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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.
...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
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
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.'
Because THQ owns the license to WH40K and not Mythic. =/