[Tacohead]

Just saw this in my RSS feed. Yes, it's Ciderized.

Story Link

Beta link

-PN

[Janichsan]

Interesting. There were rumours quite a while ago based on an ESRB rating for a Mac version and some vague Amazon listing, but there hasn't been any news for months. As far I as remember, it was hinted back then that the Mac "port" will only be available in the US. I'm wondering if this turns out to be true.

No, it ain't:

Quote

Will the Mac Beta client also be available for European players?
GOA and Mythic will be bringing the Mac Beta client to our European players soon - keep an eye out on http://www.war-europe.com for more information!

[Magnum]

This is very nice, something other than WoW to play! Hopefully it works (considering it's only a beta, who knows?)

[Wumpus]

Just saw this myself in the news. I actually never played WoW (though I wanted to, but never had a good enough connection, and basically, the time) but I would like to try this out. A 10 day trial is fair. (To note I tried to download the WoW trial, but it wouldn't work for me.) Either way, more good games coming the way of the Mac is always a good thing. Even if it is Ciderized.

[Magnum]

I've been playing it abit and it has been running pretty well, no obvious errors so far. [Edit] Actually there is one weird thing, last night I watched Aliens on my computer and the DVD was still in the computer and when I started up Warhammer it started playing a commentary from the DVD in the background.

[badger2d]

I've wanted to give this one a shot. I expect it will not treat my '06 iMac kindly, but it costs me nothing to find out. I'll post how it goes.

[Rev-O]

Huh. Another MMORPG. Not even vaguely interested.

[nod]

I seem to have gotten this running after about 12 hours of downloads and patches...

[badger2d]

badger2d, on July 31st 2009, 01:39 PM, said:

I've wanted to give this one a shot. I expect it will not treat my '06 iMac kindly, but it costs me nothing to find out. I'll post how it goes.

As I expected, my computer is not up to the task.

I was able to get through the title screen and character creation, and with my heroic Warrior Priest and his unbeatable "auto-attack" technique , I was able to save a few villagers in my starting town from the dastardly invading (and yet quite squishy) Chaos marauders. I've liked what I've read about the PvP-oriented play and the character designs, and I liked the aesthetics of the game even on lowest settings. But it runs far and away too choppy to be playable.

[Tacohead]

Downloaded it overnight. Created a character easily enough and logged in with no other applications running. Studied the interface then walked around a little bit. Game was pretty choppy on my aging iMac. Before I could do any questing and fighting I switched to windowed mode to check the online game manual in Safari. Game was not surprisingly just as choppy (if not more) in windowed mode. Tried to reduce the resolution to the second lowest and got a garbled screen and had to force quit. Now the game won't launch anymore. I get to the patcher screen but clicking on the "Play" button just briefly bounces the icon in the dock which then vanishes. I tried trashing the preferences folder and restarting my iMac and it still won't start anymore.

Now there's certainly other things I could do like messing with the config file, reinstalling from scratch, etc.. but I didn't intend to stick with Warhammer past the trial so I see no point in wasting more time (or HD space) on it. I just wanted to briefly try it to see if it compares to WoW. From what I can tell it doesn't. It certainly doesn't with Mac WoW for performance and stability issues alone.

So this definitely isn't for me.

-PN

[elderbre]

I had no issues on my Mac Pro with performance, could play just fine, the only thing is.. Okay, I played until level 3, and then stopped. The reason? I felt like I had already played all of this, nothing new. It was like playing WoW again, only difference being the names used. I've played WoW enough..

[maccer]

elderbre, on August 2nd 2009, 02:26 PM, said:

I had no issues on my Mac Pro with performance, could play just fine, the only thing is.. Okay, I played until level 3, and then stopped. The reason? I felt like I had already played all of this, nothing new. It was like playing WoW again, only difference being the names used. I've played WoW enough..

After downloading patches for a day, I tried it for about an hour. I agree with everyone that it runs choppy, at least if I try to run it in a high resolution and good quality settings on my MBP 2,5 / GF 8600M. WoW runs much better.

I suspect that just like in WoW, you need to play for 15-20 levels before you start to see what the game is all about (groups, instances...), so stopping at lvl 3 may be a bit early as the starting areas in both games are probably equally boring :-)

[Janichsan]

maccer, on August 3rd 2009, 10:17 AM, said:

WoW runs much better.

Without trying to defend a possibly sloppy port, that's a somewhat unfair comparision considering the different hardware requirement of both games:

Warhammer:

• 2.5 GHz P4 processor or equivalent
  
• 1 Gigabyte RAM
  
• A 128 MB Video Card, with support for Pixel Shader 2.0
  
• At least 15 GB of hard drive space

WoW:

• Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon XP 1500+ 1300 MHz
  
• 512 MB or more of RAM (1 GB for Vista Users)
  
• 32 MB 3D video card with Hardware T&L or better
  
• 15 GB free HD space

(comparing the requirements given for the Windows versions)

[The Liberator]

I completely agree with Janichsan, as wow is essentially a game that is from 2005, therefore the graphical requirements are obviously going to be lower. Sure, it might have been upgraded, but there is so much you can do to one graphical game engine before you need to change to a newer one.

Liberator.

[Rubel]

I played this for a couple of months back when it came out, on my Windows partition (on a 2006 iMac). It played fine, and I had some fun back when the newbie areas were full of conflict. I think the Dwarf starting zones and Greenskin ones are very fun. I couldn't stand the "oh so emo" style of the dark elves or Chaos, found the human and elf areas a bit boring.

It's not a bad game, if you're not completely burned out on MMOs like I am. I'd be tempted to look at the Mac version if they get performance issues worked out. I do wonder about the population in this game come the Fall, however--it's really no fun to go plow through the innovative "Public Quests" without a public, and there's no "RvR" if you don't have lots of opponents. Time will tell!

[pvtvega]

Tacohead, on July 30th 2009, 01:11 PM, said:

Beta link

-PN

I love you.

[Kaoro]

The Liberator, on August 3rd 2009, 04:32 PM, said:

I completely agree with Janichsan, as wow is essentially a game that is from 2005, therefore the graphical requirements are obviously going to be lower. Sure, it might have been upgraded, but there is so much you can do to one graphical game engine before you need to change to a newer one.

Liberator.

I understand what you're saying, but I have to disagree. I was a WoW player for a long time, and I gave this Warhammer trial a look. WoW looks absolutely stunning with all the graphics options turned up on my MBP. Warhammer, even if I excuse the lousy port (terrible FPS), does not look very nice even with most graphical settings at their maximum. Sure, WoW's artstyle is helping it out too, but I think even on a technical level, WoW looks better and runs better. I just don't understand why the requirements are so high for Warhammer when it looks much more dated (especially the animations). I guess this is just personal preference.

You are right, parts of WoW's graphical engine have been upgraded since launch. I don't think you should come to any conclusions about the game's engines based on the minimum requirements, though. From my experience, WoW is terrific at scaling for a wide range of hardware. It ran alright on an old PBG4 of mine, but it can also push my MBP.

[Homey]

Been playing WAR since beta, so here's the scoop. First, even the PC version runs like crap, so don't necessarily blame the port. I'm curious to try the Mac version just to see if it has the same performance glitches, but I'm not expecting anything playable out of my ibook. Technically, WAR's graphics are better than WoW's (played it for 3 years) in terms of polycount, texture detail, and lighting, but performance is so iffy, it sometimes doesn't even show.

Second, yes, it plays like WoW. Character archetypes are similar, abilities function the same way, and you do tons of questing if you want to level through PVE. If you don't, you can level purely through PVP, which is cool, but on any given night the factions can be so unbalanced that you either run around with no one to fight, or you're so outnumbered that you can't get anything done. Usually the balance is tolerable, but just know that some nights will suck. Things have been improving lately with them consolidating down to like 5 servers, but... they're consolidating down to 5 servers. Frankly, I don't even know why they're still supporting the game. There can't be more than 150,000 players total now, which is below anyone's estimate of what it takes to keep the game afloat. Maybe they're counting on a huge influx of Mac players . But judging by your guys' responses, you either have no interest in an MMO, or your comps are too old to run it. Oh, well.

The biggest problem with the game is the PVP endgame. You're supposed to siege two enemy forts and then their city. To be blunt, fort and city sieges suck. The game engine and net code can't handle large numbers of players, so only a limited number of people are allowed to participate in the fort sieges, and city sieges are divided into multiple instances, inside of which you fight more npc's than you do pc's... which sucks (they've been making improvements to this recently, but still). However, they've been adding a lot of PVE content recently that take away from PVP, so if you're interested in playing this game solely for PVE (there are dungeon instances just like WoW), you won't have to worry about any of the PVP problems. The easiest way to get the best gear is through PVE, so there's another reason why PVP is getting de-emphasized in this game.

The reason I hung with WAR for so long was that on its best nights, it's got better PVP than anything WoW has ever even tried to offer. Most of the game doesn't consist of fort and city sieges; you run around various zones in packs fighting over battlefield objectives and keeps. When the sides are balanced and you have well-organized groups going up against each other, it's awesome (graphical performance issues aside). Thing is, you'll only get that once or twice a week, thus the other nights are pretty frustrating. You can stick to WAR's version of battlegrounds (instanced PVP), but you don't get good rewards there. Also, unlike WoW, WAR has great low-level PVP. There's no twinking, the classes are more balanced than at max level, and there's plenty of objectives and keeps. But again, there are faction balance issues on most nights, and some people say the low-level stuff gets repetitive.

To get a more extensive analysis of gripes, visit http://www.warhammeralliance.com/ (no, I don't have anything to do with it ).

In case you're wondering about my member #, I've been using IMG since it was mailed out on floppies.

[The Liberator]

Kaoro, on August 8th 2009, 02:16 AM, said:

I understand what you're saying, but I have to disagree. I was a WoW player for a long time, and I gave this Warhammer trial a look. WoW looks absolutely stunning with all the graphics options turned up on my MBP. Warhammer, even if I excuse the lousy port (terrible FPS), does not look very nice even with most graphical settings at their maximum. Sure, WoW's artstyle is helping it out too, but I think even on a technical level, WoW looks better and runs better. I just don't understand why the requirements are so high for Warhammer when it looks much more dated (especially the animations). I guess this is just personal preference.

You are right, parts of WoW's graphical engine have been upgraded since launch. I don't think you should come to any conclusions about the game's engines based on the minimum requirements, though. From my experience, WoW is terrific at scaling for a wide range of hardware. It ran alright on an old PBG4 of mine, but it can also push my MBP.

Well that makes sense, and I would now like to say that I have not played either game (watched a bit of both mind you). From the experience through watching, and general logical thought, I came to those conclusions. From what you are saying there Kaoro, it seems that the developers from Blizzard optimised their game to a far higher degree than the guys who made this game. It is also an interesting fact the it seems that WoW runs better than Warhammer.

Thanks, Liberator.

[UmarOMC1]

Homey, on August 13th 2009, 06:10 AM, said:

I've been using IMG since it was mailed out on floppies.

I don't think even I can claim that! The oldest IMG anything I can currently remember was the free CD that came with Star Wars: Dark Forces for my Performa 630CD which I pimped out with a full 36MB RAM and a 68040 (to replace the FPU-less 68LC040) which I picked up at the now-closed CompUSA on 5th Ave in Manhattan. Ahhh... to have roughed it out as a Mac gamer in the '90s...!