WAR what is it good for

I refer to Warhammer online the MMORPG that was released last week. As a fan of World of warcraft I thought I would give WAR a go. I heard good things about it from a friend - the same one that introduced me to WoW.

As my discs arrived today I thought I would start with first impressions on the installation. Only two discs can be a good or a bad thing. Does it mean the game is light on material?

The two discs installed quickly which I took to be a good sign, then comes the registration process. This has a few minor niggles which I am suprised have not been thrashed out. Some of it seems a little rushed.

The site itself (like the wow site) I find slow to load because of all the pretties on it. Trying to enter personal details was more time consuming that it should perhaps be. Firstly on the drop downs you cannot type the first character to move down the list. That seems to me to be a basic error for any web page, particularly when you have to identify your country. Obviously some of the drop downs only have short lists so this is not really an issue

Then we come to the post code. For anyone living in the UK and possibly other countries too, the entry of this is flawed. I tried a few times to enter my post code in different cases etc and in each time if failed, claiming that it was not a valid zip code!! I could hardly disagree as it is not a zip code at all. However this completely daft error message does provide a clue. I happened to know that zip codes do not have a space in them, it was then that I found that removing the space meant that my post code was accepted.

This again is a relatively minor issue however it did cause unnecessary delay for me and has no doubt resulted in some support calls. The unhelpful error message added insult to injury.

Having finally jumped through these hoops I found I could login to the client but was getting rejected with absolutely no explanation as to why. Earlier in the installation I had seen something that seemed to want me to put the CD code in so I guessed that was the issue, and indeed it turned out that was the case. This took me to the validation pages. This was the worst part of the installation by some significant amount. The web page you go to is confusing at best as it looked to me as though it wanted me to register again, when in fact it turned out that all it was doing was asking for confirmation of your details. The accompanying text was poorly written with some grammatical errors. This just made matters worse and for me it certainly didn't inspire confidence, the style appeared to me to be very similar to some of the phishing emails that I have seen.

At the time of writing I am downloading a large patch - no suprise for a new game though always a little disappointing when you just want to start to play. The patcher simply has a cancel button so it isn't clear what happens if for any reason you have to cancel. Having done only one test it seems that it continues from where it left off however it doesn't make this clear. What it does do is show a lesser amount of data to download.

More to follow