"Live Expansion" Announced for Warhammer Online

Zonk brings word that Mythic has announced their plans to expand Warhammer Online in the coming months using a series of live events that will open up new careers, gear, and zones. The first event, planned for sometime in March, will allow access to the Dwarf Slayer and the Orc Choppa, as well as a new RvR scenario. Later, players will race to unlock a massive new zone, the Lands of the Dead. The expansion itself is titled "A Call to Arms," and it will be rolled out free of charge.

Comments

"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[SupremoMan]

Nice. I wish Blizzard did this. They sure as hell have the money for free expansions.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Impeesa]

Right, because Blizzard is gouging the hell out of us releasing a second paid expansion four years after release. They've added new quest hubs, battlegrounds, tradeskill stuff, whole zones, and of course many new dungeons and raids through free content patches.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Duradin]

Ya, it'd be nice if they added new instances without having to pay for a new expansion...

MC (shudder), BWL, Dire Maul, AQ and Original Nax were added to the retail release.
Burning Crusade had BT.
WotLK is coming up on the next CONTENT patch which will add a new raid instance.

Yup, no free expansions there.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Andy Dodd]

Keep in mind that in addition to paid expansions, Blizzard does add content for free too. (Think Ahn'Qiraj, for example.). Plus WAR has proven to have a lot of deficiencies that need to be corrected for it to be competitive... Although rather than add new classes (which always makes class balance harder) I wish they'd fix the existing major realm population and effectiveness balances - At least as of November, Destruction far outpopulated Order on nearly every server to a great deal because their classes simply had an edge... I made it to rank 15 or so before I got tired of Order getting constantly slaughtered in scenarios.

I'm sure WAR is going to see a paid expansion after a year or two, just like DAoC (Mythic's previous MMOG) saw quite a few, one of which managed to effectively destroy the game. (ooops)

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Phoenixhawk]

Played Eve Online for 5 years, Never once paid for any of the expansions, Nor did I have to pay to move my toon to a new server.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Andy Dodd]

I completely forgot, but Mythic has a bit of a history with "Live Expansions".

Typically their cycle in DAoC would be a free "Expansion" during the late spring/early summer timeframe, with a paid expansion in the late fall/early winter timeframe.

Examples of free "Summer" expansions would be Foundations (housing) and New Frontiers, and sometimes major game mechanics patches (such as spellcrafting the year before Foundations). There were fewer of these than paid expansions.

The paid expansions were typically yearly up until the past year (or was it two years ago they stopped?), when instead of another DAoC expansion, WAR was released. The paid expansions were Shrouded Isles, Trials of Atlantis (which led to DAoC's demise), Catacombs, , and Labyrinth of the Minotaur.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[DreamsAreOkToo]

They're gouging the hell out of casual players. When was the last time they ever added anything for casuals, (read: those who don't have to "clock in" for a raid or arena)

I haven't been paying attention for the last 14 months, but in the 3 years I played, the only and last one was Dire Maul.

Also, if you've been playing since release and bought the expansions, you've paid $700 (50 mo x 15 + 50 x 2). Since when was $700 reasonable for a game?

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[vux984]

I am a relatively casual player and I have spent thousands of hours in those zones over the years.

"Thousands of hours"?? That's more time than most people spend at a full time job in a YEAR. (40hrs/wk * 52 wks/yr = 1680hrs/yr) and you spent thousands of hours in just 5 Warcraft zones? How much time did you spend playing WoW not in those zones?

I think your definition of "relatively casual player" is seriously askew.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[irix]

In the TBC cycle, off the top of my head, the following was added for "casuals":
- Netherwing quest hub
- Shatari Skyguard quest hub
- Ogri'la quest hub
- Zul'Aman 10-man raid and associated quests
- Sunwell Isle, including multiple quest hubs and a new 5-man instance
- Added a new quest hub in Dustwallow Marsh for people leveling new characters

They also progressively nerfed the crap out of the raid content to make it more accessible for casual players.

On top of that the vast majority of content in the TBC and WLK expansions is for "casuals". Look at the amount of quest content, the number of 5-man dungeons, new battlegrounds, etc. as compared to the amount of raid content.

If anything Blizzard is completely catering to the casual player.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Saelorn]

Also, if you've been playing since release and bought the expansions, you've paid $700 (50 mo x 15 + 50 x 2). Since when was $700 reasonable for a game?

If you're a casual player, and you log in 10 hours per week, then you're getting 2000 hours( = 50 mo x 4 [wks/mo] x 10 [hr/wk]) of gameplay for those $700 dollars. Let's round that to 3 hours per dollar. The alternative, to a casual fantasy-loving gamer, would be to keep up with the steady stream of console RPGs that keeps coming out. If you don't care about getting the infinity plus one sword or reaching 101% completion (which you don't, because remember that you're a casual gamer), then it takes roughly 50 hours to beat any new game of the Dragon Fantasy variety. Last I checked, these games cost around $50 each, giving you about 1 hour for every $1 you spend on it. Sure, you could go for 101% completion if you wanted to, and that might stretch the game out to 150 hours and make it a match for WoW, but if you were that hardcore then you would probably be logging 30 hours per week in Azeroth and keeping the ratio about the same. WoW is cheap.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[_KiTA_]

If anything Blizzard is completely catering to the casual player.

Really? Catering to 95% of their player base? What crazy rebels!

... seriously. Is it "catering" at that point or "producing the product their player base is expecting?"

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[PaladinAlpha]

Yeah, and you can pick up a copy of Dos 6.11 for fifty cents and spend TEN years writing batch files, and it comes out to like a billionth of a cent per hour!!!1! The problem with your reasoning is you are assuming that "Playing WoW" is equivalent to "Playing a wide variety of story-driven self-contained RPGs." It's like saying that since an unabridged dictionary/thesaurus is cheaper per-page than 20 sci-fi books it makes for better reading.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[irix]

... seriously. Is it "catering" at that point or "producing the product their player base is expecting?"

I never said it was bad. The OPs point is that Blizzard only cares about and only releases "free" content for raiders, which is demonstrably not true.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[LandDolphin]

That is just comparing it to other games.

As a generic form of entertainment, $15 a month for ~10 to ~40 hours of entertainment a month is a damn good deal.

A movie will run you $8 and only get you about ~2 hours of evertainment.

Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

[Cowmonaut]

Although rather than add new classes (which always makes class balance harder) I wish they'd fix the existing major realm population and effectiveness balances

Not in this case. Every Race is supposed to have a melee DPS, tank, ranged DPS, and support/healer. Currently Dwarves and Greenskins don't have their melee DPS. Was pretty bad for Empire and Dark Elves since they didn't have their tanks until a few months ago. The game is balanced around each side being able to have these kinds of roles, and for a new game its balanced pretty well.

A lot of players don't realize what is happening in combat so they cry out that a specific class is overpowered. They're wrong, but even when you show them statistics from combat logs going over a month they don't listen. There WERE some major balance issues/bugs in combat regarding specific abilities.

The Bright Wizard/Sorcerer classes were doing too much damage off of criticals from their dots, all the RDPS classes had a bug with their player based AOE root that caused it not to break properly were the two biggest ones. They fixed that in a patch and while the BW/Sorc does more damage in the long haul, their spiking was nerfed a bit so now 3 of them working in tandem can't waste a team of 12 people on their own.

Honestly though, the PVE is fun and fair, the Open RVR is getting performance improvements and extra rewards, and RvR in general is balanced between the two sides (there is a mirror of every class and while they don't work identical, they are pretty close in what their skills actually do) and every class has a counter-class. The key is organization and on 4/5 servers I've been on Order is more organized and more willing to help their fellow players while Destruction is full of self serving wankers. At least it keeps the RvR games interesting.

I wish they'd fix the existing major realm population and effectiveness balances

They are. They keep moving server populations on a monthly/weekly basis. The populations in total are pretty damn close, especially on the larger servers like Badlands or Dark Crag. This varies depending on the time of day, but not by much. Really its kind of sad. Mythic has this great game here that seems very well made but people aren't behaving how they assumed. They thought people would want to play the game, but so many people are looking for instant reward situations like in Guild Wars.

At least as of November, Destruction far outpopulated Order on nearly every server to a great deal because their classes simply had an edge... I made it to rank 15 or so before I got tired of Order getting constantly slaughtered in scenarios.

Um, no. Destruction is typically a higher population than Order because far more players want to be "evil" or an Orc. Having been in the closed beta, played both Destruction and Order, and played on Core and Open RvR servers I can tell you the Destruction has the numbers, but Order has the players. The maturity level is vastly different, with far more of the bitchy self-serving 13 year olds rolling a Chaos Chosen or a Dark Elf Sorceress/Wytch. Also, the Order players work together and are far more organized than the Destruction players. Again it goes back to the maturity level, most Destruction players want to be the hero rather than just accomplish a goal.

Made me rather sad actually. I've never liked the Order armies in tabletop Warhammer. I like my Greenskins a bit too much. But you can't work with people who think Guilds have to be huge (they don't in WAR) and that they don't need to use tactics/strategy to win. They spend most of their time bitching or trying to "get kills" rather than take out the enemy team. There's a great game there for organized PvP/RvR but its being wasted currently.

I imagine that Mythic will have paid expansions out as they add other races. They get the whole Warhammer universe to play with. There have been 18 different armies in th

Of course its free

[Daswolfen]

Its just content that was originally planned for release that got cut just so they could beat Blizzards Wrath Expansion out of the gate.

So all the Orcs will yell...

[Myrkridian42]

GET TO DA CHOPPA!!!

Please!

[whisper_jeff]

"...and it will be rolled out free of charge. "

Translation: PLEASE COME BACK! We know millions of you tried our game when we launched but then Wrath of the Lich King came out and you all went back to WoW and dropped us but we'd REALLY like it if you came back. Please. Pretty please.

Ok, smartass comment out of the way, I feel bad for the Mythic crew. They had the best chance to take a substantial bite out of WoW's rather massive pie. But, in the end, they're playing in the same fantasy-genre sandbox and they just cannot compete with WoW. Yes, Warhammer may do some (or even many) things better than WoW but WoW also does many things better than Warhammer. More importantly, 11.5 million people play WoW. That's a MASSIVE player base and, given that the type of game is a massively multiplayer online game, that "massive" part is kind of important.

In my opinion, it will take a long time before another fantasy MMO comes out that has a similar real chance to take a substantial chunk of the market from WoW. If Warhammer couldn't do it, with all it's legacy behind it, it will require something truly spectacular to do it. Blizzard will need to screw things up at the same time that another company does a lot of things REALLY well with a hot IP (kinda like what WoW did to Everquest...). Warhammer had it's chance but missed the target. It'll be a while before another game has a shot. In my opinion.

Re:Please!

[zergl]

More importantly, 11.5 million people play WoW. That's a MASSIVE player base and, given that the type of game is a massively multiplayer online game, that "massive" part is kind of important.

And how many of those players play on one same shard? The massive part matters only if I can actually interact with those other players and the biggest US realms have about 35k characters of levels 10+ rolled on it. That's characters only, mind you.
I don't have any numbers on it, but if you could count only actual accounts/players (and/or players logged in at the same time), those numbers would be way less than that, too.

Anyway, if you're gonna go with this argument, EvE Online beats the whole bunch in that department without breaking a sweat. It's where the massively multiplayer aspect is truly massive with a peak of around 45k accounts (probably a bit less if you discard alt accounts) logged in at the same time in one persistent game universe.

Re:Please!

[Thaelon]

A few points at random...

But, in the end, they're playing in the same fantasy-genre sandbox and they just cannot compete with WoW.

I played wow early on got the collector's edition, and everything. Eventually got very bored and quit. I mostly like PvP, but if you do pure pvp in wow, you don't level. I got tired of the grind and quit. In Warhammer you can level all the way to 40 without killing a single NPC monster. You even get great gear from it.

That's a MASSIVE player base and, given that the type of game is a massively multiplayer online game, that "massive" part is kind of important.

This is very misleading. Sure 11.5 million players is an incredible amount, but they play on how many different servers? 400? This means there are probably at most 30k players a server. It equates roughly to at most 4,800 or so players on at any given time. Compare this to the only truly massive MOG I'm familiar with, EVE online. It has usually has 25-35k players active on one server at the same time. Sure WoW is bigger in terms of player base, but the actual number of players participating in any given thing is minuscule by comparison. EVE routinely has 300 to a thousand players in a single battle. There's only one server too. This means you and all your friends can't help but play on the same server. This perk is unique in the MMO world as far as I can tell. It's also a completely different genre (Space/Scifi) with heinous death penalties. But those penalties result in the creation of a phenomenon I've never heard of outside of EVE called the "pvp shakes". It often get so intense people's body shake. You'll hear them talk about it in vent, or in local chat, or on forums and evemails. The battles are often fewer and sometimes shorter, but they are orders of magnitude more intense and stimulating as a result.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not hating on Blizzard, I'm just not into WoW. I prefer other MMOs, notably EVE and Warhammer.

Re:Please!

[brkello]

I just had to see what you quoted to know this was going to be an Eve online post. Yeah, it is nice to know that if your friend plays Eve, he is on the same server. Even just isn't fun for the majority of people because the PvE is lacking and the PvP requires you to be a bit more hard core. That and the single shard means that the whole game is spoiled from dev cheating in the past.

What he is saying though...is that you probably know someone who plays WoW...thus making it more likely you would want to join so you can play with them.

Re:Please!

[furby076]

It's also apathy. Players of WoW don't want to leave their established characters to start from scratch.

One thing Mythic did screw up on, they created WAY too many servers to start. They helped fix it by giving free transfers - but I can't help but think how many people they lost to that.

I went and played it (had quit wow in 2007) since friends asked me to. Then they quit so I did and went back to WoW. If blizz were smart they would adopt the PvP aspect of War. They did it right.

Re:Please!

[drsquare]

Strange how every article about MMOs is quickly filled with EVE fans telling everyone how great and unique it is, even though no-one cares because EVE is boring as hell.

Loving this game...

[SpuriousLogic]

I have to say, I am really enjoying this game. I'm not getting the grind feel form other games, and playing it way more casually, but still having a blast because of the RVR. Having a free expansion is nothing but gravy. Sweet wonderful gravy....

Re:Loving this game...

[tbcpp]

I have to agree with the parent. I got this game about two weeks ago. So far, my wife and I have hit lvl16 (out of 40 lvls) and we've only been playing for a hour a day. Very casual oriented. I have a level 64 pally in WoW, and the leveling rate is so insanely slow we just gave up. You can't do PvP or even run raids in WoW until you hit 80 these days since getting 25 people in the lvl 64 range is next to impossible. In War, the RvR battles are everywhere, and you can actually help out as a lvl 16. I will be playing war for a long time....

They Had Me, Then They Lost Me

[Petersko]

I bought Warhammer Online, signed up, played for most of the first month, cancelled, and haven't been back since.

That game brought my machine to it's knees, and I have an Intel Q6600-based quad-core machine with 4GB memory with an nVidia 8800GTS video card. It wasn't bad in most of the world, but when I was in the chaos city it became completely unusable.

When I first logged in, there were some people in the beginning areas. Then I didn't log in for a couple days, and those areas were completely deserted. I couldn't find anybody to do the group quests in. I was also getting tired of being one-shotted from a ridiculous distance if I happened to stray to close to an order town.

In the end I was completely underwhelmed with the gameplay, disgusted by the performance, perplexed at the unbelievable linearity of the game, and simply unwilling to waste any more time on it.

Re:They Had Me, Then They Lost Me

[MaineCoon]

Interesting; I have a very similiar system (Q9300, 4 GB, nVidia 8800 512 GT), and it ran pretty well on max settings, 1680x1050 in a Window (on 1920x1200 desktop).

Did you update your drivers? If I recall there was a known issue with older nVidia drivers.

The server migration did wonders - they overestimated expansion based on early demand and expanded too quickly, but by allowing people to migrate from lower pop servers to some mid pop servers, things really picked up.

That said, I did get bored and quit after a month, but I get bored of every game after a month or so (even WoW).

Re:They Had Me, Then They Lost Me

[Faw]

I have almost your same configuration and I'm running it without a problem:

MB: EVGA nforce 780i
CPU: Q6700 (not much difference)
MEM: 4GB OCZ
VIDEO: 8800 Ultra

I even tried it in a friend's Toshiba laptop and it worked perfectly. I don't know why it didn't ran well on your machine.

Re:They Had Me, Then They Lost Me

[furby076]

Something is wrong with your comp. I have a dual core system and my video card is a bit weaker then yours and I had no problems with the graphics. Prior to that i had P4 - 3.02 ghtz with Gigbyte motherboard 2gigs ram and a radea 9700. It crawled but at min settings I could play it. Given your system is WAY better then my old system I think you should check your computer.

What did annoy me is that ranged had SUCH a far range that if an archer was on top of a hill he could blast you and you could not get away from you or out of his LOS so you were literally toast. But that is just gameplay.

With regards to LFG - the game is based on PVP you should have gone for the scenarios not the world events.

Notes?

[RobXiii]

I'm disappointed they havent listed any patch notes, or game balance changes. WAR is a good game, but there's definite issues with it. Whoever coded the mail system likely did the buff/debuff updates. I have a great gaming PC (new quad core + 4870x2) and I can get 30-50FPS during a keep raid, UNTIL I target something with lots of buffs/debuffs on it, such as a keep door. Even with buffs disabled, nothing showing on my screen I instantly drop to 1 frame every 3 seconds. Theres some serious issues there. I'm also an Archmage, and really sick of invisible Witch Elves dropping me before I can even cast one instant ability, thanks to stun + silence and obscene DPS. Other than those issues, I have a great time in open combat with my guild, there's routinely 100+ people online each night in our guild, fun times!

City of Heroes...

[Anonymous Coward]

.... has been doing this from pretty much day 1. It's true that there has been one paid 'expansion' (City of Villains), but every other content change, which has touched on every aspect of the game, has been free.

To All Those Posting About System Requirements

[Satanboy]

I am going to post this because I have seen so many people complain about system requirement issues in warhammer.

There is a CUSTOM button in your preferences for graphics.

If you click this button, you can do the following:
You can set spell abilities to off, yourself, your party, or everyone.
You can adjust the buffer to use more of your cards RAM (this is set to 0 by default but moving the slider 3/4 of the way speeds the game up immensely for me).
You can change the resolution.
You can change the way shadows are displayed.
You can adjust the detail level of the textures in the game.

I run a 2.4 ghz dual core intel with 2 gb of ram and a 3870 vid card and the game runs fine. I've taken keeps with 4 warbands (thats 96 people folks) and have had some slowdown, but it was not a slideshow.

The game handles massive amounts of people very well, and adjusting your in game resolution settings should be a no brainer for anyone playing video games on their PC.

With all that said, i am VERY pleased to hear of the updates that are coming.
A suicidal dwarf and a berzerking orc will be fun to get to play around with.
Getting new lands? I'm still exploring the ones we have!

But yeah, this game is rocking along very well and I have to say, the devs have been really responsive on whats being done.

I have no complaints, and have absolutely no reason to get into another MMO with how fun this game has turned out to be.

Re:To All Those Posting About System Requirements

[Skuld-Chan]

Shame it doesn't have good defaults - I've read at least 3-4 players they lost over that alone.

New mmo's don't seem to understand that you need to appease new players within the trial period or they may never come back. Sometimes they have even less time if they are already happy with an exist MMO (like WoW). This whole release now, and patch later thing really doesn't cut it anymore - even though WoW had a lot of launch issues as well.

warhammer, shmorehammer

[yodleboy]

does it have hogger? didn't think so.