The most frequently asked question we got now the WAR was "Is WAR the WoW killer?". People always likes these comparisons. EA Mythic have ervr responded their Warhammer: The Age of Reckoning won't be a World of Warcraft killer. "We're not going to hit the same numbers as WoW." said by EA General Manager Mark Jacobs. While EA CEO John Riccitiello said: "Warhammer Online will be a strong entry in the MMORPG space, but will not rival WoW." Recently, the senior designer Josh Drescher of EA Mythic reinforce this point in an interview with WAR by Destructoid. Also, this time Mythic compared the WAR to Led Zepellin, if WOW is The Beatles.
You recently said you weren't afraid of Warcraft. Although you are aiming to offer an alternative rather than compete directly, are you hoping at least to take some of the Warcraft user base for yourself, or are you looking to corner a different demographic altogether?
Josh Drescher: We're looking for people that are excited about co-operative, competitive gameplay, looking for a really immersive experience that they can enjoy for years and years to come. If those players come from another game, that's fine, if they come from a fresh base of users that have never tried an MMO before, that's fine. When we say we're not competing with World of Warcraft we really do mean that. I'm going to steal something from our creative director Paul Barnett, so imagine this is coming with a Northern English accent -- World of Warcraft is basically The Beatles, and if you set out to try and be The Beatles, you wind up as The Monkees. So, we really do just try and be a different type of product. We're not trying to beat them, we're not trying to replace them, we're not trying to destroy them, we're trying to be Led Zepellin.
We're trying to offer you a harder, darker, heavier sort of experience. We're trying to offer you the kind of music you'd listen to down in your basement with your friends, with a black light on and maybe some illicit substances. We are not trying to be the thing that you all slow dance to at your high school prom. If that means we take a couple of players from World of Warcraft, great, but if it means that we get a group of people that have been waiting for an experience like ours then we're just as happy with that.
There are a lot of MMOs on the market, not all of them successful, and quite a lot of them have been canceled. What are you doing to make sure Warhammer stays and holds its own against the big MMOs out there, especially World of Warcraft.
Josh Drescher:I'll come from that at a slightly different angle -- what is it that causes the MMOs that fail to fail, largely before they even get out of development? Part of that has to do with [it being] very easy to look at the MMO genre and go, "this is where all the money is in PC gaming at the moment ... obviously the MMO is the only way to go!" So developers that have a pedigree in some other area -- maybe they make console games or real-time-strategy games -- they look at MMOs and they go, "well we'll just make one of them," not realizing just how much more difficult it is to build an MMO than it is to do anything else in the industry.
These are games where you're not working with a team for a year or eighteen months to develop ten hours of content. You are working with a team of hundreds and hundreds of people, for usually two, three, four or even five years in the case of something like WoW, to build a game that is intended to be played forever. You're handcrafting hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of content. In Warhammer there's probably around a thousand hours of handcrafted content in the game across the six different races.
That's a ton of stuff to be building, and so it's really easy to dive in and go, "yeah we're gonna make a massively multiplayer game based on football! It'll be real easy." The next thing you know, you're two-and-a-half years in, you don't know what you're doing, your server code doesn't work, you've never worked with thousands of players at once instead of ten or fifteen, the engine that you're working with is designed for first-person-shooters and doesn't scale when you put fifty models on the screen. There's just a lot of experience that we had that made it much easier for us to build this kind of game because we've been in the industry for a really long time.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
WAR: We Are Harder, Darker and Heavier
Friday, September 26, 2008
Warhammer Online - RvR Combat System
Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning features Mythic's unique Realm vs. Realm (RvR) combat system. This takes place within three different racial pairings: Dwarfs vs. Greenskins, Empire vs. Chaos, and High Elves vs. Dark Elves. Although there are only two races per pairing, we may travel to either of the other two pairings to help fight with their friends and allies.
Unlike many massively multiplayer online games, Warhammer Online gives players the opportunity to engage in constructive RvR combat from a very early level. There are four types of RvR combat: Skirmishes (random world encounters), Battlefields (objective-driven battles in RvR-specific areas), Scenarios (instanced, point-based battles against the opposing faction), and Campaigns (invading enemy lands and capital cities). Here, you can provide your own RvR contribution through Player vs. Player (PvP) combat and (to a lesser extent) Player vs. Environment (PvE) quests so that you can assist your realm in their victory!
So You've Decided to Play a Goblin Shaman?
Creating your character in WAR is a very easy and straightforward process. There are no stats for you to tweak, just the look of your character to customize. So without further ado make your Gobbo as funny looking or serious as you like and enter the game on your chosen server.
You've chosen to make a Goblin Shaman, so before we go any further let me explain what you have taken on by doing so. You are a healing class and so people are going to expect you to heal, whether you want to or not, and if you choose to ignore healing you are missing out on a large part of your potential. In addition to aforementioned items you have to learn the basic class mechanic for the Shaman, how to harness the power of the WAAAAGHH!
An interesting mechanic and one that ensures as a Shaman you don't fail to neglect either path. To be the best healer out there, you are going to have to attack the enemy at some point to build up that bonus. Which leads me to one of WAR's nice little features: offensive and defensive targeting? You are able to have two targets in the game, and as a shaman you will make extensive use of this feature. You are able to target an enemy and friend at the same time, ensuring that any damaging spells hit the enemy, and all buffs and heals hit your friend.
So you'll start at Rank 1 and with three abilities already on your hot bar. Brain Bursta, Gork'll Fix It and Flee. Brain Bursta is your very first DPS spell and will be the bread and butter of your arsenal, dealing 53 Elemental damage to your offensive target. One thing I should also mention here is that abilities learned at this low level scale as you grow, so even Rank 1 abilities are useful to you as you grow. Gork'll Fix It heals your target for 43 and then for a further 114 over 9 seconds, so essentially a small burst heal with a nice HoT (Heal over Time). Now Flee, whilst it is described as a buff is really an ability, you can use it to run places faster or for its proper usage, escape from a battle if things go a bit pear shaped. However, there is a down side. By triggering this mechanic you will lose all AP, all WAAAGHH! and your Morale will start to decrease too. Morale is something that is built up gradually over time, but only whilst you are in combat, as Morale increases it will make certain abilities available to you but, since you aren't able to train the very first ability till Rank 8 we will explore this in more detail later.
Now would be a good time to introduce you to the groundbreaking and innovative feature that is the Tome of Knowledge (ToK). If anyone has ever played Lord of the Rings Online, you may have a slight feel for what this feature entails, but let me tell you now, it is so much more. The ToK acts as many things, an in-game Encyclopedia, quest log, titles earned, mob kill count etc. One of the best details is that the tome levels with you. It starts out blank and you fill all the information in, so many months down the line when you've hit Rank 40, it will show all you've accomplished during your epic journey.
At some point in this game you are going to fight in a Realm vs. Realm (RvR) environment. RvR contributes directly to your Rank through giving you experience, and as a Shaman you will earn experience both from attacking enemy players and contributing to their deaths or by healing your allies. You also receive Renown Rank (RR) experience too, which simply put, is an RvR Rank. You are given a rank title too, and the first one you will receive as a Goblin is Little Git. Your RR will be important as you level, as it will unlock access to purchasing decent gear from vendors in conjunction with your Rank. Not only this but you gain one RR point per RR Rank, which you can spend at a Renown Vendor NPC to further specialise and personalise your class.
Public Quests (PQ) are another exciting invention for this game, and they work very well and very easily. To take part all you have to do is enter the area, and you will know you have done so as box will appear informing you of the current stage and progress. All you have to do here is take part; just do what your class does best. Once the PQ has finished everyone is rated on their contributions and receives a medal which will grant a point bonus. Once that has been done, everyone that took part receives a random roll from 0 - 1000, and then those that received a bonus get that added to their roll. If your score then comes in the top three (or six for some PQs), you will receive a loot bag and should collect it from the chest. There are varying colors of loot bags and various levels of each color which is determined randomly it seems. As a Shaman you will get a better contribution score if you DPS as well as heal, and don't forget to throw your buffs out too.
From: MMORPG.com
WAR Will Get 250-350k Subs
EA said it shipped 1.5 million copies of WAR to retail last week.
Arvind Bhatia at Stern Agee told Edge on Tuesday he came to the 250,000 subscriptions figure based on EA's goal to break even on the game.
"Over time, subscribers will drop off and level off at 250,000- 300,000," he said in a phone interview.
But he admitted that the number could jump as updates and expansion packs are released, adding that it would take about "six months or so" to get an idea of the MMORPG's sustainable user base.
He added that retail checks indicate initial sell-through is tracking "about in line with (but not above) expectations." He forecasts a higher mix of revenue from Europe compared to the U.S.
Bhatia estimates EA to generate 55-60 million USD in revenue from WAR, or 5 percent of sales for the September quarter.
Why Don't We Play Innovative Games?
A Tale in the Desert is an MMO without combat, but not a pure sandbox either, there are skills, a series of tests, and a complex social gameplay. Puzzle Pirates is a completely player-skill based MMO, where your success at anything is determined by your skill in various puzzles, not your level or stats. Wizard101 has more traditional levels and quests, but a completely novel combat system based on magic cards. And the guys from PixelMine just sent me a press release on how their MMO Ashen Empires won the Best Fantasy MMORPG award at the Independent Games Festival. And that is just a handful of examples I happen to know of. There are tons and tons of innovative MMOs out there. But each of them attracts only a few thousand players. Meanwhile millions of players play games like World of Warcraft or Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, and then whine loudly about the lack of innovation in these games.
Doh, guys! Most game companies produce games for the money, not because they hope to become critically acclaimed starving artists. They are always going to look out what kind of games seem to sell well, and then make that sort of game. If customers throw a billion dollars a year at Blizzard for World of Warcraft, and A Tale in the Desert is making peanuts, then of course other companies prefer to make a game more like WoW than like ATitD. They would be crazy if they didn't do it.
In the last open Sunday thread people were blaming the big companies to make games as bland as McDonalds bland food. I'm saying that the complaint would be a lot more valid if the complainers weren't actually sitting in the McDonalds restaurant and eating bland burgers, while right next door there is an empty, small gourmet restaurant with a varied, but foreign cuisine. As soon as about a million of you guys start playing innovative games, game companies are going to make more of them. As long as you go for games that offer small, evolutionary steps to a well-known concept, companies are going to make those. The question is not why WAR isn't more innovative, the question is why there aren't more people playing Wizard101 or other innovative games. Game companies produce what the customers want, and we only have ourselves to blame if we voted with our wallets for evolutionary approach. If even we as players are afraid to try something really new, then how can you expect a company to bet millions of dollars on really new?
Mythic Entertainment GM and VP Mark Jacobs writes his feelings on gold sellers on his personal blog.
I hate gold sellers/spammers. No, that's not strong enough, let me try again. I
HATE GOLD SELLERS WITH EVERY FIBER OF MY BEING. Ah, that's better. Now, why do I
hate them you may ask? I hate them for a number of reasons, most of which have
been detailed in various interviews I've done over the years. And now that they
have taken their obnoxiousness to new levels with gold service spamming, I HATE
GOLD SPAMMERS EVEN MORE NOW THAN EVER BEFORE. For years, lowlifes like IGE have told us, in defense of their behavior, that they a) are just providing a
service; b) don't interfere with players enjoyment of the game. Well, I can't
argue with (a), they are providing a service, just like maggots I suppose but
I've always argued that (b) is totally and complete BS. Now, those old arguments
aside, I can't see how this new generation of pond scum (new and improved, with
25% more scummy action!) can argue that their constant spamming of chat channels
doesn't interfere with players enjoyment of the game (I'm waiting for the whole
"Oh, you can always just turn off chat" argument). I hated seeing their messages
when I played WoW or any other MMO and I've been waiting for the day that WAR
launched so I could have the absolute pleasure of instituting policies to make
their lives more difficult so we could drive them out of WAR.
Since WAR launched we have been banning these jerks like crazy. As of Saturday Night, we had banned about 400 of them. My CSRs have a zero tolerance policy. We don't wait and let them stay in the game and ban them en-masse, my guys ban their
useless, time-consuming butts right away. We have a strike team whose sole job
it is to get these guys off our servers as quickly as possible. This weekend, we
unveiled a new wrinkle in the fight against them, the public ban message.
Players on our Phoenix Throne server have been treated to special messages when
a gold seller/spammer is banned. I've given them a wide leash to come up with
creative messages to tell the entire community who has been banned and we keep
it within the Warhammer universe.
A Beginner's Guide to WAR
There are four kinds of conversation in MMOs: terrifyingly complicated strategising, endless moaning about imbalances, enthusiastic but awkward roleplaying and total silence. That latter is surprisingly common, a vast number of players choosing to get on with things in their own time rather than acknowledge the existence of anyone else. Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning respects that. In fact, it's quite a quiet game throughout, as it's so focused on constant conflict and activity that there just isn't time to hang about complaining that the Shaman is overpowered. Crucially though, it's found a way to merge that total silence with group play.
There's a lot of talk about how WAR is a player-versus-player game. Certainly that's going to be the case in the long run for most of its players, but nonetheless an enormous part of the game revolves around traditional questing and looting, which is what quieter players are likely to stick to.
There's been this problem in other MMOs that a fair old whack of players are, for one reason or another, anti-social. They want to keep their heads down and crack on with tasks under their own steam. The trouble is that this way they miss out on the bigger baddies and bigger rewards of group quests. Public Quests are an answer to that: they're mass-scale group quests in which you don't have to share a single word with anyone if you don't want to. Just within the space of WAR's first few days they've proven one of its biggest draws.
All you have to do is stumble over to one and start hitting things: your actions automatically add to the overall task for everyone. So there's no need to roll your eyes in disbelief when a note saying you need to kill 100 militiamen pops onto your screen - even with just half a dozen players, that'll take no more than a few minutes. Once done, there'll be a second stage, which generally involves slaying just a few super-tough baddies. There's a bit more emphasis here on working together, at least compared to the wild free-for-all of the first stage, but all that really means is hitting the same thing as someone else rather than tackling an enemy on your own.
It's subtly introducing the rudiments of team-play to those who usually hate and fear it, but again, absolutely no communication is necessary. Which makes a lot of sense, really: WAR is a war, and wars generally don't involve soldiers introducing themselves to one another and politely inviting them into their party just so they can go fight the enemy together. The final stage is always something substantial: a boss foe, whether it's a hard-as-nails hero character, or some epic monster like a dragon or demon. Cue a massive pile-on and, presuming the fight goes well, a sense of heroism generally reserved for the climax of a three-hour dungeon run.
Only, this whole process has taken less than 20 minutes, and didn't require any of the tedious organisation and hanging around waiting for people to fly over that your everyday raid does. It's one of the reasons people play MMOs: to fight something really, really big. At last, it's something you can just go and do, rather than put the amount of effort required to organise a charity fun-run into it beforehand.
Friday, September 12, 2008
Burning Crusade's Quality Delayed WAR
Mythic boss Mark Jacobs has said to media that the quality of questing in World of Warcraft expansion The Burning Crusade delayed development of his own MMO, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, reported by Eurogamer.
The details are as below:
"We obviously had a major bump when Burning Crusade came out," Jacobs said.
"When [Blizzard] released that expansion, they raised the expectations of the
player."
Jacobs paid tribute to Blizzard's ability to create stand-out
quests that players would talk about with each other, and to pack its game with
content.
"They put in some of what we call 'watercooler quests', the
things that you talk about around the watercooler," he said.
"We looked
at the amount of content they put in that and said we need more time if we want
to add some of those things, if we want our own watercooler quests or more
watercooler quests. So our choice was to delay the game and spend more time on
it."
Warhammer Online has been delayed several times from its original
2007 release date, and is finally set to launch on Thursday next week. Public
servers for those who pre-ordered the collector's edition of the game will open
this Sunday in both Europe and the US.
WAR Review
Some readers preferred that I do a specific WAR review with a recommendation of whether to play it or not, so here is my take on that. As I've already talked enough about how the game works, this post is pure opinion. I don't do scores, but rather prefer relative comparisons: Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is better than Age of Conan and Lord of the Rings Online, but not as good as World of Warcraft. This isn't to say that you should play WoW instead of WAR, because that totally depends on how burned out you are of playing World of Warcraft. If you've been there, done that all in WoW, WAR might be a good option, at least until Wrath of the Lich King arrives. So, lets have a look at various aspects of Warhammer Online to judge it by:
Graphics: As many people remarked, WAR graphics are somewhat similar to WoW's, being cartoonish instead of photorealistic. In my opinion that is a good thing, because photorealistic games have problems with high hardware requirements, and the Uncanny Valley. Nothing wrong with a game looking, well, like a game, and not like the real world. While similar, WAR's graphics are somewhat less cheery bright and colorful than WoW's, which is consistent with the grimmer lore. (Hah! Smooth transition to the next point!)
Lore: The Warhammer lore has a quarter of a century of accumulated material, a miniature game, a roleplaying game, and lots of books. It is considerably richer than WoW's lore, and more mature. Not Age of Conan's bare nipples kind of mature, but grim and serious. You won't meet any Haris Pilton selling gigantesque handbags in WAR. That is good. But there is also a serious downside: As Michael Zenke so correctly remarks, Destruction in the Warhammer lore is really, really evil. But only in the books. In Warhammer Online, playing a character on the Destruction side is exactly as good or evil as playing a character on the Order side. Dark Elves get quests to kill High Elves, but High Elves get quests to kill Dark Elves, so which of the two sides is "evil" is just a question of semantics. A Destruction character, just like any Order character, will spend a lot of time being helpful to complete strangers by running errands (aka quests) for them. In the Warhammer books the evil of Destruction might churn your stomach, but in the game this is unlikely to happen. WAR is more like a war between the red and the blue army than an epic struggle between good and evil.
Technical: I'm only talking about the game itself here, the European account registration site is a different chapter. Warhammer Online has less bugs than Age of Conan, but more than World of Warcraft. WAR is generally quite playable, but you *will* come across bugs, some of them annoying, in your daily gameplay. A week before release, and with Mark Jacobs' explicit statement that Mythic isn't doing miracle patches, the "this is just a beta" excuse for bugs is wearing thin. The current version 4.1 is rather solid, and improved things like pathing and the Tome of Knowledge. But it isn't bug free. You will still see some bad pathing, albeit less than in the first preview weekend, and you will come across mobs that can't be hit. My most hated bug: If you alt-tab out of the game and try to alt-tab back in, you are greeted by a black screen and can do nothing but shoot down the game with the task manager. But I finally managed to "fix" that problem by playing in windowed mode. Nothing game-breaking, but certainly one point to consider in our judgement.
PvE: Despite all the marketing hype praising WAR as a PvP game, WAR is a great PvE game. PvE fun might stop at the level cap, which is only 40. But for making alts and leveling them to the level cap without doing any content twice, WAR even beats WoW. You can level up at least 6 characters to 40 before doing any quest twice. And there are more character classes than in WoW, although I can't exactly say how many. Technically there are 20, but some are mirror images; an Archmage plays exactly like a Shaman. But not every class has a mirror image, so the number of different classes is somewhere between 10 and 20. And there are more different game mechanics than WoW has. WoW only has 3 right now, using mana, rage, or energy, with a 4th on the way for Death Knights using runes. WAR has more different basic mechanics right out of the door, but again I haven't played all the classes yet and thus don't have an exact count. Another great WAR PvE feature are public quests, which are a lot of fun. But WoW still keeps the PvE crown, because it has a wider variety of quests, and a huge PvE raid endgame.
PvP: I like WAR PvP. I'm a carebear. If you are a pre-Trammel UO, hardcore impact PvP fan, that should make your toes curl up: If I like WAR PvP, you won't. WAR does not have "meaningful" impact PvP with permanent consequences and the ability to free-for-all gank anyone you dislike. WAR has a solid system of carebear PvP, which is much better integrated with PvE than it is in WoW, and there is a whole lot more of it than in WoW. It just isn't much more permanent than in WoW. At best you can conquer the enemies capital, which will cause the map to reset a couple of days later. The keeps you conquer will be lost to a sneak attack at 3 am in the morning, unless you are crazy enough to organize a 24/7 substantial guard, armed with the telephone numbers of all your guild members, and your guild members are willing be woken up in the middle of the night to defend that keep. I think the WAR PvP is the best option for a mass market MMORPG, but the real hardcore PvP fans will certainly be disappointed by it. WAR PvP is substantially better than WoW PvP: Staying to the end is more important than winning, so no people afking out when they start to lose. But actual participation is better measured and rewarded than in WoW, so no people staying back in the cave and collecting rewards while absent either. Another great feature is good PvP reward gear for every level, not just epics for the level cap. In WAR you don't level up to the cap doing PvE and only then start with PvP. In WAR, just like the marketing slogan says, war is everywhere, you are best off if you do some PvP at all levels, and constantly switch between PvP and PvE. Maximum fun by maximum variety, a good concept.
Social: With open groups, public quests, and living guilds, WAR beats WoW easily in social functions. It is a lot easier to play together with a bunch of strangers in WAR than it is in WoW. Groups in WAR are inclusive, the more the merrier; groups in WoW are exclusive, you better take the right mix of classes, levels, and talent builds. But while in WoW "pickup group" is a dirty word, a good group in WoW is a marvelous machine of collaboration, and WAR is missing that somewhat. The social dynamics are very different, you group easier with strangers, but you don't feel that much of a bond with some once you finished beating that public quest together with them. It remains to be seen how that works out for WAR guilds; in principle it is easier to do something together with all online guild members, regardless of class or level, in WAR than it is in WoW. But by making cooperation easier, the level of trust required is necessarily less high. WAR will probably have a lot less guild drama than WoW, but we will have to wait and see whether a WAR guild raiding a keep will feel the same level of connection as a WoW guild raiding a dungeon.
In summary, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is a good game, albeit not perfect, and it will have some problems living up to the excessive marketing hype from Mythic. It is certainly worth buying and trying out for a month or two. But I honestly don't know yet whether I will play WAR or WotLK in December. And I certainly can't tell *you* which game to play. But I would suggest you give WAR a chance while Blizzard is still building their expansion. WAR has enough good, and new, features to justify giving it a try. Don't let anyone tell you it's just a WoW clone! Recommended!
Should Europeans Play WAR on US Servers?
A lot of European WAR fans are currently considering the option of playing Warhammer: Age of Reckoning on US servers instead of on GOA European servers. Can't really blame them, GOA hasn't done much to earn our confidence. Big announcements of how nothing could possibly go wrong, then things going wrong, radio silence followed by apologies, and the account site still not working: No wonder some people think the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. The US has a working account site, and an open beta which by all reports is running quite well.
But playing on US servers has serious downsides. One is ping, the time between something happening on the server, the information getting to you, and your reaction travelling back to the server. I have no actual measurements for WAR, but for other games I observed about 50 ms ping to Europeans servers, and over 200 ms ping to US servers. Okay, that's only fractions of a second, but in a heated PvP battle fractions of a second can make all the difference.
The other big downside is time zones, I blame Copernicus. :) WAR, much more than WoW, is a social game. You *want* to be online when everyone else is online, be it for public quests or for PvP. Europeans live 6 to 9 time zones ahead of the US, so unless you play day and night anyway, you're not going to be online much during US prime time. Your US guild plans a big keep raid event, but they'll schedule it for the time when they are all online, which is 3 am in the morning for you. Been there, done that, it's not a good idea.
Of course for me it is easy to be confident that WAR will run on launch day in Europe, as I have that free US account as backup (Side note: Anyone noticed that I'm the only one reporting to have got one? I can't believe Mythic created that service just for me. There must be lots of game journalists and maybe even bloggers out there who also received one of those and kept mum.). But I'm really hoping that the European launch goes well, even if the open beta didn't. I want to play on European servers, not only for the ping and time zone, but also because my guild and all my friends will be on the Euro servers.
Warhammer Online Head Start Program Dates Announced
Mythic Entertainment announced that North American players who have pre-ordered Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning will be able to get the jump on creating their characters and exploring the world when the game's "Head Start" program begins on September 14th.
The "Head Start" program offers players early access to the game and a chance to join the Realm War before the servers officially go live on September 18th. Players that have pre-ordered the standard edition of the game will be granted "Head Start" access on Tuesday, September 16th at 7am EDT. The lucky fans who pre-ordered the Collector's Edition will be able to log in even earlier and begin play on Sunday, September 14th at 7am EDT.
Whether players choose to join the fight as an incendiary Bright Wizard or a shadowy Witch Elf, the characters they create during the "Head Start" program will carry over their skills, abilities, weapons and career rank into the game when the servers officially open to the general public on the Day of Reckoning - September 18th.
Based on Games Workshop's epic tabletop fantasy war game, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning features revolutionary Realm vs. Realm game play that will immerse players in a world of perpetual conflict for years to come. Available for PC, WAR is rated "T" for Teen by the ESRB.
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Why I am looking forward to Warhammer Online Age of Reckoning
I am very excited for the Warhammer Online Age of Reckoning release in a couple weeks. I have been a closed beta tester for over a year and like what I have seen from the game. I have played quite a few MMO's, although I am not quite the veteran others are. I have played WoW, COH/COV, LOTRO, Perfect World, DAoC and beta tested Tabula Rasa. I feel like Warhammer has a lot of features that make it stick out from the other games I have played.
1. Being able to gain XP and level through Quests and PVP. To me it's hard to under estimate the freedom this brings to the game. You can get to the level cap of 40 anyway you want. If immersion into story line and quests is your thing that is the path you can take. War does a great job with their story lines from what I have seen in the beta. You quickly feel like you are being drawn into a War effort, from collecting ammo for giant siege weapons to finding and killing spies. The hatred for the opposite faction is strong among the NPC's and it helps draw you in. If quests aren't your thing and you just want to go pwn some noobs, then you can hop right into RVR combat and level your character that way. Or if your like me and want to use a combo of both to keep things fresh than thats an option to. It's great to not have a linear path to the level cap, you can get there anyway you choose.
The Leveling guild is a big draw for me. In most games your guilds just becomes a place to hang out and chat with your friends. Loyalty to a guild is always fleeting. People jump to the one that can help them get their epic item the fastest. In War, guilds themselves level, unlocking abilities for the guild along the way. This combined with the coordination it will take to lay siege to an enemy capital city, should return the days where people were loyal to their guilds and cared about working towards a common goal. This is something I have been missing in guilds lately and I hope it lives up to the hype.
3. I feel War has brought some innovations to the MMO genre that will most likely be copied by other games. First is Public Quests. The best way to describe these are Instances that take half the time and you don't have to wait around for a group for. Basically you stumble into an area and it has a public quest which is a three wave fight against npcs. Each wave is progressivly harder until the last wave unleashes a boss. Everyone in the area gets to take part and the boss drops a chest of loot. You get to roll on the items based on your contributions to the fight. I have to tell you from the beta these were a blast and there was never trouble enough players to complete the PQ. The other big innovation being the Tome Of Knowledge, basically this is a book you carry around the documents everything you do, see, and kill. It's great for information and there is a lot of cool achievements to unlock. It helps a lot with immersion into the world.
These things are what have drawn me to Warhammer and I hope will draw a good number of players. To be successful War doesn't have to be a WoW killer. I find it funny when people call games WoW killers. WoW is lightning in a bottle, it will never happen again, no MMO will have 10 million subscribers but plenty of games have carried on with 100,000- 500,000 subscribers, some even less. If War gets 1 million subscribers, which I think is more than possible than it will be the 2nd most successful game ever. There is never going to be another WoW, for a lot of reasons. I just hope Warhammer can live up to the my expectations and I am really looking forward to finding out and I hope many others join me.
WAR's OB Trouble in Europe
A public apology from GOA, the European publisher and operator of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, was posted on the WAR European site for the great failure happened on the first day open beta test. Much of the players - except very few closed beta testers - couldn't access into the test because the account registration and authentication for new players didn't work.
In this apology, Ghislaine Le Rhun GOA's chief executive remembered the whole course of event which must have made his team tired out.
During the day, we have reconfigured authentication and database servers several times, both of which suffered under the huge number of simultaneous connections. The investigations and corrections we have done so far were essentially targeting the parts of the system which didn't require a complete stop of the writing process in the database. This means we preferred to keep the database turned on during the day to let it work on the huge number of accounts that were in the process of being handled. This operation will continue through the night and when complete, we will shut down the database and reconfigure it.
At the end of the article, he promised to give players access to the account page if the operation works as anticipated then you register your code for the open beta. His expectation of the re-start test is going to be late Monday morning.
Sunday, September 7, 2008
Review: Warhammer Preview
For this entry I am going to try something new and take a break from ranting about the usual MMO debacles. Instead, I am going to give my impressions of the Warhammer Preview Weekend from the perspective of an MMO veteran, guild leader, and a gamer coming off the of the AoC disaster.
As a guild leader, I and my members were recently burned badly by the Funcom bullshit. I approach Warhammer Online with heavy scrutiny while trying to recover from the burns Funcom gave me and my members.
Character creation is nothing to write home about honestly. I found it to be quite lackluster, and I could see where this could give people a negative first impression. I wasn't thrilled about my option, but like most MMO's, my armor covered me up after a few levels and it became a non-issue to me at least. I guess it could be justified that a lack of options helps performance in large scale PvP, I am not going to speculate to the validity of this theory, but after AoC's performance I could see it having merit.
The user interface is probably one of most glaring similarities to World of Warcraft that will catch your eye. It literally shares an almost identical positioning and style to WoW, which could be viewed as a positive if you liked this interface. The good news is the user interface is fairly customizable, and Mythic has left the door open to 3rd party UI mods which will surely be in abundance.
As a guild leader, I am extremely thrilled to see a real Guild Interface akin to that of Everquest 2. Guild Functionality has always been important to me, and Age of Conan's left a lot to be desired. The Warhammer Guild UI offers multiple tabs showing roster that is sortable, and gives me the ability to make notes next to each name to labels alts and such. It also gives me the ability to rename all my ranks, set their permissions, an unlockable calender, a log showing me recent events, and guild battle standard options. Guilds level up through the members PvPing and new functionality becomes unlocked.
The graphics in this game have been the subject of a lot of debate among the community. Obviously no one will contest that Age of Conan has far better graphics, but these graphics are a lot better then WoW IMO. Are they cutting edge? Not be any means, but they get the job done. Again I think some will argue that the games graphics will make it accessible to a wider audience, and help performance in RvR. I do think some people are giving this game a lot more heat than it deserves in this department, once I turned the resolution up, it looked good, and in large scale PvP I ran smooth as a baby's ass.
Character Customization comes to you in a variety of ways. While I found the creation process lacking, as you progress through the game will you see that there are some ways for you to tweak your looks and skills to fit your playstyle. First you will be able to tailor your "Tactics Abilities" to suit your needs. These are basically passive abilities that you can put into the bottom right of the screen to enhance your character. They deliberately limit the number you can use at a given time to force you to decide what to best use in a situation. These can be changed at any time however, and I think you can cycle through layouts of these as easy as you cycle your hotbars depending on your situation.
There are also "Moral Abilities" which remind me of TP moves from FFXI. The longer you fight and stay alive, the more jacked up your character gets. He is able to then perform super moves that get stronger as he gets more moral built up. These can be interchanged again to fit your playstyle, and add another layer of tactics to the combat.
The RvR rewards come in the ways of both gear and points. The gear is strong enough to make it a viable alternative to gear earned through PvE, and better in some cases. The points are spent much like talent points or AA points. If you played DAOC, you are very familiar with their PvP reward system, which is fully functional and in the game unlike a certain rival game which still has yet to give an ETA on their system.
One other aspect of this game in regards to customizing your appearance in the use of armor Dyes. This was one of the better features of DAOC that I am shocked was never stolen by more recent MMOs. It gives you the ability to make yourself look a little different and it gives guilds a chance to add uniformity to their members. Changing your armor colors can be done very easily by visiting a merchant. A nice dressing room screen comes up where you will be able to see the colors before you buy them.
The PvE aspect of the game is pretty run of the mill from what we have seen in recent MMOs. The game follows the same lame quest format of collecting X amount of dingleberries, killing Y amount of orcs. Nothing to write home about honestly. The game does break Quest mold from recent games by adding public quests. Doing these will get you rep in that local area, and this rep can be used to claim rewards, which are usually very good if your rep gets maxed. Luckily, maxing out your rep in a given area does not seem to take very long at all, and the public quests are always fun as long as other people are there. They can be compared to the Besieged Mode found in FFXI where you are rewarded for your contribution, and acts a nice diversion from the collection quests. At the end of the day, the PvE is just a means to an end, and that end is the RvR.
The RvR is where this game really shines. Finally I feel like I am getting the RvR that World of Warcraft promised me but never delivered on. You can PvP from level 1. You get exp from PvP, and quests to kill people in PvP. This helps makes PvP a viable way of leveling if you so chose. The games does have a battleground type system called Scenarios, which honestly I am not a fan of being an overworld guy myself. To their credit though, they are well thought out and usually contain some sort of interesting twist instead of the makeshift deathmatches we got in AoC. I hope Mythic will make world PvP enticing enough to minimize the desire to play in these. On the flip side, if you play on a server where the population is imbalanced, these do provide a level playing field somewhat. If you are under leveled, the game gives you a buff to your level to help you remain useful, but a true level 10 is stronger than a buffed level 10 because he has better gear and new spells that a level 5 won't have.
The castle sieges are very well done. Finally we have real capturable objectives to fight over, and they are meaningful in the struggle to push your enemy back to the city gates. Siege weapons are easy to get and funner to use. Giant cannons that put you in an FPS view with a crosshair to bark fire on the oceans of enemies inside the castle or outside. Rocks can be seen flying through the air from catapults, and it really adds a wildcard to the battle as well as making things a bit more chaotic in a good way. It also helps give melee something to do in situations where enemies are out of reach. After playing these sieges, I have no desire to go into the scenarios, and hopefully the population who plays will see it the same way.
The castle sieges are very well done. Finally we have real capturable objectives to fight over, and they are meaningful in the struggle to push your enemy back to the city gates. Siege weapons are easy to get and funner to use. Giant cannons that put you in an FPS view with a crosshair to bark fire on the oceans of enemies inside the castle or outside. Rocks can be seen flying through the air from catapults, and it really adds a wildcard to the battle as well as making things a bit more chaotic in a good way. It also helps give melee something to do in situations where enemies are out of reach. After playing these sieges, I have no desire to go into the scenarios, and hopefully the population who plays will see it the same way.
Most of the PvP is group on group. Do not expect to be some WoW superhero 1 shotting people like a God. Combat in this game takes a bit longer, and as such I think a bit more skill. If I wanted to 1 shot everyone I would stick with Call of Duty 4. You feel like you are a unit in an RTS game, no one person is so superpowerful. This makes it a very team oriented game, and hopefully the Community will be good. Some have complained about the combat speed and a global cool down, but honestly it never occurred to me until I started reading whining on the forums. The combat to me felt interesting, tactical, and I was not spamming the same ability over and over like other games.
In conclusion, the game is fun even though it lacks major Innovation. First and foremost I think that fun is why we play. The game delivers on its promises. Mark Jacobs at Mythic has been honest about talking about flaws and problems with the game and I appreciate his straight talk. It upset a lot of us with AoC that they were in denial about the game's missing features and short comings.
This game will live and die by the RvR and the endgame. The RvR looks amazing, the endgame we won't know until we get there. If it is anything like DAOC, then hopefully we will have a good RvR MMO that will last us a long time, made by a company that seems to be honest and competent. I am hoping this game will help heal the burns Funcom gave me, my guild, and so many others like me. Only time will tell.
Saturday, September 6, 2008
WAR Bonus with RA3
Mythic Details WAR Early Access Dates
EA has confirmed WAR Collector's Edition pre-orders will be invited to play from 14th, while regular pre-orders will join a day later. Warhammer Online launches for the masses on 18th September. Eager fans can download the rather meaty 9.4GB game client before launch.
Besides, the official website answered players' questions about game client.
Why can't I patch?
The game patcher and login servers are not yet online. They will be switched on closer to the Open Beta.
The news says the client is 12GB but I have only downloaded 9.4GB. Am I missing something?
No you're not. The downloader itself is downloading compressed files which will be a little smaller and there will be additional downloading available during Open Beta. These are largely localised Voice Over files which will make up the remaining 3GB or so.
I would like to use my own torrent program, is there a torrent link available?
Yes of course, just use this link with your preferred torrent client.
I can't enter my codes anywhere!
The page on the website where you can enter your codes is not yet online but will appear next week before the open beta begins. Keep checking the news page for news about this.
Will I be able to use this client for release?
Yes, you will be able to use the same client for release, it will just patch you up to the live version. No need to uninstall and reinstall from the box DVDs.
