Slashdot Mirror
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."
"Players can get into the North American open beta by pre-ordering Warhammer Online from select retail partners."
How can it be called an "open beta" when you have to basically purchase the game?
Two four cities removed is hardly "half the content". In fact the amount of content in the game is staggering. Personally I am looking forward to the game going live with great enthusiasm.
The Long Now Foundation
I'm an elder beta tester, and here is my review:
The poor graphics gave me a really bad first impression, but the graphics are honestly better than WoW (not saying much), and we all know that graphics aren't everything, gameplay is king.
So, I decided to give it another shot with the 3.2 patch and jump into RvR.
So far I'm having a blast. You can level and XP in this game through either PvP or questing; you don't have to quest or grind at all. For me this is a major plus because I love levelling through PvP.
I wanted to talk for a second about some of the unique mechanics I noticed, which you might have already heard about before. The archmage I'm playing has a mechanic known as high magic, which the shaman also has, but it's called Waagh!. Basically, how it works is like this: If you cast damage spells, your healing counter goes up from 1 to 5, by a point for each damage spell you cast. If you cast healing spells, your damage counter goes up from 1 to 5, by a point for each healing spell you cast. This counter is like a charge that can be saved, but if you stop casting spells for 10 or 15 seconds you lose all the charges you have. If you cast a bunch of damage spells and build your counter up to 5, your next healing spell that normally would take 3 seconds to cast will be instant, and will heal for more. Likewise, if you build your healing counter up to 5, your next damage spell will hit harder. This unique dynamic encourages people to not just be healbots, but to be in the fray of battle, dishing out damage, and tossing out heals constantly. Every class has a similar unique mechanic, which will be refreshing for those of you used to filling a simple role (like healbot).
The RvR minigames are really well done and I jumped right into a queue with a level 3 archmage (healer, DoT archetype) and was able to contribute to battle right away. Think of instanced battlegrounds, but more fun because there are events that happen during the battle. For example, the RvR I was playing had 2 control points. If Empire or Chaos captured both of those points and held them for 10 seconds, a fireball would shoot out of the points, engulfing everything within about 100 feet and insta-killing everyone that was in it's path. It made things very dynamic because you could capture both points, and everyone would have to run out, resetting the points and allowing them to be captured again by you or the opposing team.
There are also keeps to capture in open RvR (world PvP), and with siege weapons such as catapults, burning oil, doors to break down, etc, it can be very epic. I've been in battles with over a hundred people on each side and the performance is pretty amazing considering how many people are participating.
Not only do you get XP for fighting in RvR, you also get RP, which are like PvP XP. You have two different levels, your Rank which is like your PvE level, and your Renown Rank, which is like your PvP level. When you get to certain Renown Ranks, you get access to buy
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
Yeah, WoW really did a good job when it was released with all of its end-game content complete and in place... and now back to reality-land where WoW didn't have most of its end-game content at release either.
When you play the game and realize that those cities are not just static cities like WoW, with NPCs that stand there and don't do anything, you'll understand why.
Each one of those cities is a full raid type environment designed for end-game players to capture, defeat several bosses within the city, and finally defeat the king of the city himself.
What happens is this: If one side, order or destruction, controls the keeps in all 3 pairings (dwarves v. greenskins, empire vs. chaos, high elves vs. dark elves), they have the ability to challenge the opposing side's capital city. This involves completing massive public quests within the city such as burning down buildings, killing champions (elite mobs), ransacking libraries, overtaking the sewer system, etc. The entire time, you're not only trying to complete these public quests in the opposing capital city, it's being defended by the opposing faction.
So, they chose to leave out 4 of 6 of the capital cities because it was just too much content to balance, especially because the content is not just PvE raid level bosses and the King himself, but also PvP content, essentially trying to kill the bosses and King while you're tackling PvP at the same time. It's just a lot to balance and tune effectively, and they decided it would push the release off too much.
They may release the cities later. I applaud them for wanting to make sure that the parts of the game they do release are of high quality, and not completely full of bugs.
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
And since they just lifted the NDA I can openly talk about this.
Yes, the game has some rough edges, but damn its got a lot of content.
Way too much content so I ended up skipping a lot of it just to explore areas.
Anyways, coming from the background of a GW fan, I will say that Mythic has captured the atmosphere quite well. There is always something to do and I never found myself saying to myself "Hey... I'm just grinding."
Yeah some of it was, but it wasn't a boring grinding.
There isn't an economy to speak of, but I believe maybe that was the best design decision ever to make a game without an economy rather than a broken economy that inspires gold farmers and imbalances the game.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
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).
Of course, WoW never tried to put out 24 classes either. SO when they implement another 10, that's a good comparison. At their rate, if they add it to the next expansion, it will have taken them 5 years. I bet WAR does it faster.
As for the capital cities- it may actually come out for the best. With 3 cities it was going to be very much 3 separate wars with no effect on each other. Now it will be a series of interconnected battles- someone fighting on Empire/Chaos cares about Dwarf/Greenskin and Elf/Dark Elf, because if any 2 of the 3 are captures the city can be sieged.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
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.