A Black Orc - one of his moves is called "Right in the Jibblies", a quick kick in the groin area to generate threat and slow enemies.
Well, the day of reckoning is almost upon us. Another sign of the impending WAR-o-calypse is the lifting of the Beta NDA by Mythic, effective immediately. I am expecting truly massive onslaught of coverage in the following hours and days.
Which is - let’s face it - the way to go. By keeping the lid on WAR information, Mythic ensures a flurry of Warhammer related information to hit the wires just as it is most convenient, marketing-wise: a month before the product becomes publicly available. That’s wise. By the time beta euphoria has died down, head-start players will get their fix of WAR (head start players purchased the game as a collector’s edition and are eligible to play on release servers a week in advance of everyone else, thus getting a head start). Shortly following that, there’s release.
Warrior Priest - His chief weapon is surprise. Surprise and fear. His three weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency... and an almost fanatical devotion to Karl Franz.
Previously (until now), I was allowed to say the following:
- Yes, there is a closed beta
- Yes, I am in it
Now here’s some more:
- Yes, there is a closed beta
- Yes, I am in it
- It truly rocks my socks
- It’s insane
- No, I will not be “quitting” any of the other MMOs I am playing
This means, in a nutshell, that WAR will be more or less a very “casual” experience for me. I love the closely tied PvE and RpR (PvP) aspect of the game, I am really looking forward to having not three or four but dozens of battleground “scenarios” alongside world combat and world RvR objectives, and - comparing Blizzard’s Open WotLK Beta with WAR’s RvR system - prefer it over other games.
That said, however, I don’t think any comparison between WAR and WoW is fair - thoug indubitably it’ll be drawn quite a bit. These games aim at different play-styles, different goals, and clearly WAR doesn’t try to be a WoW killer but a great game in its own right.
WP vs. Shaman - crazy man with hammer and marked abandonment of all reason fights crazy man with skull in hand and a marked abandonment of all reason. Sounds almost like the U.S. Congress.
Which brings us to the inevitable question of how “WoW” the game is. My answer? It’s adopted just enough of the MMO landscape’s tried and true paradigms to make the game better. Unlike, say, CoA and others, Warhammer doesn’t try to be different just to be different for the “we’re not WoW” sticker.
The game’s graphics are polished and pleasing to the eye. For someone who started his MMO life with Ultima Online (and considered it graphical overkill, considering we did just as well in MUD environments for years), graphics don’t mean as much as to, say, the new guy or gal playing Crysis for the nice explosions, but I am not one not to appreciate the graphical prowess of games.
Where WotLK is aiming to extend the horizon, however, applying gaussian blurs to remote objects and making everything look a little dreamy and very vibrant, WAR shoots for busy foregrounds and immersion through gadgets and widgets left lying around almost everywhere. Entering a village which has recently been ransacked by Destruction doesn’t just get you some widget corpses lying around and a smoking cart in the corner. You get half-eaten meals, burning fireplaces, blood dripping from walls, a child’s toy destroyed in the road, and more. The immersion is insane.
From the very start of the game you’ll have to make some decisions. Ideally your character will advance in more than one aspect. While this is central to many MMO (crafting, pvp, pve, influence/reputation), in WAR it is much more pronounced. Your starter area quests lead inevitably into the first so-called Public Quest (PQ), which will raise your “influence” with your current zone. Influence can then be used to obtain weapons and gear with superior stats than those you’d get from merely questing outside PQs. The cool knack here is, that PQ influence can be obtained in more than one way. Soloists can get there just as well as groups and those who join ad-hoc happenings. The end-result is the same, but WAR gives choices.
Just a little bit later most players encounter the first signs of the ongoing war - and with it many quests that require the killing of members of the opposing faction (or, in many cases, PvE quests in contested areas which will flag the player for RvR). Those who dislike RvR/PvP combat may just as easily skip those areas and advance at the same pace as PvPers. More than that - both, PvE and PvP, contribute to the games’ overall goal - to strengthen either side’s home city. Yes, that’s right, collecting wolf pelts and killing goblins or humans both contribute.
All things considered, WAR has the makings of a great new MMO and I can not wait to see it go live. It won’t “kill” WoW (if you hate WoW so much that you want to see it killed, why do you keep giving them money?) and as well it shouldn’t try. But it will likely get some good business from WoW players who are disenchanted with the current Arena focus in World of Warcraft and want to see a real PvP/RvR system implemented and become central to a game.
Expect some screenshots and videos over the course of the next few days. For more indepth coverage, there’s a bunch of really good websites out there, no need for me to become another WAR pundit.
{ 2 comments }
Are you a game tester or a programmer or both or neither?
Professionally, neither. I do test games quite frequently as an auxiliary part of my job, but am not paid to test (or program) at this point. I’d make it clear if someone like Mythic paid me for testing, simply because my whole assessment of a game would have to be seen in that light.
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