are much more responsive now. Fighting, pressing those buttons, just feels that much smoother.
I did, however, experience some lag. That’s not unusual for me since the packets have further to travel. I didn’t think of checking the ping time last night, but for reference, in most games I get between 200ms and 450ms ping times. Even though that’s a lot compared to most folks, I’ve never found it has made much of a dent in performance. Either last night I was getting bad ping times, or the new client/server configuration doesn’t handle lag as well. We’ll just have to wait and see I guess.
Possibly related to the lag. I was finding my mouse movement very choppy for a while. It was so bad at one point that I ended up plugging in an older corded mouse. I use one of those wireless rechargeable mice and I’ve had similar problems with them before, but it worked fine after I logged out.
I’m pretty impressed with how much the Warhammer Online team has achieved in the last two weeks. With the launch just over a week away, it’s looking pretty good.
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That mouse issue is very interesting, Stropp – I had exactly the same thing happen to me today. It’s happened before, notably when hubby got the same kind of cordless mouse and they interfered with each other, but I couldn’t work out what might be causing it today. Last thing I’d have thought of was the client though – the two don’t seem related? Then again, I only know enough to fake it, but not enough to make any real judgements.
In my case, I doubt it’s interference since the mouse worked fine when not in the game.
My guess is that it’s a combination of a couple of effects.
1. The time taken to process the wireless signal.
2. It’s possible the mouse is less responsive anyway. It’s not a gaming mouse.
3. Lag in the game.
4. Sluggish UI.
Separately, these conditions would generally be un-noticable. But put them together and it becomes very noticable.
I should say too that after the patch the next day, I barely noticed this effect. If Mythic improved their end, it might have been enough to fix the problem. We’ll see.
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