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Warhammer Online Open Beta To Begin September 7th
Mythic Entertainment has announced that the open beta for the long anticipated Warhammer Online will begin on September 7th, eleven days before the finished game goes live on September 18th. We've previously discussed WAR's delays and the content cuts involved in reaching this deadline. In the meantime, Mythic's Road to WAR website (which we talked about earlier this month) is still available. The press release notes, "Players can get into the North American open beta by pre-ordering Warhammer Online from select retail partners."
I'm in closed beta, and the NDA was just lifted: The scale of the cities and the depth of tier 4 (highest RvR tier) is huge. Far, FAR bigger than the endgame content released with WoW (Western Plaguelands and MC, still took most guilds many many months to even attempt MC).
I'm having a blast playing. My biggest problem right now is that I'm spending too much time in it. Seriously though, play the game before you make any judgments (but I suspect you are just looking for reasons to dump on it regardless).
I've seen plenty of places where skill overcame numbers. In the open field just last week my group beat a bunch of order who outnumbered us 2:1- by flanking them and hitting them from behind in their casters, while they engaged a small group of destruction running from them.
We won a keep battle the other day by skipping the lord and running through to the roof. When the order stupidly followed us up, we had everyone with a knockback use it to get them off the roof, and killed the remainder. WIth half the forces they couldn't stop us from taking the keep.
I won a scenario for Destruction yesterday pretty much by myself. In a capture the flag scenario, we were 12 minutes (out of 15) in and down by 20 points, neither team had captured yet. I saw their flag carrier slightly apart from the group on the right, with their group concentrating on the left side of the battle. I got 100 DM, ran in and gibbed him, expecting it to be a suicide mission. They ran at me with 5 melee dps/tanks. I hit them all with the AoE root spell, hit sprint, and got out of their safely. I then helped guide our carrier to the cap zone for the only cap and win (having to kill a few DPS who were attacking him).
Plenty of room for the good to beat numbers in open world and scenario based combat. Perhaps you aren't actually as good as you think you are?
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
For the haters, why not play the game before you trash on it, you know, don't judge a book by its cover.
So they removed some content, guess what. The other 95% of the game is still there.
Inevitable city and the Order version of Inevitable are pretty damn big, especially with the ranked content that is available to a ranked city (3-5 stars).
The game itself is very fun, and from the getgo (level 3) your into scenario pvps, with regular rvr by level 8. It is not meant to be a standard pve mmo. It is a pvp mmo with a little bit of pve content tossed in, which is there mainly to align the story line for each of the 6 races. As far as exploration goes, it has quite a great deal of content.
As a Closed beta person, I don't crash, I don't lag, I don't get dc'ed (except to patch). I have fun, and there are not that many bugs to actually report. For a 'beta' product, this is almost unheard of. Especially having done several other beta's (9 or so) over the past few years. Most beta's are terrible products (wow, hellgate, several of the uo's, shadowbane, to name a few).
And yes, the lack of economy is a very, very, good thing. Crafting is in, but its not an important aspect. If you need something, you can either quest for it, via the Public Quest (great damn feature), or you can kill folks in rvr to nab your skills and loot.
Blizzard best hope that WotLK is damn near perfect and has some great pvp, if not, they are gonna loose quite a bit of clientele.
~DF
Having played in closed beta, I can say that the game (from a PvPers point of view) is in a much more completed state than any MMO I've seen, including WoW.
It's all live, and ready to go day one. You won't have to wait a year for battlegrounds, pvp ranks, or pvp gear. There are already more than 15 battlegrounds in the game with variations on objectives and scoring. There are realm ranks (pvp ranks), which not only allow you to purchase pvp gear, but also give you access to something like a pvp talent point system. Sieges are in and have been stress tested for days.
Battles are epic and because of the design choices they made with regard to player clipping, push backs, and knockdowns, you will find that position matters a lot more in this game than others you may have played. The "tactic" system is very good and adds another level of depth to the game. Tactics are like passive abilities that might improve certain skills or resists, but you can only have a few active at once while in combat. Combining tactics with talents and the pvp renown points makes for a high degree of variety in what build you want for your character.
Lingering issues are some class imbalances and the graphics, plus the cities and classes they took out. The game as it is is very, very enjoyable for a beta.