A WoW Player's Guide To Warhammer

With Warhammer Online just around the corner, Zonk wrote up a guide which compares it to the current top dog of the MMO market, World of Warcraft. He highlights the fact that despite the appearance of "War" in both names, Warhammer is much more focused on the struggle between factions, in gameplay and artistic style. Warhammer's open beta started on Sunday, doing well in the US but stumbling in Europe. The full version launches on Sept. 18th, but people who pre-order the game will be able to access live servers up to four days before, thanks to Mythic's head-start program. Mythic CEO Mark Jacobs recently launched a blog to answer questions about the game.

Comments

What I want is more simulation

[leoboiko]

Here's what I want from a medieval MMO:

• An ecosystem. Doesn't need to have full-featured critters like in Spore or Creatures; just make the monsters eat each other, reproduce, and compete for resources in the obvious way. Come on, it's not difficult.
• An economic system. Again, nothing fancy, just set a few resource sources and sinks (even invisible) and let the market forces decide the item prices. WoW does it for the player market, why not the in-game market as well?
• Auto-generated, per-player quests. Gearhead can auto-generate quests, why canâ(TM)t you? I mean, most of WoW quests look the same anyway: talk to someone, find something, kill something, or escort.
• Allow player actions to affect the world. If I kill all predators from an area I expect the ecology to be ruined. If you donâ(TM)t want players ruining the ecology, make it difficult to genocide.

Unlike most players I met in WoW, I find no fun in comparing the size of virtual âoeswordsâ or in optimizing numbers in a game of statistics. I want immersion. The way WoWâ(TM)s world is just some immutable scenario ruined immersion to me.

Re:What I want is more simulation

[Duradin]

UO initially had ecosystems of a sort. Then the players pillaged and burned and plowed salt into the ground.

Animals? All killed off. Trees? Graphics still there but no lumber generating. Monsters? Hahahahahahahaha. You killed the other players while waiting for the one (1) orc to spawn in the orc fort.

Ecosystems are cool until they come into contact with players.

Re:What I want is more simulation

[Chris Burke]

UO initially had ecosystems of a sort. Then the players pillaged and burned and plowed salt into the ground.

Ha, I remember that. I had a Grandmaster Ground-Salter. Those were good times.

Anyway, I've thought about how cool an "ecosystem" would be, and also the problem of player abuse. It seems like you could get something a lot better than what we have without leaving it open to complete exploitation by the players. UO's problem was that it tried to remain too "pure" which opened the way to player abuse/boredom, while WoW's problem is that it remains completely artificial with only the tiniest nods towards an ecosystem (i.e. a wolf mob will attack a squirrel or bunny mob that's nearby, and sometimes herd animals actually travel in small herds though usually not). Vicious velociraptors will walk right past delicious zebras without taking notice. Because both are waiting to be slain by the players.

Just add more dynamism. Have the carnivores hunt down the herbivores, and have their respawn rates be relatively related to the number of each. When left alone, the populations will naturally stay in balance. If the players start killing off the carnivores, then the herbivores spawn faster. When the herbivore population rises, then carnivores start to spawn faster too. If the player keeps killing the carnivores, then before you're up to your neck in herbivores, they start to die of starvation. If the player kills lots of herbivores, then carnivores start to die too. But you never have to let the respawn rate reach zero, or even get more than some fraction less than the default spawn rate. Assume, much like you must to imagine Orgrimmar is really a bustling city, that the population that is represented by mobs is really a subset of a much larger one and thus genocide is effectively impossible.

WoW has done a decent job of making sure respawn rates are such that it takes a fair amount of concerted effort to truly keep an area clear. Put some basic safeguards around an ecosystem, and you could keep players from completely wrecking things while also making it much more interesting. UO didn't do that, and had much too low of a base respawn rate anyway (and a much smaller world and much fewer mobs etc etc). I don't think we need to write off the idea entirely because of UO.

Re:What I want is more simulation

[apoc.famine]

The solution is a badass, omnipotent, omniscient being, able to smite at will, subscription bedamned. When the forest god assumes wolf form and eats you dead, dead, dead as you attempt to exterminate the wolves, everyone else will think twice about doing it.

While it doesn't work all that well IRL, on the internet, most everything is better with a vengeful dictator at the helm. Griefers and other problem users can be struck down with little else.

Mythic has broken some old MMORPG rules..

[Liquidrage]

There's a few things that standout in this game.

When you kill a person in RvR you get EXP. You get loot (money and items that come from a random pool, not the dead players pockets).

There are repeatable quests for RvR. You join the RvR scenarios (similar to WoW battlegrounds but a faster pace and with more on the line) simply by clicking an icon on yuor screen from anywehere (though your likely to be in a queue for a few minutes before actually getting into the scenario). You have repeatable quests in those scenarios. You truely can level in this game with just RvR.

On the PvE side Public Quests are very well done. Open groups are very well done. In both cases you just walk up and your "part" of something. No need for invites. No more "we don't need a tank, we need a healer" rejections.

Now, the games not perfect, but it's well done. It certainly is linear in many ways (from zones to loot). And it misses the mini-game casual play of WoW. There's no mini-pets or fishing in WAR. Some like that, some dont. But it will have an impact on the total player base.

Anyways, Massively's got a lot of info on the game that anyone interested should check out so not much more I can really say besides it gets a thumbs up so far.

Re:Another game that doesn't get it...

[loom_weaver]

You do realize that Mythic is directly targeting those who like to PvP. That percentage of the market is much less than PvE'ers but it exists. Think of all the FPS out there.

One way to imagine WAR is a FPS MMORPG.

I played DAoC quite a bit and I think Mythic got the PvE/RvR balance right in that game. I spent most of my time in PvE but when I felt competitive I had a decent PvP game to partake in.

WAR is not designed to be the next WoW.

Re:Attention developers;

[pyrr]

I could've done a 1-to-1 hardware comparison back before Blizzard released a patch that caused WoW to stop running correctly in Direct-3D mode and come out way ahead. I have a friend with an identical laptop running Windows and who plays WoW. My framerates have consistently been higher than his (I also used to run things like UI size and resolution higher, too), but I've noticed a lot more in the way of graphics glitches under OpenGL and sometimes the framerate fluctuates wildly. Cedega & Wine's current implementation of a D3D protocol doesn't seem to be compatible with the current WoW patch level. Hardware does matter; ATI tends to yield poorer performance under Linux than Nvidia.

Then there's anecdotal evidence; aside from some glitches introduced in certain patches which I had to change config settings to mitigate, I can't recall the WoW client ever crashing for me under Wine or Cedega. It used to crash a couple times per week on my gaming box when it ran Windows (only the client, not Windows). After I ditched Windows and got games up-and-running under Wine or Cedega, it became rock-solid stable. Of everyone in guild and raids, I easily have the most stable client/OS. I see that as a big component of performance, since it's hard to say you're performing well despite crashing with relative frequency.

And of course there's that even less-quantifiable gain that relates to the satisfaction of getting an application to work on an unsupported platform better than on most implementations of its native environment.

Re:Attention developers;

[Trevelyan]

That depends where you start from. If you use open*L libraries from the start while targeting Windows, with portability in mind. Then OSX and Linux come at little extra effort.

However if you build your game with DirectX then yes, it will cost more to port then you'll get in return. Keeping people tied to their platform is no doubt why MS provide DX for free.

I think with the rise of Ubuntu there could be a market for games on Linux (there probably already is on OSX). But it is still at the chicken and the egg state. No games on Linux means not many gamers using Linux. Not many gamers using Linux means no games for Linux.

Re:simulation != game

[leoboiko]

So what happens when a griefer guild shows up and slaughters all the wolves and bears in your forest? How do prevent this or can they even?

What prevents real-life griefers from doing so? For one thing it's a massive task, not easily accomplished by twenty or thirty people (even if they're expert hunters). Another thing is that they would attract attention from local police, then armed militia, and in most places armed militia is more combat-effective than any civilian organization. Just implement that in-game. And if a faction does manage to overcome armed opposition and the sheer amplitude and execute such an amazing feat, then I want to see the ecology ruin and the local economy plunge. Just make it easy to regenerate scenario procedurally (the nethack approach -- things may die, but then you just play again with new things). If the players managed to ruin the whole world, why not have creator gods come up with a new one? Why not challenge these players to destroy the new one too, patching the game to be less and less exploitable -- wouldn't it be much more rewarding to the griefer guild to be known as destroyers of worlds than "those guys who narf n00bs in the town"? Hire some professional writers to come up with convincing explanations, the possibilities are endless.

I know, most gamers are power trippers and your level 99 "hero" needs to be the Strongest Creature on Earth and single-handled trample entire societies and gamers would oppose to be less powerful than guards. I for one wouldn't mind less powerful characters in a more immersive world. Hell, I bet I'd feel more powerful if I could somehow affect the world, however slightly.

If it is so darn "not difficult", why haven't you written your own game and have a few hundred thousand subscribers already?

Er, because it takes hundreds of people and thousands of dollars to put a 3D MMO online? I did experiment with roguelikes; I hacked a bare-bones ecosystem in a weekend in Ruby, and now I'm (leisurely) playing with fractal terrain in Scheme. By now I'm convinced a simulation-centric (as opposed to stats-growing--centric) MMORPG is feasible; it just wasn't tried yet.

Re:Attention developers;

[lysergic.acid]

this could be a blessing in disguise. the lack of mainstream titles by the big studios means that there is an untapped niche market for smaller studios or independent developers.

you won't see indie games with the most realistic 3d engine, but huge resources aren't necessarily a prerequisite for quality gameplay. besides, innovation is generally born from the margins of society rather than the mainstream.

it may not be as profitable a market as other platforms, but surely there are enough potential linux gamers out there for it to be worth the attention of independent game developers. and with the ease of distributing the games yourself over the web, you can bypass publishers and retain all of your profits.