Jul
12

WARapalooza

10 Comments

Once again, I find myself commenting on Warhammer online…not to hype it mind you, because we don’t do that here anymore. Right….right… /crickets

…ahem…

Aaaannnnywho. I was drawn…nay…dragged to an article regarding Warhammer over at Gamespy. Despite the somewhat mild criticism of yesterday’s article, this one is quite cheery…with bunnies and rainbows and birdies, oh my The general message I got from this article…or, the one I think the author wants to transmit is that Mythic is using its “delay” time to full effect. Apparently they’ve completely revamped the starting areas for the Dwarves and Orcs. That is in no way significant to you and I, but, yayyyy…I guess. Apparently, Paul Barnett told the author that the original starting areas where ok, but not great….the “glory of Warhammer was not there.” Oh dear gawd with the dramatics. Paul is starting to sound like a gameshow host again (I know…I’m never getting a beta key from these guys…heh). If you wanted to personify the hype machine for this game, it is Paul Barnett. He loves this game…no doubt about it.

The quest system also seems to be having lots of work being done on it. I’m sure content is being added everyday, but what I think they’re really concentrating on is giving those quests some personality…

The real improvements don’t seem to be visual — they’re in the design and narrative flow of the PvE quest content. Many of the quests I had last played at GenCon are still in the zone, including my favorite in which the level 1 player is tasked to break open barrels and kill the waterlogged and confused dwarves hiding inside. In the original version, the dwarves in the barrels were coming over the side of a waterfall in some crazy scheme to sneak into the Orcs’ encampment. This could only be discovered if the player was willing to read the quest text. This time, when ZugZug hit level 3 he was tasked with climbing the wall of the Dwarf fortress and assisting a group of insane Goblins at the top. His job? Find stunned and wounded dwarves, put them in empty barrels and shove them over the side of the fortress into the river because the goblins think it’ll be funny.

If they put that much character into each quest, then Warhammer will be up there with the best of them for story development. Actually, from the stories I read about the integration of PvE and RvR, they might actually have a leg up on the WoWs and the LoTROs. I’ve always been of the opinion that WARs strengths will be in the RvR/PvP….but I’m starting to think I am wrong. Their strength will be how they integrate the RvR and PvE into a seamless experience. If they pull it off, they’ll have a huge advantage over the other MMOs….it’ll all be in how they execute.

D out.

Posted in Editorial Links and News Warhammer
10 Comments Posted by Darren

10 Responses to "WARapalooza"

  • Kanthalos says:
    July 12, 2007 at 9:59 am

    Wow, interesting and dare we say funny quests can actually exist in MMO’s? That actually sounds really cool. Hopefully I can one day write quests like that :) Against your will, you are hyping me up for WAR, so you, sir, are failing in your objectivity.

  • Darren says:
    July 12, 2007 at 10:06 am

    “Against your will, you are hyping me up for WAR, so you, sir, are failing in your objectivity.”

    …I know…I suck :)

    I blame Paul…its those sunglasses. They’re hypnotic….

  • Pixey styx says:
    July 12, 2007 at 10:20 am

    … you on there payroll Darren !!! Mr Hype .. anyway just wish they hurry up and release the damn thing

  • Adele says:
    July 12, 2007 at 2:39 pm

    I like Paul. I like to watch videos of him (and not in the way that sounds). He is so hyper and excitable. He gets so reved up about the game when he talks about it that I can’t help but believe him and get excited myself.

  • Darren says:
    July 12, 2007 at 2:42 pm

    Adele…we’ll have to chat about your Paul video fetish at some point.

    Yeah, he is very enthusistic about WAR…which both excites and scares me.

  • Eric says:
    July 12, 2007 at 2:51 pm

    As far as the delay goes, I think Mythic saw Vanguard ‘the WoW killer’ come stumbling out of the gate, fall flat on its face, and proceed to crawl from there. The simple reason being; when it was launched, it wasn’t really ready yet.

    To me, the guys at Mythic watched this train wreck and said “mental note – don’t do that”. So they announced a delay on WH:O to make sure it was as good as they could get it when it hit the shelves. On launch day it has to come out of the gate running, not walking, and certainly not stumbling or crawling. Running.

    In the MMO business it seems that the difference betwen success and failure is decided by the fans very quickly. SW:Galaxies and D&D:O both had poor starts, so depsite franchises that should have been licenses to print money, both are lackluster contenders. Attempts at revamping or adding more content aren’t helping because most fans have already written the game off.

    LotR:O on the other hand has had a good start, and just has to get enough content out there to keep people playing after the first month. Its also not solo friendly which I think will hurt them in the long run, but over all it seems to be making a good showing.

    It looks to me that the devs are trying to get WH:O as polished as possible for Q1 ’08, and have enough content (end game being RvR/ PvP is probably going to make that easier for them, at least in the short term). From the tone of the article in Gamespy it sounds like they still need some time to get the game ready for its launch (some things still need to be tweaked and polished).

    So, it looks like Mythic made the right choice with the delay. It will be very interesting to see this game when it comes out. With what we have seen so far, I think it has a good chance to be a real contender (hope I’m not jinxing it).

  • Pvthudson says:
    July 12, 2007 at 9:45 pm

    I think Vanguard made a lot of developers take notice of how easy it is to fail, and not want to end up in that boat. Go go Tabula Rasa and good luck to all MMO’s that break the genre open and add something new

  • Rick says:
    July 12, 2007 at 10:14 pm

    I think I’m going to consider a personal WAR break. After playing these games for almost a decade, and going through the waiting pains for lots of mmorpg’s-in-development, there’s a limit to how much continued effort I can put into thinking about a game that’s still months away. At best :)

    WAR has promise and some interesting ideas, but I’ve got probably a year of gaming before I’ll get the chance to see how it plays out. I’m starting to think that WoW is a huge exception in MMO’s, and maybe we’re going to see a splintering of MMO players into smaller niches instead of some game in development grabbing another 8 million players worldwide. LOTRO’s not going to be that big, I doubt WAR will be that big, Conan certainly doesn’t seem to have that sort of buzz. We know that Star Trek games always suck, so that’s not going to be the next big winner.

    I think I’m just going to go enjoy me some Eve, and I’ll see how long I can ignore WAR. I’m going to be damn excited when it’s released. I don’t want to peak too early :)

  • Fred says:
    July 14, 2007 at 2:56 am

    I am not sure that I want WAR to be as popular as WoW. I like the gameplay of WoW, but the community stinks. No one groups, no one chat (except for leet speak), and no one is there to make friends. I really hope that these people do not migrate to WAR. If they do, I fear that the WAR community will stink too. Community is one of the most important aspects of an MMORPG for me. After all, it is what distinguishes an MMORPG from an RPG.

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