Resurrecting Warhammer Online - General Columns

SBFord

Resurrecting Warhammer Online - General Columns

You can never go home again but in MMORPGs you can sometimes visit. I recently took a trip back to the year 2008 in Warhammer Return of Reckoning the fan made Warhammer Age of Reckoning emulator. Unsurprisingly a game that was full of mixed emotions upon its launch triggered another mixture of emotions upon its resurrection.

Read the full story here

EponyxDamor

I am a huge fan of all things Warhammer. WAR did have great class concepts and fun instanced PvP, but that's about where the enjoyment ended for me. I'm glad to see the option available again for those who enjoyed it, though.

Galadourn

I tried WAR out for a couple of months when it launched, but I was so hooked with WoW at the time that I never gave it a decent chance... pity, because it has some cool features and the WAR setting is one of my favorites.

cameltosis

I certainly had fun in WAR, but I have to remind myself why I quit. Think I played for 6 months following launch, then attempted to go back to it a couple of times after my first exit.

Yes, I loved my characters. "Spit" was my black orc and "Scab" was my squig herder. Both great classes and I loved some of the greenskin areas. The PvP, when balanced, was amazing.

But, the PvP was never balanced. For tiers 1-3 it was less noticeable with the scaling, but tier 4 was horrendous. The power gaps in WAR were just ridiculous. For example, my RR50 black orc (tank) had less armour and mitigation than a typical RR70+ clothie. Acquiring gear at launch was also a nightmare, you just had to hope you got lucky during sieges.

It got a bit better later on when they made the gear much easier to acquire and ranks much faster to obtain, but by that point the game had already lost most of it's population.


Still, despite the complaints, nothing has ever quite beaten that feeling of taking the last keep in a zone, having it flip and then watching 200+ players swarm over the countryside on their way to further conquest! Or the first fortress fight on our server that had nearly 600 destruction attacking, and 400 order defending......sure, we killed the server, the game was coded like shit, but the slideshow looked epic! Was great to just be a part of something of that scale.

some-clueless-guy

What baffles me the most is how, with the PC I have today, before I updated the .exe file, I was still experiencing massive fps drops. (i7, 8GB ran and Geforce 1050TI)

Back then, months after launch, I felt like I was the village idiot asking everyone "Do you have FPS problems? Am I the only one who can't play this". I remember I could play Age of Conan at max detail and view distance but WAR would stagger as soon as I entered RVR.

The ROR guys have put on the site an .exe that uses up to 8GB of ram which solves the problem though, so kudos to them.

MadFrenchie

Enjoyed the game while I played it.

There are a few titles that likely could've progressed into a strong niche consumer base, if it were not for the timing of their releases.

Certainly, compared to the innumerable piles of half-finished games being hawked these days, WAR would've seemed like a very complete package.

Darksworm

EponyxDamor said:

I am a huge fan of all things Warhammer. WAR did have great class concepts and fun instanced PvP, but that's about where the enjoyment ended for me. I'm glad to see the option available again for those who enjoyed it, though.

Warhammer had some of the most unbalanced PvP known to man.  Lol.  The classes were out of balance as well, which led to faction imbalances as the classes were faction-locked.  There were not "enough" classes (think DAoC) to counteract this.

EponyxDamor

TimEisen said:

People say class imbalance like its a bad thing. I always enjoyed riding the flavor of the month hype after every patch in the oldschool MMOs. I enjoyed taking those FOTM's down more, even if it meant it took a whole group to drop one hehe. One players OP class is another groups PVP boss fight I guess.

Personally, I prefer the non-mirrored classes like WAR had; it made PvP way more enjoyable for me. They were similar enough and performed similar roles, but were still balanced differently enough to make the factions feel different. Games like SWTOR have boring PvP to me, as the classes are skill-to-skill exactly the same across factions, just with different visual effects.

Gobstopper3D

One of the only PVP games I have actually enjoyed besides the early days of Eve Online. Oh how I miss the castle sieges and small group battles. Were the classes unbalanced? Yes, but for me, that didn't distract from the fun.

I remember as a Order player and a group of 10 of us took a Ft. That Ft was attacked by a group of 25 destruction. We held it for 90 mins before a group of 15 more order showed up and the destruction gave up and ran off. Oh what fun times those were. I was hoping that ESO will take over and I would once again find a PVP game I enjoyed. ESO failed hard in that regard.

What I wouldn't give for EA to bring that game back to life. I didn't know about the Pvt server. Will have to check it out.

Sovrath

I loved my Sword Master. It goes down as one of my favorite classes in any game.

As far as the npc's they always just stood around. I remember mentioning it to a developer at PAX (he did not work on warhammer) and his response was "well, they aren't pve guys".

I would have slated it under common sense. I have always wondered if it was just a window into how developers are perpetually clueless about things that seem common sense.

Mykell

I lucked out and rolled the first piece of epic/legendary(?) gear from a city raid i think on my server. Its was a siege where pretty much everyone on the server turned up to and the game became a slideshow.

I still remember dying and asking for a rez from my buddy, only to revive and run all the way back which took like 5 or 10 mins only for the little confirmation box for me accept a rez to appear just as i got back lol.

I also remember things like a guy who was boxing 4 bright wizards in the pvp scenarios and just melting entire teams or how the ironbreaker was able to knock people off ledges into lava in some of the scenarios (i was chaos and i hated that ability lol).

For all its faults it was still a lot of fun.

Panther2103

I really liked WAR a lot when it was out, I had a guild I ran and a bunch of friends playing it with me. I played ALOT. I think the main problem happened with balancing IMO. It felt like they just couldn't ever balance the game properly. Not just PVP balancing but the balance between leveling and doing the RVR and battlegrounds. It just felt skewed. PvP balance was kind of bad too but I guess it did get quite a bit better as the game went on, but in the starting period it was so unbalanced.

This private server is alright. I like what they did. But I don't like how they act towards players. They have a very loud opinion on a lot of different things and they aren't afraid to voice it, and it kind of sucks sometimes because a normal developer wouldn't attack players, or be rude towards their fans or even trolls. It's really cool they have maintained a decent population, I'm hoping some of the bugs get worked out (I played the white lion and my pet kept falling through the ground). I might give it a go again in the future, but right now there are so many other options to spend my time on.

Scorchien

   I played Live War to RR 93 had my statue up in Altdorf at one point for 10 months running..
      
                  And  this private server has a better version of War running than EA did at close .. Devs have done a fine job .. Tweaking/fixing and adding content ..

  The only people i have seen have trouble with these devs are those that deserve it .. By being a dick in chat or on the forums...

  These devs are doing this for free .. Why should they tolerate some idiots BS .. I wouldnt .. Its hard work and they have done a fine job..

  Be respectful of the devs and the community if you have a concern there a ways to discuss with out being a dick .. Otherwise enjoy the ban ..

  

Arillix

Oi, ya snot nosed gits, sods off wif tis blanaced fluff. Ta mean greens, have the knok baks and da muscules ta pumle ta pansy orderz to the ground.
Me choppa, will slash in two, with a single swing. ha take that ya girly pointy-ears.

give me 4 to 5 other green skins and Ill show you, we destroy order.

Greelix 40 choppa 2 handed specced.

calibek

Warhammer is my top lore and world with Elder scrolls world coming in second. WAR got me interested in the Warhammer world and I love it to this day. Memories of this game are what caused me to pick up Total War: Warhammer. While not an MMO it provides me with all the destruction I can get from all the cool races of Warhammer.

The problem with this game was EA seemed to have rushed it out the door before it was ready and that caused it to go downhill fast

DrunkWolf

I dont really want to read all of that. did they turn a server back on or something? i hope so.

mad-hatter

I can vouch for this server, have a 40 runepriest, though I haven't played it in awhile. My only recommendation to anyone planning to play there, don't mouth off to, or around the staff, they are ruthless and take absolutely no shit from anyone, which isn't really a bad thing. Don't run your mouth in open warbands, because sometimes you don't know who is a staff member, you talk shit to other players and you'll face the banhammer quickly for stupidity.

Gavyne

WAR was fun, I really liked their class concepts, their introduction of public quests to the MMO genre, and the fact that we could level while doing PvP instances rather than be forced to grind PvE.  I played the game for 3 months and enjoyed it while it lasted.

Unfortunately there were issues that caused the game to nosedive.

-Lack of content past Tier 3 was evident, you really felt it and it was anticlimactic for you to progress through these levels only to find that the game wasn't finished towards the end.  Once the game lost its PvE endgame players, it lost half of its population.  Game launched in September, had 750k subscribers by October, but reduced to 300k players by end of December.

-Public Quests were overused.  You had PQ's in PvE, you had PQ's in RvR, public quests were everywhere, forced onto you whether you liked it or not.  Because PQ was a random system, you could've played your hearts out and never got rewarded for it.  Both in PvE and RvR, if you were unlucky, you simply didn't get loot.  That was a fatal flaw with the design, and many got discouraged over-time due to public quests.

-Because people were so starved of loot and rewards, RvR became musical keeps after awhile.  Realms started to avoid each other because the faster you took keeps, the more chances you had at getting a roll for something.  So it was more rewarding to take empty keeps and avoid having to fight.  We've seen these fatal design flaws in RvR games since DAOC introduced RvR.  Things were just worse in WAR.

It was a fun game, but had issues that people just couldn't overlook.  But all in all it was a successful AAA title launch, with 1.2 mil copies sold within 2 weeks, 750k subscribers within 1 month.  Unfortunately it couldn't retain players due to the issues mentioned above.  Oh and the engine had issues handling large large scale RvR like city sieges, but what's new.

I'm glad people are having fun with the emu.  I myself can't get motivated to play on emus of dead games.

MadFrenchie

EponyxDamor said:

TimEisen said:

People say class imbalance like its a bad thing. I always enjoyed riding the flavor of the month hype after every patch in the oldschool MMOs. I enjoyed taking those FOTM's down more, even if it meant it took a whole group to drop one hehe. One players OP class is another groups PVP boss fight I guess.

Personally, I prefer the non-mirrored classes like WAR had; it made PvP way more enjoyable for me. They were similar enough and performed similar roles, but were still balanced differently enough to make the factions feel different. Games like SWTOR have boring PvP to me, as the classes are skill-to-skill exactly the same across factions, just with different visual effects.

I agree.  There's an extra layer of depth involved when classes mirror one another but utilize significantly different mechanics.

Alomar

This was one of those mmo's which I missed out on, and by the time I thought about playing it was near empty and soon to be shut down. I've been linked this or other private versions over the past couple of years and I might just give this a shot. As a hardcore pvper whose bored shitless with modern mmo pvp I could use a new (old but new) distraction.

Mensur

Great idea! But my mind is focused on pantheon and daydreaming my way trough work about it  

Nepheth

Gorwe said:

Scorchien said:

   I played Live War to RR 93 had my statue up in Altdorf at one point for 10 months running..
      
                  And  this private server has a better version of War running than EA did at close .. Devs have done a fine job .. Tweaking/fixing and adding content ..

  The only people i have seen have trouble with these devs are those that deserve it .. By being a dick in chat or on the forums...

  These devs are doing this for free .. Why should they tolerate some idiots BS .. I wouldnt .. Its hard work and they have done a fine job..

  Be respectful of the devs and the community if you have a concern there a ways to discuss with out being a dick .. Otherwise enjoy the ban ..

  

Yeah, they have a nasty habit of silencing the critiques or advice for improving the game with "stfu ; what do you know ; are you a dev?".

While some did deserve what they got, these devs are anything but paragons of good and decent morale / behavior. They are a bunch of stuck up elitists IMMENSELY enjoying their power.

Most of forum bans happened directly because they GOADED people. They are abrasive, rude, hypocritical and sometimes outright deceitful. Not a bunch of people I want to have anything in common with.

To finalize, if they really cared about WAR as much as they claim they do, they'd release the Source Code and allow people to create their own pvt.servers. BUT! They are doing the EXACT THING they were very worried about when they bought(iirc) the code from Dyox. Corollary? They don't care that much about the game itself.

At this point I think Dyox would've handled this with more grace.

Yeah right release the source code and let other people create their own private servers. Split the already small playerbase and kill the game for good.  That's a very smart decision... I won't answer to your other claims.I still remember your old thread about how we should avoid this server because they banned you. Aww...

Uthrax

Chosen aura cycling with Hold the Line stacked x 3 in front of a keep gate....good times.

JamesGoblin

Ah, WAR...good people of EA launched it's early beta right into the dawn of WoW's peak xpac. What could possibly go wrong?

PS Hey, Timmy is back! WAAAAAGH!

Slapshot1188

@TimEisen Welcome back!

I recently played on that same WAR server and it was a lot of fun.   I found it less fun as I graduated from the lower levels and found that they had tied all the other tiers together.  I get that they wanted a huge population there but I just didn't care for it.

They did a great job on the server though!

Foncl

I've only had good experiences on the RoR servers. It's usually easy to find an open warband for some large scale open world PvP, in tier 1(lvl 1-15) and tier 4(endgame lvl 31-40) at least. There's also instanced scenarios to queue for with smaller scale PvP and equal numbers on both teams. WAR has some of the best class design in MMORPG's imo, it's a alt-friendly game. The game lacks in PvE, suffers from desync issues especially in large battles, and tier 4 is less fun than lower tiers most of the time for me.

I prefer tier 1 and sometimes tier 2 PvP because there's none or less of AoE healing, AoE dmg and crowd control. Gear and RR(PvP rank) matters too much in tier 4 for my liking, so you get fewer even and fun fights than in lower tiers. AoE healing is also extremely powerful in endgame which has a negative impact on PvP imo. I say that with the strongest AoE healer in the game as my favourite class, the Warrior Priest.