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Warhammer Online Information by the Truckload
Last week Massively.com got the chance to head over to EA Mythic's Virginia lab to clock some hands-on time with Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning . As a result they were pumping out loads of review content, everything from hardcore PvP info to dungeon crawling to crafting. The culmination of all this hard work was a summary post with clickable navigation to all of their review resources. Definitely worth a look if you are at all curious about this upcoming behemoth.
I haven't seen a post from Zonk since April 17th and now I see that this blog at Massively is by none other than Michael "Zonk" Zenke.
Is there a reason why this wasn't hosted at games.slashdot.org? Is it a sign of Zonk moving on like other editors/authors or is he merely helping other sites out?
Either way, an unparalleled score of information on Warhammer Online by EA Mythic! Well done, Zonk!
I wish there was word on how stable and balanced the game is currently at. I remember playing some MMOs back in the day that were more than a bit glitchy.
My work here is dung.
the players have real agency. What's the point of being online with lots of people if everybody's quests are identical and no player's actions really impact the world at all? Maybe Warhammer will be the one to do that. Time will tell.
I'm unfamiliar with that unit of measurement. Could someone convert that to Libraries of Congress, or failing that, to metric buttloads and I can convert from there to LoCs.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Unlike the recent launch of AoC. Abysmal game programming.
End of the world kind of guy, zonk is. Hyperbole is another word, but less effective.
When they put the game on hold some months back and stopped the beta program I was a bit intrigued on what they may doing. It looks like they took feedback from the beta players (mostly DAOC players?) and implemented siege warfare, keeps, realm abilities and other features directly ripped out from DAOC. This could be bad, really bad.
Well let's hope Mythic learned their lessons from the mistakes that they did with DAOC and not repeat them. Who know it may be a great game.
How much PLAYER SKILL does it take to compete?
World of Warcraft is very cookie cutter -- X class will beat Y class, armor and weapons make a HUGE difference, etc.
I have been waiting for Darkfall Online for 6 years (and am still optimistic), but it seems like that will be the only game that fulfills the idea that an individual player can beat somebody else because of innate ability rather than what class you played.
That said, the only other good PvP game has been Ultima Online. I've tried EVERYTHING since then -- AC/EQ/AO/EQ2/WOW/AoC, and more that I forget.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Thanks, that article and its description of crafting makes me not want to play this clone mmo even more.
Especially the part where the dev guy says "well i dont want to play that way, so screw them, i will make the game the way i want"
WoW hit the sweet spot for MMO's in that they made it challenging enough to keep hardcore types interested but easy enough for their casual friends to get into and experience quite a bit of the content with them. I'm hoping WAR can do the same thing and perhaps improve the experience a bit. WoW is starting to feel a bit long in the tooth and seems to have lost it's focus a bit. If WAR can deliver what WoW is missing before Blizzard gets out the next expansion, they could have the makings of a very successful launch.
I wish WAR lotsa luck, just hope EA allows them to stay online for more than 2 years. But that probably will not be the case.
includes exclusive 'dump grits' ability (+10 dmg, +10 stun)
The game.
It's a series of tubes.
In full disclousure I am a former DAOC player:
Warhamma' has one major, GLARING, OUTSTANDING, AND IDIOTIC failing that Mythic has time and time again told us the players is not an issue, yet we complained over and over (and still do to this day).
In Warhammer, there are only two factions (sides.) And I played BETA for 3 months I NEVER SAW A SINGLE, NON-CHAOS player. EVER. With only two sides the oldest problem MMO's face crops up, un-balanced populations.
Every 10 year old kid is going to "roll" Chaos. All the hard-core PvP'ers will roll Chaos. So for every 10 Chaos we'll get 1 person playing a dwarf for about a week; subsequently the dwarf cancels because they're outnumbered 30 to 1. DAOC had 3 factions so even if Midgard outnumbered Hibbies (Hibernian) the combined populations of bucket heads (Albion) and Hibbies outnumbered the fatties (midgard). A three-way battle provided an excellent mechanism for preventing population imbalances. (And isn't a three-way better then a two-way anyway?)
Faction stacking is going to be a serious issue with Warhamma, enough to kill the game at launch if not addressed and as usual, egotist know-it-alls claim they are smarter then the players, and in this case, smarter then basic statistic and math. They denyed population imbalances for years prior to and post Atlantais in DAOC. Time and time again we would show them the population problems (on one server there was an 4 to 1 ratio of Mid's to any of the other two. The other two combined only equaled 1/2 the number of mids.) Their arrogance keeps their head in the sand and with Warhamma, unless they fire some of those twits are gonna bury their own product at launch (reminds me of Star Wars....)
We see it already in WoW with battlegroups (clusters of servers) starting to stack as people transfer to "the horde or alliance dominated" battlegroups.
At least WoW instanced the majority of PvP\RvR to control population imbalances but as far as Warhamma is sizing up, failure is written all over it before it even launches... Hell the gearing imbalances still linger from the AV debacle. On Stormstike I have both alliance and horde (Archimonde and Scilla) and When I queue up for WSG I am standing next to 70's with an average resilience (a key PvP gear statistic) of 70. When I log into my horde on Scilla and head into WSG the average is 200. Most in full s3 gear and very few without at least 4 pieces of s2. Full BG rewards because they had such an advantage during the AV transition (now fixed but the damage is done.)
Basic math doesn't lie and without major re-work I see no future for Warhamma.
When you paint a situation with only two clear cut sides, even the foot steps of a moth will break any hope of balance.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
89.6 LOCs
Hrm.. that's a lot of Warhammer Online information. Perhaps if you've used CD's instead of hard drives. Lets see... a cd weighs 16 grams... which leads to 115.823133 terabytes... 5.79 LOCs
Hrm, that's still a lot of Warhammer Online information..
Excellent game will turn out.
They should first concentrate on what WOW did right. Looking for mistakes in WOW is going to devolve into being saddled down with personal nits. In other words if they look for what WOW did wrong they will not get a good picture simply because what was done wrong is so overshadowed by what went right.
I have nothing wrong with trying to make a better WOW, but you don't do that by trying to find out what is wrong with it. The only thing really wrong with WOW is that its size hobbles other companies trying to compete in the fantasy genre. If anything that size stifles others as VC money is more likely going to examine what happened to recent offerings like LOTRO and DDO and say "if they couldn't make a dent or sizable population what could?"
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Will it run in Wine? Age of Conan has taken every step possible to ensure it wont run in Wine. WoW runs great in Wine which keeps me playing it. If Warhammer plays nicely with Wine I'm sold, regardless of imbalances and bugs. God knows WoW has had more imbalances and bugs than any game in history, I sincerely doubt Warhammer could be any worse.
So, basically, they're trying to avoid what made WoW so successful? I'm sure they can ask the fine developers of Vanguard how well the plan went to avoid everything that made WoW fun.
:P
I mean, seriously, even Sony had to grudgingly give up and demote most NPCs from heroic (think "elite" in WoW lingo) to make it more soloable, plus give all classes enough firepower (e.g., via "heroic opportunities") to solo.
Now I'm not commenting on Warcraft Online specifically, since I don't have enough info for that. I don't know whether it will rule or suck.
But trying to avoid solo-MMO at this point is really a way to say, "nah, we're not giving the vast majority of players what they want." I just have to question why would anyone sane do that? Did they (and their publisher) take a vow of poverty? Or are they trying to not compete too hard with Blizzard? Or what?
Or it could be that they're smarter than that, after all, and just give a wrong impression.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
He's either trolling or crazy. Or one other I'll leave till later.
Given that most of the beta has shifted across race dynamics (dwarf vs greenskin, chaos vs empire, elven factions), with only certain races available at certain times, he has certainly seen members of the other race in the three months he's beta tested. If he didn't he played with his monitor off.
Second, his WoW numbers are totally fabricated. His experiences there of "average" numbers are made up. That's painstaking research to try and do, know way possible to get it 100% accurate, and based on his post and common sense no way he knows that or even enough to guess at it. Anyone that has played WoW PvP in any serious amount will know he's lying. You don't get S3 (Season 3) gear from battlegrounds, you get S1 gear. S3 gear requires you Arena where there is no balance issue at all (arena is not faction based in any way), or since patch 2.4 from Tier 6 content where you can token trade from PvE content.
He made up some gear imbalance from AV. If you don't know, the more you do battlegrounds the more points you get. You get some from losing, but more for winning. But there's a finite amount of gear to get from battlegrounds. It's all S1 gear, and it's not hard to get even if you lose over and over.
So please, when I replied earlier he was just a 2 I was expecting to see modded down. But he's now a 5 that is nothing but lies. Obvious fabrications of someone that is most likely upset that in his eye you NEED at least 3 races else HIS worries are going to kill everything about the game. When he sucked in BG's in WoW it wasn't him sucking it was the other guys had better gear. He's someone with every made up excuse in the book, the problem is the only place where they are real in his in mind.
It is true that some PvP servers are shifted one way or another. And yet others are balanced just fine. That's normal. Some severs are going to randomly have a bigger imbalance then the normal amount, and in some cases those will get amplified as people flock to the winner. In WoW, there's just as many Alliance servers as there are Horde servers like that. And then plenty of balanced servers. That says more about the people playing then the balance of the game. And there's no reason to think WAR will be any different.
Personally I dunno where people got that definition that you must need a group to even go to the toilet, to be a "real" MMO.
The name just says "massively multiplayer", which strictly speaking means lots and lots of players on the same server.
The first "real" MMO was UO, so basically it means whatever Origin wanted it to mean. It had no such restriction.
Some people would argue that MMOs are really a continuation of MUDs, only this time with a graphical interface. And while I would personally call it a new genre anyway, or a convergence of two former genre, I see their point too: the first ones played a lot like a DIKU with graphics. MUDs had no such restriction either.
Basically I'm not disagreeing with anything you said. Quite the contrary. Just wondering where people got that idea.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
That's right, WarHammer is a scientology franchise. Every time you pay your monthly tax to Warhammer what you're really saying is "Tom Cruise, I love you man!".
Playing this game and bitching about scientology is like wearing a leather jacket while marching outside a meat factory with a "Meat is Murder" sign in your hands.
Everyone playing WoW says "No, thanks". The key to all of the nostalgia for UO and its ilk is the presence of an underclass of gankees that the nostalgiac could prey upon... but these days the gankees have other outlets where they can have all the socialization and grind without getting their face pounded at least once a play session.
"Player agency" means the ability to inflict yourself on other people. Thanks, I'm going to take a pass on that one.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Mythic has developed RvR in Dark Age of Camelot and has tested most of the concepts there. The whole concept of RvR as an endgame is mostly neglected by other MMOs, most have a PvP-ruleset or limited arenas with gameconcepts taken from Shooters like CTF. In my opinion RvR is the best concept for an endgame, as opponents are evolving, developing new tactics and counters and introducing human creativity to the game.
Unfortunately (but not entirely unexpected...) it has shown, that players behave like ordinary human beings and try to maximize profit (in the case of DAoC in realm-points) while minimizing risk. While not as ubiquitous as on pure PvP-rulesets some players tend(ed) to heavily use textures, geometry and game mechanics.
Additionally Mythic designed many aspects in DAoC with a certain usecase in mind and seldom thought of the consequences of combining certain aspects. Often they totally underestimated the impact of their doings on the RvR-endgame, but they seem to have learned something from their past mistakes. At least in my opinion the latest expansions have been better balanced.
With Warhammer they decided to limit the possible combinations (fewer classes, fewer abilities) to make it easier to estimate gaming-impact of changes.
To me Mythic still has to prove, that they have lost their tendency to introduce overpowered abilities to the game and overnerfing them afterwards.
I think they especially need someone to tell them about RNG, as the one they use in DAoC has a strong tendency to produce streaks (shown by large tests from the playerbase and posted on vnboards) while Mythic still claims it to be working fine.