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Mythic Launches Warhammer Online
After four days of "head-start" players getting the run of the servers, Warhammer Online launched today to the rest of the public. Mythic took the opportunity to explain why they think World of Warcraft players should give them a chance, highlighting their focus on PvP (or Realm-vs-Realm in this case), and their desire to keep time-intensive activities to a minimum. Creative director Paul Barnett says it's "a bit like Batman." 1.5 million copies of the game have already been sent to retailers, so they're clearly expecting a solid launch. The folks over at Massively have developed an excellent series of guides for players looking to get into the game. They explain and contrast general career choices and look at individual classes as well. They also have a variety of interviews and descriptions of gameplay.
Been playing for a few days now thanks to CE. Love the game! If your looking for someting new or deciding to try the whole MMORPG thing you will be impressed!
...best idea if they're trying to dethrone WoW.
Someone should have told them that 20 years ago when they came up with the name!
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
You do realize it is not WoW right? PvP in WoW sucked since it was a majorly overlooked portion of the game where WAR is built around the combination of PvE and PvP. You wont have to kill another player if you don't want to. However you can also level by only doing PvP. Warhammer will not just fade away like many other games have in the past.
actually there is almost no ganking in WARHAMMER. You can't go back into a lower tier's pvp zone after you lvl out of it.
Also the PVE is lots of fun. Quests are well done and interesting. World is really well put togther, tons and tons of lore.
WAR has no ganking, and an extensive PvE game.
To WoW's fault, WoW PvP was as after thought crammed into a PvE game.
To War's defense, War RvR was the fundamental of the game, PvE seems more like it is there to give you a story and 'down time' progression and another option of game play.
War is NOT a WoW PvP server. On the core servers, you can voluntarily flag for PvP at any time. You are only involuntarily flagged if you enter a RvR area. When you enter an RvR area, if you are below rank ?8 you will be bolstered to rank ?8 (for instance, a rank 12 person in the T2 content will get stats like a rank 18 person) to even the playing field. If you enter an RvR area that is a tier of content lower then you (say a rank 15 person, should be in T2, heads to T1 thinking they'll gank some newbies), you are immediately turned into a chicken. You have 0 armor and 1 hit point. All you can do it run around squawking at people until they kill you, or you leave the RvR area.
So you can still level in peace, and it goes pretty fast. I think at 4 hours played I was rank 8. And the faction grinds are a breeze. Gone are the 4 week grind fests of WoW where you had to grind instances and the same 2 camps of mobs for butt feathers or toad nards to get to exalted. For the most part, if you complete 2 public quests in a chapter, you'll be exalted. And since there is great gear to be had doing PQ's, it's totally worth it to run 'em once or twice, and there are usually 1-4 PQs per chapter.
The game still needs some polish. Crafting is a bit of a pita, talismans are so-so, the mail box functionality needs improvement, no loot linking over chat... but its all just polish stuff. RvR and PvE are both solid in performance and entertainment.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Bootcamp requires:
- buying Windows
- re-partitioning the main hard drive
- losing hard drive space to yet another OS + extra room for things like swap space, etc
- time to do all that
Think more 'Dark Ages of Camelot' v2.0 than WoW, given that it's Mythic. From my experience in the beta, the PVE game exists only to teach you how to fight, and to lead you around to collect loot and XPs. The public quests in particular are very much 'Repeat these until you max your local faction out, collect a few greens, and hop in the local RvR queue.'
Actually some of the pve portions are really neat with warhammer. There's the concept of PQ or public quests, where anyone in the area basically participates in the event (scripted events even, sometimes with voiceacting of sorts). So far the event comes in 3 parts. Usually 2 kill goals and a boss or two. For example the first one in the chaos area is
part 1 - kill 50 guards
part 2 - release souls (open graves, kill the guards surrounding the graves)
part 3 - kill the demon (after collecting the souls from the graves, a unstable demon is summoned)
At the end, everyone who participated gets a score based upon participation (who helped complete the PQ). That is combined with a random roll, and the top X get certain bags of loot, which you choose what you want from it (1 item). The higer the total score, the better bags you get. You get exp for completing the pq as well as killing the mobs. You also get influence points by doing quests like these that you can spend on eq.
From experience this system is kinda fun and different than wow, where doing a low level 5 man instance is really annoying to get the people to do it.
There's still the standard quests and instances. However if you do like pvping whether it's casual or hardcore, you get rewarded through experience and renound ranks.
Very interesting game to say the least, I'll be playing it for a while.
I would have preferred to see a WH40K setting
Amen to that. Instead of trying to compete with WoW in yet another fantasy setting, why not compete in a sci-fi setting? 40K has a lot of background material, they're constantly updating it with new races and new storylines, and it's just overall a lot more fun as a setting. It feels like they went with the fantasy setting because that's what every other game has done, and that's just dumb.
25 years. Warhammer Fantasy Battle was originally published in 1983. (Yes, I still have miniatures I bought in '84).
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
EA does do Mac games. Spore and several of the sports games, for example. Furthermore, while they have declined to comment on whether or not they are going to do a Mac version of Warhammer, Mark Jacob's has strongly hinted. E.g., he's said no comment, and then added that the other computer next to him is not a PC.
Mark Jacobs, Lead Designer for Warhammer Online, said the following on his blog: "Any plans for Mac support?" Nothing to announce yet but the computer in the bag next to my desk isn't a PC.
I think the "Public Quests" are a pretty neat innovation. It's kind of like a 20 minute raid (which has a story) that you automatically join once you walk up. At the end everyone rolls for rewards, and you get bonuses to your rolls depending on how much you contributed and you also get a bonus if you didn't win anything the last time you tried. During these quests, you're also making progress on your "area influence", which allows you to get some nice rewards as well pretty quickly. It might seem like a "small" innovation, but I keep wondering why I haven't seen it in any other game (and I've played quite a few).
Mythic has extensive experience with PvP and has put controls in to remove the griefing of lower level players as much as possible.
The game is divided up into four "tiers." The level ranges for the tiers are (roughly, I'm not positive) 1 through 11, 12 through 21, 22 through 31, and 32 to 40. If a Level 12 players enters a Tier 1 zone and goes looking for some Level 2 warrior to gank, he won't succeed. The level 12 player will be "chickened." He will literally be transformed into a chicken with 1 hit point and an attack that does 1 damage.
Even on the open PvP servers where you are always "flagged" for RvR (there are no safe PvE zones like on the Core ruleset servers) they have kept a reduced form of the "chickening" mechanic. It's just been extended down a tier, so a level 15 character can go into the tier 1 zone without being chickened, but a level 23 character WILL be turned into a chicken in the tier 1 zone (but not in tier 2).
There is also the "starter" area, which is a subset of the tier 1 area, where anyone from a higher tier will be turned into a chicken regardless, to allow the newest players time to level up to 2 or 3 before going out and fighting.
My least-favorite part of WoW. I guess I won't be spending my money on Warhammer.
I haven't been a PvP type in most fantasy MMO's. I'm not a statistically / math minded person .. so Dark Age of Camelot I stuck to the PvE content. I tried and enjoy the large scale PvP and RvR however wasn't great at it. I didn't study and perfect my characters build (skills, armor, etc) ...
I however love PvP in Warhammer and I would encourage everyone even the most dedicated PvE players.
Mythic has made PvP accessible to everyone. The Mini-game feel to the scenarios is just fun. You don't have to prepare so much ... just jump and beat on anything red (target name color) :)
The key I think is the bolstering of a lower level character to that of one fairly evenly matched. You jump in at level one, you contribute like a level 8. You have the health points of a level 8. You don't have the skills of a level 8 .. but you don't get hit once and respawn over and over.
The open field RvR is much more skirmish like at this point ... as the population advances, group tactics will become much more prevalent and necessary. As will coordinated attacks on well defended / upgraded keeps.
It's worth investigating the system ... even if you just watch the production pod-cast videos on the main site... here's the link.
Watch:
WAR Production Video Podcast #21
WAR Production Video Podcast #17 - Jeff on Cities
WAR Production Video Podcast #14 - RvR Keeps and Siege
WAR Production Video Podcast #11
all: http://warhammeronline.com/podcast/index.php
Because THQ owns the license to WH40K and not Mythic. =/
There are a bunch of time unlocks including XP and titles for fighting as a chicken. You get titles for being killed XX number of times and titles for killing other players and other chickens. The more you kill/die the better the titles. There are a bunch of other pointless but fun things you can do. If you get certain unlocks in the time you get items you can hang off your armour. For example if you kill the king of the other faction you get his head that you can put on your belt.
Sorry to say, but this is the only reason why I don't buy it. I'm just tired of booting into Windows to play a game, that's why I stick to WoW for now - not because it's better than anything else but because it runs fine on my MacBook.
With the state of the desktop application level of performance and the OpenGL reliance Apple is tied to, you might just be waiting a lifetime before gaming ever becomes prominent on OS X.
1) OS X is slow for gaming. OpenGL, same game, virtually same code, Boot OS X Native, Vista Native, Windows wins everytime by a large number.
2) State of OpenGL is bad at the moment, and Apple has put all their fruit in the basket. OpenGL isn't even trying to catch up to DirectX 10, let alone 11, which will be the next big thing. (Go read Tom's Hardware on OpenGL/DirectX11).
3) Apple's graphics stategy is OpenGL and and SSE Intel optimizations. Trying to bank between the two to achieve respectible performance. SSE is not what Apple thought it would be, and even dropping to OpenGL 'AQUA/QUARTZ' concepts are failing.
Apple never was able to accelerate the original Quartz or Quickdraw, let alone the new lipstick pig they are trying this year.
Software rendering only goes so far in today computing environments, when you have rich web UI and WPF smacking your developers over the head with performance and simplicity Apple could only dream to offer.
Game developer know the OS X score, and bootcamp helps them make this an easier decision. Why should they even try to get a game to run, when they know it is going to run a lot slower than the Windows version, because you can't fight the Apple and OS X overhead to get the raw performance you can on the NT Architecture.
You have to consider the way War is structured.
The zones are divided into "tiers" that cover roughly 10 level ranges, the races are paired up territorially into opposed groups. For each tier, there's areas for each race and a contested area between them, allowing open world PvP at any level, while simultaneously being places you never actually need to go (you can go the entire scale without setting foot in the contested regions). There are also BG-like scenarios, which follow the City of Heroes style model of bumping you to an appropriate level for the event, so you don't get destroyed, per se.
Essentially, so long as you don't cross the "griefers be here" line, you never have to deal with them, and there's no reason you strictly need to do so. Ever. Class balance seems pretty close too, though it does hold a rock-paper-scissors kind of structure to it. They solved the problem of having classes focused on CC and strong debuffs by simply not having theme. There are no fears, no polys, no long duration slows, roots, or stuns. CC renders you immune to it for a period of time. I used to hate open PvP in WoW. I'd be willing to try it again in War, once server pops stabilize some and I can get on the server my friends are on on the correct side.
RvR. It has been keeping DAoC alive, even though DAoC has severe flaws that can't be fixed in-place. WAR fixes those flaws.
My point was partly there is no PvP playerbase in WAR, since the entire game is PvP. Really, having a game that is built around PvP at its core affects a lot more than just the mechanics. I'm going to guess that what you object to the most is the ganker type--people who seem to PvP just in order to make other people miserable. Those people are probably going to steer clear, because that kind of behavior is actually disallowed by game mechanic (you get turned into a 1 health chicken if you try to kill people in a lower level bracket than yourself). Again, a lot changes when a game is built around PvP from the outset.