Jan 2007 Newsletter highlights from articles

xrebel

Warning, very long post



My favorite quote gets the very top:

"He has no illusions though. The MMO genre is defined by World of Warcraft. He told me that World of Warcraft is like The Beatles to this genre. But just like popular music of their era, everyone needs an alternative. To him, Warhammer Online is Led Zeppelin."



please DO NOT turn this into a WoW flame thread, there are enough of those already... please use them. This is an informational WAR post.



Okay, because I'm naturally curious I'm going through and reading every article listed in this list from the Jan 2007 newsletter:

" Last week we invited 40 members of the global gaming press to visit our studios to debut the first Empire and Chaos playable content. It was quite the event with both Senior Producer, Jeff Hickman, and Creative Director, Paul Barnett, in rare form. After forcing the journalists to sit through some short presentations, they got to play through the beginning of both the Empire and Chaos starting zones, as well as engage in some friendly head-to-head competition in two of our new RvR Scenarios. Links to the first articles are below so you can read what the press had to say about their experience with the game and check out new screens, concept art, and plenty of videos of the presentations and RvR session."

Warcry.com

GameSpot.com

GameSpy.com

Curse-Gaming.com

MMORPG.com

TenTonHammer.com

Worthplaying.com

RPGVault.IGN.com

Gamersinfo.net

EuroGamer.net

Buffed.de

Onlinewelten.com

Jeuxonline.info



I'm going to pick out the highlights from each of these articles here for quick snippit reads for everyone, and YES, this will obviously be biased towards what I like the sound of



Warcry:

** "The key difference between classes in Warhammer Online and most MMOs is that rather than going for variety, each class has its own recognizable and distinct personality."

** "A neat feature of Warhammer Online that ties into silhouetting is the concept of characters growing in relation to their power. Orcs for examples get bigger and stronger, Dwarf beards grow longer and Chaos mutate. "

** "Within seconds of starting up as a Bright Wizard, I had a few spells and was off doing quests that felt a touch more organic than those of most games." & "The quests organically moved me around the zone as the tasks got more complex." & "The tasks were all simple, but unlike the "kill five wolves" that somehow starts every game, it felt like I was in the fight and contributing to the evolving story and good of my people."

** THIS IS NOT WoW!!! ** "Visually, the graphics are crisp, stylized and enjoyable. Many have drawn the comparison to World of Warcraft - especially after seeing the first racial pairing - but while both are stylized in a similar way (Warcraft was inspired by the original Warhammer figures), there is a grittiness to Warhammer that doesn't exist in Warcraft. From the smoke in the sky, to the crows eating the eyes of the dead (in the Dwarf lands) to a flock of birds flying overhead, the details is what sets Warhammer Online's art apart."

** "The claim to fame of Warhammer Online is that players can advance nearly exclusively through RvR if they so choose." & "What happens in the low levels of RvR, helps the high levels," Producer Jeff Hickman emphasized." & "We only got to see two scenarios, but I must say they floored me. These scenarios evoked the kind of emotion I'd only ever experienced in online FPS games and that was with teammates who I couldn't identify and a character I cared nothing about. Throw in some attachment and this has the chance to be spectacular."



Gamespot:

** " this gives me hope that "kill 10 rats and bring me their tails" won't be a main quest line in the game:

"The starting quests in the Empire zone required our bright wizard to rally peasants to war, rescue them from their burning houses, and slay chaos lieutenants before they could open fire on the village with hellcannons, the fearsome chaos artillery."

** This is the first I had heard of WAR using collision detection (yay!)

"This is because the game actually models geometric collision, which is a fancy way of saying that characters can't walk through each other."



Gamespy:

** ""melee/healers" because of the way they gain the power to cast spells. These aren't standoff clerics. They need to do melee damage in order to build up reservoirs of faith/fanaticism that can then be spent on healing spells."

** " The difference between Warhammer Online's design and the competition came through most clearly in his description of the Bright Wizard. "They have no buffs, no crowd control, no healing," Barnett exclaimed. "Bright Wizards are about making… stuff… burn! They are nuclear weapons! They are instant sunshine!"

** (IMPORTANT! ) "in addition to no crowd control and no long-term buffs, there are minimal stealth options. In Warhammer Online, you're expected to get in there and mix it up."

** (Good for people who love grouping) "According to Hickman the public quest rewards include some of the best loot in the game. The latter stages of the quests are timed to reset in order to preserve the group aspect and avoid solo grinding."

** (PVP!) "The PvP game in Warhammer Onlineis "realm vs. realm" and is based off a similar system from Mythic's previous MMO, Dark Age of Camelot. According to Hickman, it's been refined to take advantage of the hard-learned lessons from that game. The biggest lesson to come out of Dark Age of Camelot is that most people don't really hate PvP -- they hate meaningless PvP that comes from left field and interrupts them while they're having fun with something else. Give players something to fight over or an objective to pursue and they'll happily slaughter each other all day long." & "Finally "scenarios" are instanced point-based, objective based battles with NPC allies (called Dogs of War) who will be placed in a group when there aren't enough players."

** (How is PvP "new"?) "Each type of PvP will contribute to an overall progression in which zones will change based on which side of the war is winning the most points. Win enough battlefields in which the goal is for Chaos to sack a town and eventually the town will stay sacked. Trigger enough to change the zone and battlefields and new quests open in another zone. Eventually players will push the zones all the way to an enemy's capitol, culminating in a vicious sack of their city."

** (Collision Detection) " The first thing I noticed was the collision system. Player avatars don't walk through each other in Warhammer Online. That means it's very important not to get stuck between other players and that position and protecting other players is going to be extremely important."



Curse-gaming:

** "Warhammer Online, as it stands per today, is an amazingly good game." (amazing statement for early beta! )

** (More info on public quest "faction/reputation") "“Influence” is a sort of “secondary faction” system that is in place for rewarding people who participate in public quests. Barnett explained it like this: “Suppose you have a person in the area who really, really hates giants. By killing lots of giants, this person will like you more and more, and based on your influence level with him, reward you with items that match the level of influence you have gained”. Due to the fact that public quests are infinitely repeatable, it is therefore possible to gain all the rewards from this person, depending on how much work you wish to put into it."

** (Are all starting points *the same*???) "I must say though, while the similarities of the starting areas of Empire and Chaos were there, playing as Chaos truly gave me a feeling of being much more evil and corrupt. Thus far, Mythic has done an amazing job at "themeing" their starting areas in a fashion that fits the lore, background history and general feel of each race really well. Something else to note is that although the Magus and the Bright Wizard are both spell caster classes, they played out completely different and actually had quite a unique feel to them."

** (PVP!) ""So what was it like?", you might ask. Well, it was new, it was fresh but most importantly - it was damned fun. That, my friends, is what PvP should be. That said, I did have some nostalgia from some of the first times I had visited battlegrounds in WoW, except this felt more like real PvP and less like a game with pvp as part of the tools used to win the main objective."

** "Q: How does leveling through PvP compare to PvE exp/hour wise?

A: That is something we are constantly working on balancing. It really is something we are going to have to tune as we go in order to make it as equal as possible. The same goes for Item drops from PvP - we need to see how it pans out and change it as it is needed."

** (are you a modder?) "Q: What kind of features/support is planned for interface modification or addons?

A: We are aiming for the game interface to be very modifiable. The actual method we have chosen for WAR is to have LUA addons. Extracting ingame information like item stats, character profiles, quest information and similiar will be possible."

** (NO TWINKING!) "Q: Will it be possible to "uber-twink" lower level characters once you have a high level character?

A: No, we have restrictions in place to make the power Curve of lower level characters remain relatively stable."



mmorpg.com:

they have an article and a topic about it already HERE.



TenTonHammer:

** (Ooops, bad luck for this fellow) "As my computer was experiencing technical difficulties (not the game, which seemed fairly stable judging by the folks around me) "

** (controlling public quests) " If the PQ becomes stuck on a step, it reverts to the prior step after a few minutes of inactivity."

** (Grinding for loot... perhaps not so boring) "In addition to the rather decent loot found as a result of killing the enemy mobs such as the bright wizards in the PQ above, a certain amount of loot is guaranteed so long as you participate and by doing so, gather influence in the area. Influence is used to unlock three tiers of special equipment for an area: basic, advanced, and elite. "What we expect most players to do is generally hit the advanced item and move on." Destin Bales, the Content Director stated. "One of the questions we had was do you have to continue or can you continue to grind on the same public quest? You can, but there's a variety - you can actually go to 2 or 3 other quests in the same area."

** (in conclusion...) "The PvE was fun, I like what's being done with PQs, and the RvR is a blast. The only negative I experienced at this stage of the game is that I didn't have enough time to play."



Worthplaying:

** (PvP is balanced FIRST!) "Indeed, one of the things mentioned during our visit is that the game, races, and their classes are all first balanced for RvR, and then the PvE environment in turn is balanced accordingly, rather than the other way around, as seen in World of Warcraft. Thusly, not only is RvR a major component in Warhammer Online's gameplay, but for possibly the first time in a fantasy MMORPG, the RvR gameplay shares equal importance with its PvE counterpart, and players can choose to engage in either PvE or RvR and obtain the same amount and quality of loot, experience points, and level gains."

** "Warhammer Online's RvR component is also much more layered and engaging than previous attempts in the genre."

** (more Collision! he he) "One aspect of RvR that stood out fairly starkly was that unlike other MMORPGs, there is collision detection between players, meaning that to get past that Black Orc standing in the hallway, you can't just jump through him like a ghost but must actually take him down. It wasn't too uncommon to see two beefy characters shielding weaker classes by placing themselves in the way of danger and opening up quite a few tactical avenues of thought"

** (More info about Dogs of War) "If the game cannot balance the two sides and one is found lacking yet no suitable player is found to even the balance, a Dog of War is created as a last resort to get the game going. These A.I. combatants follow the party leader of their side and are set to whatever level, gear, and abilities would best balance out the two sides. They can be any class, but the class is specifically chosen by the game to fill out any gaps in the team's roster of players."

** (More Detailed RvR end Campaign Info) "All of this brings us to the end result fourth type of RvR, the campaign mode. By definition, the scenario mode is part of the overall campaign mode in which you take over zones, with the end result being the sacking of the enemy capital city. Once you get to and successfully take control of the zone that contains the enemy's capital city, the city's massive gates open up, and the attackers can enter. Save for a small area of the city that contains spawn points and mass transit systems to other parts of the world, the entire city is opened up for two hours in a all-out RvR environment, and everyone from players to quest-giving NPCs, and bankers to auctioneers can all be killed. Attackers looking for the really good loot must cut through the obviously miffed enemy players to take down four sub-bosses found around the city, such as the master blacksmith or the captain of the guard. Once all four sub-bosses are down, the King himself becomes open to attack, the successful assault of whom lends to the greatest loot, in addition to the transport of the King back to your capital city's stockades."

** (This is really cool... and should prevent grief from Over-strength factions!) "At the beginning of the sacking, defending players must rely solely on their own – and each other's – abilities to repel the attackers, but every so often, the defenders get increasingly powerful buffs when fighting against members of the invading army. They gradually build in strength until the two-hour mark, when, simultaneously, the city gates are closed once again, and defenders will be buffed to the point that they can lay down the remaining attackers in a single blow. Once a city is sacked, the conflicted zone is reset to the middle of the pairing again, and though the city can technically be pushed back and sacked again, it takes a great deal of time before the city builds up enough loot and wealth to make it really worthwhile, which discourages the sacking of the same city over and over again."





Okay, I'm going to post this now and Edit as I continue... this has been a lot of reading

KnivesOnly

I don't get it.... it's not on the website and i havn't got the email......

 

Just tell me the important news.... who won the beta slots?

xrebel

Originally posted by KnivesOnly


I don't get it.... it's not on the website and i havn't got the email......
 
Just tell me the important news.... who won the beta slots?

Good question, I can't find the newsletter online either.



But I'm signed up to have it go to 3 different e-mail accounts... I just checked and I only got it in 2 of them... kinda weird.

xrebel

Okay no more I promise...



There's a lot more good stuff from the remaining reviews, but if this piqued your interest you can read em (like me )



Hope at least someone finds this interesting for the time I spent