So we ran out and grabbed Warhammer a couple nights ago.  We’ve only put in a handful of hours, but here are a couple of very early impressions centered around the way Mara and I have been playing together:

The Class, Race, and Gender Bugaboo: I’ll let Mara expand on this, but the core annoyance is that she can’t be a female Squig Herder.  In addition, most of the women avatars are not very appealing to her (either super thin, scary, tiny-armored hussies or dwarves.  Not much in between).

XP Drift: This may be because we are new to the game and haven’t figured out the best way to stay together like we have in other games, but PvP seems to skew our XP far more than in, say, WoW.  Even though we’ve been playing together in a group for our 6ish hours, I’ve managed to get ahead by several tenths of a level.  This is a minor annoyance and one we’ll probably be able to get a handle on given some time in the game.

Kinda Crappy on our Older Machines: We have 2 year old budget machines with decent video cards that are at or slightly above the minimum requirements.  We were expecting poor performance and/or needing to run on lower settings, but even on the lowest graphics settings, we get very, very choppy performance.  This could be due to our CPU being very close to the minimum requirement and WAR being a CPU heavy game - we have plenty of RAM and our video cards should be doing fine.  This is something we’ve been looking to address anyway, so we’ll see.

Questing is Good: So far, questing is really fun and easy as a duo.  Objectives are clearly marked, quest items are automatically picked up, and public quests are fun and easy to do as a duo.  We miss some of our WoW mods that track both of our objectives and announce to each other when quests are complete, but hopefully these are possible with WAR mods (haven’t really looked into it yet).

Crafting: We haven’t quite figured out what to do with crafting yet.  From what we can tell, each crafting profession requries materials from two gathering skills.  We will probably end up having me take Salvaging so I can provide Mara with the fragments she needs to makes talismans leaving me with a semi-worthless crafting slot (unless I want to buy all my mats which I really don’t).  Also, OMG bag space issues.

So far, we’re having fun.  Although we also got our pre-ordered copy of World of Goo last night and the hour of playing that may have been more fun than our first few hours in Warhammer.  It could be because Goo is awesome.