Wizards, while looked down upon by most members of society, are capable of pretty terrifying effects if they put their minds to it and progress through their career paths. We don't have namby-pamby magic," assures Barnett. No purple.
No bloody particle effects. No ooh, ahh' music. For us it's mumbling, sulphurous smoke and dangerous muttering. Magic is in-your-face the moment it blows your head off. That's the message - it's about combat, you muppet.
That career system is another way Dews and the team are hoping to make WHO stand out from the crowd that and the big spikes protruding from just about everything. With one of the three basic archetypes chosen fighter, thief, scholar you start down one of the many associated careers, each coming with an appropriate set of skills. Dews explains: If you choose a warrior, say, you can move along the combat careers - the city watch, militiamen and so on.
That doesn't mean you can't then say, Actually, I want to go and learn some magic'. But if you chose a different archetype, it'll take you a lot longer to progress along that path.
Changing careers means changing skills, although you don't automatically lose your existing specialisations. Unused skills are subject to a decaying process. Or as Barnett puts it: If you change from a magician to a thief you can still cast spells, because you used to be a wizard, with just enough proficiency for a broad range. But after a while you'll no longer have access to the super-duper uber ones, because you no longer have your magic stick and you no longer have your pointy hat and you've shaved off your big beard.
And we all know that the most powerful wizards have big sticks, pointy hats and big beards. Our main task in the graphics department was to take these lead miniatures and transfer them into the aesthetic of a computer game," recalls Roberts. It's a completely different medium from working with a couple of inches of lead. Partly it comes through hue shifting -letting you colour your character's hair, armour, clothing.
But mainly it's through the component system. For player characters we have in excess of 30 separate components," says Roberts, so when a player is changing these body parts, putting some new armour on for instance, it's not just a texture change, but a whole geometry change. Doesn't all this abandonment of established concepts mean that WHO will find itself alienating a significant portion of the market? Our take on that is if you want to be a baker or a candlestick maker, this isn't your game.
Go and play The Sims Online," responds Dews as our visit draws to a close. Warhammer Online won't appeal to everybody and we don't care.
We're not trying to appeal to everybody. Without A Shadow of a doubt, the game that we were least expecting to adore at E3 was Warhammer Online. Thing is though, there's such a sly British tang given to affairs by Games Workshop's Nottingham heritage, it's hard not to love its drunken giants, silly quests, incessant violence and simply adorably grimy artwork. Even its Orcish maps raise a chuckle with Greenskin scrawlings of 'gud wolf meat here', 'we kill'd dis dragin', 'funny tree' and 'gud smell here'.
What's more, Mythic's dedication to Realm vs Realm conflict is truly intriguing. These charming chaps are part of the Greenskin alliance - within which you'll be able to choose avatars from the Orcish and Goblin races.
Warhammer is about war - lots of it So Realm vs Realm combat is high on the agenda. The main battlelines are between Dwarves and Greenskins, Empire and Chaos and the opposing Elven camps.
For a race to win, a capital city must be sacked. As you play and level-up, your character evolves with you - so an Orc will get more and more heavy-set and menacing the more powerful he is. In this way, you'll know who to avoid on the battlefield. Likewise, the more powerful Dwarves will have longer beards. You can just cut off his arm and feed it to him. From individual 'strangers on a plain' bouts of fisticuffs through to objective-centred in-ganie battlefields and instanced scenarios, the frontlines are in continual flux; this bridge battle on Mt Bloodhorn is a key point in the campaign.
Another example of an intriguing PvP scenario sees a battlefield full of dying Dwarven warriors. It's up to the Dwarves to rush in and save them by providing refreshing flagons of ale, then the Greenskins to run in, finish the job and lop off beards as trophies.
Mythic are going all out to avoid the usual 'fetch me five pieces of monster gut' quest dynamics. One quest currently on show has fellow Greenskins gathering alcohol to get a giant pissed, and then watching him stumble into Dwarf territory killing all he meets.
As you can see, Warhammer is all about destruction and battle. As such, fans of girly-swot-swot PvE and prancing around forests looking for balls of flax aren't really being catered for.
Warhammer Online is all about bloody battle, mingled with a fair amount of heavy drinking and rude stories about the opposition's motliers. You Can't Get my mother to watch Star Trek.
You can tell her its just like any of the other programmes in funny clothes, but she'll just fold her arms and say, "I dont like it. The first crackle of magic, runes or friendly trees and she's in the kitchen watching Maid In Manhattan for the 30th time. So my mum, who reads because I've told her that 'staff writer' is a highly prestigious position, is probably beginning to despair.
Warhammer - what has become of her son, who once loved to play in the daylight? Well, his skin may be paler, but lie's happy. Happy that WOW has broadened MMO appeal so much that it's on South Park, and happier still that two monster fantasy newcomers are about to be set upon us. Witness the online loneliness of Auto Assault, the now subscription-free Archlord and, erm, Roma Victor. But while the competition between these new MMO heavyweights is sure to be fierce, the two are actually very different games.
This is Warhammer, not Middle-earth, and living memory doesn't have much in the way of peace, even among relatives. For a start, Chaos Marauders have been threatening the stoic warriors of Nordland for centuries, but with their plague tearing through the town of Grimmenhagen, they seem closer than ever to taking control. Meanwhile, The Bloody Sun Boyz, the vintage band of greenskin hooligans led by the performance-enhanced orc Grumlok and his shoulder-mounted goblin Shaman Gazbag, have taken over and vandalised Eight Peaks, traditionally dwarf country.
Still hungry for bloody conquest, theyre looking to take over Karaz-A-Karak, the dwarven capital. Pretty much because they hate dwarves as much as they love fighting. That so many areas are on the brink of collapse isn't just hollow, scene-setting drama. Mythic invented realm vs realm RvR combat with Dark Age Of Camelot, and have had years to develop and refine the experience.
The battlefields of WOW, for all their frantic pointcapturing, feel like little more than a distracting side-game in areas kept artificially on the brink. In WO. AOR or WO to its friends you'll capture whole areas, plunder cities - even capital cities - for loot uniquely available to the RvR players.
You can play old-fashioned player vs environment PvE if you like, but the war will find you in the end. Moreover, players of Camelot had to wait for this kind of combat as a high-level endgame; in WO, you'll be able to take part in the faction power-play from an early level. You'll even be able to build your character entirely from RvR missions.
Youll miss out on some similarly unique PvE rewards, but at least no-one will come up to you and emote a clucking chicken. Before you get to take down capital cities, however, there's lower-level PvP to fill your hours. In everyday world skirmishes, players are left to their own devices by the servers. Battlefields aren't like WOW's instances - they're free-for-alls with reinforcements potentially arriving at any time, depending on whos online. If you want a more controlled environment, you can play a scenario, in which teams are balanced using a point system, distantly akin to that used in setting up a game of tabletop Warhammer.
Any player imbalance is adjusted automatically by NPCs joining the fray, a feature that'll also reduce waiting times for these instances. Personality too is important. Whereas proper' role-playing in a lot of other MMOs seems to be the preserve of tedious escapists who think role-playing equates to talking a bit medieval and saying yon really, really hate the other guys, playing in character in IVO could turn out to be half the fun.
Take the hooligan orcs. They love humiliating the dwarves, defiling their buildings and cutting off their cherished beards for trophies. More to the point, the way the different classes benefit from certain combat styles will force players into a kind of role-playing.
Dwarves are better at holding a location, with sniping engineers drawing in the enemy, and Runepriests buffing the Hammerers to cause maximum damage. Meanwhile, goblin Shamans draw jxiwer from conflict around them, so will? The cliaracters have to the? Hie six main playable races each play their roles, like one of the darker episodes of Friends. The abilities of Black Orcs, for instance, reflect their unsophisticated methodology. Well, that's if the 'Right in the? Idiotic NPC goblins, on the other hand, will lie baffled by dwarven engineering skills, to the ixiint of putting their heads inside them to try and figure it out.
Some of it rings depressingly true, too - take the supixisedly good-guy Empire Witch Hunter class. Dedicated to the cleansing of heretics, theyll Ilappily expand heresy to include anyone wlio needs killing. War is hell-arious. Warhammer's attitude is summed up by associate producer Josh Drescher, and the way he recently phrased WOW quests. He thinks the "kill ten squirrels and collect some magic daisies brigade are missing out on proper war. But how to turn a such a player into a bloodthirsty RvR fanatic?
Mythic know it's a conversion process for some, so they're going to coax you into the battlezones. At first with a mission to find someone. Then maybe you'll have to help out a little bit. Then kill a specific person, then Well, by then Mythic reckon youll be hooked, so its more likely you'll need coaxing out. Certainly, playing against other humans can be frustrating. They dont just stand there, and they don't run away at predictable low-health triggers.
They jump around like idiots while you're trying to smite them, and they come back with higher-level mates when you kill them. For most MMOs, this is something to be feared and shunned. For Mythic, however, it's PvE players who are nuts - why play identical, instanced dungeons when you can have the infinite variety of huge, human-populated wars? Perkins namechecks Counter-Strike more than once. The Chaos Hordes are a stunning bunch of freaks, and if youre into PvP, it'll be as natural as a barrel of ducks rolling into a pond.
To get the most out of the game, players of non-PvP-orientated games will have to pull their socks up, hone their tactics and - how to put this delicately - grow a set of balls. He's certainly famous in game development circles, simply because he makes disarmingly honest comments and has a mouth that never stops frothing with interesting, and often unpublishable, stories. He's also known to fans of Warhammer as the bloke at conventions, getting everyone to talk into his phone's video camera.
Deputy content director Kate Flack unpictured due to unwillingness to send a bad photo has a long history with Warhammer too. Jon Blyth met Paul and Kate in the foyer of a hotel, helped himself to the endless bowls of complimentary nuts, and talked to them about making a game.
There's a great gravestone which marks the death of the dwarf explorer 'Thorskin Thrumek'. So you've got a place called 'Thorskin's End', and if you look at the gravestone, it says 'It was a sticky one'. So this dev put his dad in the game as an engineer where he's working with the dwarves on a bit of plumbing. He took a screenshot of it and emailed it to his dad who was like 'Aww, my son's put me in the game. Isn't that awesome!
You can say 'Can you do it an octave lower than that? They're absolutely astonishing and they're worth every penny. Older lady, but she's got that kinda deep sultry voice we wanted for the that class. Her son and his friends are all into Warhammer, and she's now really upset because her son's friends keep taking the piss out of him, saying 'Who is that?
She sounds really hot! Brad Derrick was our composer, we flew him over to Prague to watch it. He walks into the hall with this enormous fur coat and big Elton John glasses. The orchestra hands Brad a baton and says, 'Mr Derrick, if you would'. He looks at the baton and the orchestra, and thinks Tm in a bit of trouble here'. Being the American abroad, he picks it up thinking 'This is just going to be terrible,' and he's sweating profusely in that coat.
Four steps from the podium, this hand taps his shoulder. It's the conductor saying, 'I think that's for me'. Turns out the orchestra do this with everybody as an icebreaker, and they see how long it is before the person looks like they're gonna lose their mind.
Ihave a scheduled time in my day to just relax and play the game and see how people are using it. The people are the fifth participle in the game. They're the bit you anticipate during development and try and design around, but until you see how they're talking, what they're saying, what the slang is, how they're using the game, what they intend to do, you just don't know.
I can finally play RvR instead of being repeatedly crushed into the ground by our QA team, who are total ninjas. So I go into a game shop you can guess which one , thinking it'd be great to see WAR at maybe number two in their chart, near the top.
It's at number It's beneath Morrowind. It's six places under Simon the Sorcerer 4. There's clearly something terribly, terribly wrong. I ring up our people and they confirm the shop's wrong - it's number one everywhere. It's one of the most lunatic decisions I think I've ever come across. I love watching people playing the game, though.
I log on to a roleplaying server and watch people doing their crazy roleplay. A lot of it is really funny. I was running around in RvR with two other players.
We decided to take a battlefield objective and were attacked by a bunch of NPCs. He was going, 'My face is being humped by a Cold One! Three years of their lives has been spent creating this thing, working on it every day, overtime, obsessively ranting to your wife about it, your kids don't see you because you're making this damn game. And suddenly it's like, 'This is an awful lot of people rating us on Metacritic', which is refreshing.
Universal acclaim. I want that to be frozen exactly where it is for posterity, so people can see it and go 'Ahh, very clever'. Anyone giving it a lower score should be ashamed of themselves. This Is One of the first, if not the first, MMOs to truly sit down and make sure that players work together from the start, shedding the ironic selfishness of a genre that's meant to get people playing together in the first place.
It's weird to say it, but until you play Warhammer Online and take part in the war itself - taking battlefield objectives, winning scenarios, and fighting in glorious public quests -you'll look back on how much time you spent soloing in WOW and sob. The backstory is that the Age of Reckoning has finally been reached, and the armies of Destruction have decided to lay waste to everything.
The forces of Order are trying to hold back the vnpce. Mythic have absolutely taken the Warhammer mythos by the horns, embracing every part of the grim fantasy without pulling any punches. While the mollycoddling is there in the sense of players being eased into the game through a selection of easy quests and hand-holding throughout the first few levels, you will be at war with other players well before level 10, and depending on what side you're on, you're going to do something uniquely Warhammer.
Ores kick dwarves off of the side of buildings, the Empire has the warhost on its doorstep and watch as its crops burn and people are slaughtered, and the Dark Elves release gigantic dinosaurs to eat people laying flowers at graves. The atmosphere is one of having no safe haven, one that draws you right into the conflict and gives you the drive necessary to slaughter your way through lines of your enemies.
And the real beauty of war is that this isn't all fluff - you're at war, from the off, constantly, and it's fun. PvP or realm vs realm as it's known in WAR, and the rest of this review is an integrated, fun-packed and addictive part of the game. You control one of 20 careers classes , split reasonably evenly between the two realms sides of Order and Destruction.
Choosing a side locks whichever server you join to that side, to stop people from playing cross-realm spy games with each other. The realm of Order is made up of the Empire, high elf and dwarf armies, and the realm of Destruction holds the Chaos Warhost, dark elf House and the Greenskin aaagh!. The latter is the only non-racial army - it's made up of pres and goblins -and will probably end up being flooded by roleplaying types who insist on typing everything like the bower boy ores they're playing as.
Careers are army specific see 'Career progression' , split between the archetypes of tanking, healing, ranged damage and up-close melee damage. There's some that overlap, such as the Bright Wizard and the Sorcerer, to keep the lore-monkeys happy without blocking players from their favourite role. The careers fit reasonably comfortably into the usual class roles, with a few notable differences. Careers are fess dependent on the hpool of mana or energy, and each has a special mechanic they depend on to do most damage.
While abilities use action points, they generally depend on some other source to do the most damage. For exampfe, the Black Ore, as he uses different attacks, moves towards 'Da Best Plan,' a state that lets him unleash his most damaging attacks. The Bright Wizard builds combustion with each attack, doing more powerful and frequent critical hits, but also damaging himself in the process.
There's a degree of micromanagement that requires you to be a little more alert than the average thumping of keys. It's not rocket science, neither is it really doing much to advance the basic mechanics of MMO combat, but it's satisfying, playable, and most importantly it works. If you've read any of Mythic's press releases, you'll know they've built WAR with the idea of a gigantic battle held firmly in their mind.
From the outset, you're introduced to the other side as a marauding force of evil or as your upstart prey. You'll be flung in the case of the Greenskins, literally, from a catapult into direct combat with the other side's PvE forces. Everything has a "point" to it, and thankfully, you'll always find the items you need on the monster you kill. If you're getting dwarf skulls, you can bet that each dwarf you kill will drop one, and there's a welcome lack of quests involving the butchery of random wildlife.
They're there, and yes, there's a butchery trade skill, but at least there's something approaching a storyline behind them. There was a danger that Mythic could have made anything PvE-related effectively foreplay for the player vs player environments, as they did with Dark Age of Camelot. But there's a strong marriage between both. RvR and PvE content.
The most obvious - and arguably the most enjoyable - is the public quest system. These are essentially walk-in quests that rely on groups of people to complete. You complete f objectives to advance the quest through : stages See 'The anatomy of a public quest' , gaining influence and experience as you go, with the biggest contributors those who do the most damage, buff people the most, heal the most rolling dice for the biggest rewards from the quest.
The influence you gain is specific to the chapter of the game's story you're on, and as you gain more you get access to Basic, Advanced and Elite rewards. The idea of grouping with strangers usually sends chills down people's spines, but WAR introduces open groups that you can choose to join automatically.
As everybody receives the experience and 9 influence from the public quest, and you can't really advance them on your own, PQ's grow a spirit of teamwork within even ardent soloists. WAR opens up grouping to those who would not group, and gives them pause to consider doing it in the future. While there's a lot of good, run-of-the-mill questing to be had, these public quests pervade the entire game, and are rewarding and fun on a scale that trumps almost anything we've seen in WOW.
The later ones even have raid-style content, and making a warband a raid party is as simple as right-clicking and selecting "form warband. Public quests also help tie together the PvE content with RvR. There're some such as the Kron Komar Gap where both realms actively complete a public quest in front of each other, with real players killing both each other and AI soldiers to advance their separate quest.
The reward for doing so is not only influence, but control of the surrounding area and access to extra facilities and quests. It's a lovely surprise how well integrated and commonplace they become, too. It's so common for MMOs to talk about new hot features, and then fail to integrate them meaningfully into the game, that we were ready for public quests to be a let-down. They aren't. What's shocking is how thoroughly enjoyable RvR is, even for people who're reluctant to face up to PvP combat.
It's introduced very early on, with a selection of quests from a war camp where you're given quests, much like NPC-related ones but relating to real, live players. You descend into specific RvR areas to capture objectives, which can provide tactical advantages healing boons and NPC guards and fight your fellow man.
Killing him nets you both your normal experience and "renown," which levels a completely separate pool of 80 Renown Levels, with their own rewards, tactics and morale see Tactics and morale'. As you advance, these objectives become bigger and harder to conquer, ranging from a gun emplacement to a gigantic keep surrounded with soldiers, with rewards to match the scale of the effort.
Each time you complete one of these smaller objectives, you bring the current area closer to being under your control. This keeps the war constantly fresh, as arriving in a zone to find you're not netting those gains gets you fired up to rip somebody's guts out. That, and you get experience and renown for killing them, so the risk versus reward of going after a skilled opponent makes it genuinely tempting. There's a real synergy between renown and experience.
As you gain renown levels, you can buy new equipment that's useful for both questing and RvR. The same goes for quest rewards, which are less rewarding but less time-consuming than your average man-barney, and still manage to gear you up reasonably well. In fact, WAR caters very convincingly to the PvE-aholic, but also leaves a tasty-looking trail of breadcrumbs to the RvR dark side, with experience rewarding quests for getting involved.
It's also far less time-intensive than anything in WOWs PvP-circuit, as in a minute game you can run into an RvR battlefield, chop a few heads off, and then bugger off to Tesco. It's a simple, well-designed and brilliantly executed system that oozes with well-realised lore and the necessary atmosphere to draw you into the conflict. Mythic have used the Warhammer licence well, and created a structurally sound MMO that's actually multiplayer game, with enticing elements for both the lower and higher end players.
An issue, however, is how much high-end content will be available that caters to large-scale PvE grinders. There isn't, however, any question of the quality. Mythic have done exceedingly well in creating interesting, story driven quests, and have created the first major advance in the genre - public qnests - since content was instanced to avoid players cramming together. Ironically, that's actually what makes' WAR such a joy. Mythic have taken this idea and put it on its head, making it a good thing when an area is crammed with people trying to do the same thing by rewarding everybody for taking part.
Even when you're not a top contributor in a public quest, you still receive a bounty of influence and experience. In RvR battlefields, defending Keeps and other areas from assaults still rewards everybody for being in the area.
The land even changes as realms take control of different areas, taking away the classic MMO-stodge of static, immovable content.
By giving players so many options and making everything so cohesive and interesting, Mythic will score many disenfranchised Battleground-lovers, along with a slew of bored PvErs from a multitude of games with broken promises.
Ultimately, their ongoing support and the amount of people that play WAR will be what makes or breaks the game, mostly because it gets more fun when more people get involved. For now, it's up to the players. This is such a strongly community-driven game that it guarantees that there will be some bitter, angry struggles in the Age of Reckoning, and we hope that Mythic and European publishers and server-runners GOA are prepared to support it The license is strong, the game is great, and the quality of the content is second-to-none.
If servers are stable, players are listened to, and expansion content is as well tweaked, inventive and superbly written as its launch material, this could be the game that savages WOWs subscription numbers. The general aim of WAR'S careers is to get players into the fray - so there isn't one that can't make themselves useful in a scrap, no matter what play style they have.
The Disciple of Khaine and Warrior Priests' healing abilities are rooted in their offensive abilities, and are good enough to hold their own even against the tougher melee opponents. Even basic melee careers, like the Black Ore and the Stabbin' Squig Herder, are kept lively by their adaptability.
Squig Herders have three types of squig that adapt to any solo or group situation, and Black Ores are equal parts damage-dealer and super-tank.
The Tome of Knowledge, rather than being a simple place to read your quests from, catalogues your escapades over the various chapters of the WAR storyline, as well as rewarding you for completing certain tasks.
Kill squigs, and you get a experience reward. Click yourself times and receive the title 'Ow My Eye'. More complex Tome Unlocks, as they're known, will require you going across the entirety of the Warhammer World, but reward you with Tome Tactics specific to the achievement. The TOK also keeps track of where you've been, how many things you've killed, and just how much experience fulfilling its dark desires has netted you. The upcoming launch of Age of Reckoning has lit a cold fire in many guts.
Suddenly, unexpected people are popping up and showing a surprising knowledge of words like Tzeentch, Khaine and Sigmar. Who knew, when we were reading those rulebooks and manuals all those years ago, that Games Workshop were laying their dirty lore eggs in our fertile teenage brains, set to hatch as adults? If you're a fan of any comparable MMO, we definitely can tell you how you'll feel after spending your first 20 hours in WAR: you'll be awestruck and overwhelmed. You'll have about five characters on the go, and you'll be trying to decide which one you'll take into the higher levels first.
You'll be considering a graphics card upgrade. Having spoken to a number of people who've played the opening zones of Warhammer Online, there's a surprising consensus: it beats the living shit out of World of Warcraft, and no-one wants to go back. We'll have our full review next issue, but we simply couldn't resist spending an issue telling you exactly what you'll discover should you choose to drink down a free trial draught of Mythic's canny poison.
The first decision you'll face is which faction you want to join - Order or Destruction. These are actually called realms, and aren't to be confused with WOWs realms, which are fancily named servers. You then decide which army to join: the Order have High Elves, Dwarfs or the human's Empire, or if you prefer Destruction, you can choose from Dark Elves, Greenskins Ores, Goblins, Giants and the like and Chaos humans corrupted by demonic forces. These choices decide which opening storylines you'll encounter.
For instance, choose to be a human from the Empire and you'll find yourself in the battlefields of Nordland, with almost no time to get used to your class before you're attacking the hordes of Chaos. Choose to be the fungal Greenskins, and you'll be thrown into a siege of a dwarven fortress, and onto the stunties1 ramparts using catapults. Join the pious High Elves in their battle against the Khaine-worshipping Dark Elves, and you'll find yourselves defending a continent that's had a ruddy great ship full of the bastards driven into the side.
So the opening areas May 19, Warhammer Online 1. This program doesn't seem to be compatible with your operating system. You might prefer to download the Mac version of Warhammer Online. A turn based role playing game that draws it theme from the popular horror series Five Nights At Freddys. A modification for the application Garry's Mod which allow users to play the classic pc game PropHunt.
This site is not directly affiliated with Electronic Arts. The download will be executed through a download manager.
The mentioned download manager doesn't have any relationship with the author.
0コメント