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Road to WAR Website Launched
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Mon Aug 04, 2008 04:20 PM
from the taking-aim-at-the-entrenched-opponents dept.
from the taking-aim-at-the-entrenched-opponents dept.
Last week Mythic launched their "Road to WAR" website, allowing users to declare their allegiance, recruit friends, gather gold for the fight, and participate in a simple battle for self, state, and realm every week. In addition to the "prestige" of being on the leaderboard, you also have the ability to win in-game items and titles for launch. Looks like they really are hitting the warpath.
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Warhammer Online Open Beta To Begin September 7th 144 comments
Mythic Entertainment has announced that the open beta for the long anticipated Warhammer Online will begin on September 7th, eleven days before the finished game goes live on September 18th. We've previously discussed WAR's delays and the content cuts involved in reaching this deadline. In the meantime, Mythic's Road to WAR website (which we talked about earlier this month) is still available. The press release notes, "Players can get into the North American open beta by pre-ordering Warhammer Online from select retail partners."
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And the site is down for maintainence (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:And the site is down for maintainence (Score:4, Insightful)
or they don't want Slashdot to crash the sever.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The days when Slashdot could bring down a big-money website are long since past. Pipes are ever fatter, but Slashdot sure isn't growing.
War! (Score:5, Funny)
What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing!
Parent
boring (Score:5, Informative)
First, here's the actual site: http://www.road-to-war.com/ [road-to-war.com]
Next, it's down for maintenance, which I guess is temporary but not a good time for an announcement.
This is, though, a better way to promote the game than monthly emails with new information that amount to "no you're still not in the beta."
War... (Score:2)
War, war never changes....
Whoops.. wrong game.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If only...
...actually, I take that back. I can just imagine the horrible WoW grind-fest clone they could make out of a Fallout MMORPG.
Personally, every single time someone announces that some franchise that I really like is getting an MMORPG, I am sad. Right now we are in the "Doom clone" phase of MMORPG design. Doom was original for its time. It knocked people's socks off. Then out came thirty thousand Doom clones that add nothing except cosmetic changes and slight refinements of gameplay. MMORPG des
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CS? (Score:2, Funny)
Obviously since no one thought it prudent to mention what game this post is about, it must be about CounterStrike, since those are the only people with the sort of tunnel vision to think that everyone else in the world plays the same and only game as them.
No Mac support. (Score:2)
Yawn.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Welcome to the real world.
Would you like to play most computer games?
[Y/N]?
Y
Buy a PC?
[Y/N]?
Y
Anti-mac post on games.slashdot (Score:2)
Re-yawn.
Aussie servers (Score:3, Informative)
Good bad or ugly a lot of Aussies are going to play this just because it has servers based in Australia. Hooray! Goodbye 500ms pings!
I played Warhammer Beta... it's alright, fun even. But it's a MMORPGer and I just don't have the time for the grind any more :(
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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Blizzard's IP is based off of WARs IP, I thought everyone knew that...
Sadly, the abuse of GW IP is making WHFB fans cry... I'm talking about Mythic, not Blizzard.
And the crazy tunnel vision for a teen rating. Seriously, Khorne is weeping softly for the lack of blood in this game.
Re:Dead site... hopefully WAR will be better (Score:5, Insightful)
Since you want to compare Warhammer Online with World of Warcraft so badly...
They are launching a fraction of the content they were intending to have. Significant content too. Its like Blizzard shipping WoW with just Stormwind and the Undercity as capital cities.
They cut four character classes and are still shipping with 20 classes. How many character classes does WoW have right now? 20 classes is a lot to ship an MMO with in the beginning. They felt that those four classes that were cut were just not up to par with their expectations, and they may never see the light.
The capital city cuts were pretty bad, but it would have been worse had they shipped with six half-assed cities. They did discuss the fact that those cut cities will be reinserted into the game and will not charge for it.
They address this information about class and city cuts here [warhammeronline.com].
People are content with WoW, especially with a new expansion releasing in 3-4 months. They don't feel like levelling up a new character in a MMO which is redone DAoC content.
Speak for yourself - not all people are content with WoW. If you read through some of the Warhammer Online forums, you'll see plenty of people who are getting sick of WoW and cannot stand the daily grind and the static classes. I am quitting WoW as soon as WAR is released. Even if WAR sucks, I'm not going back to WoW. The quests are too redundant, there is absolutely ZERO reward for exploration of the map, your in-game actions have no impact on the environment, and the classes are just too static.
If you want to be successful in dungeons and raiding, you have to follow the same path as anyone else. You almost cannot be versatile in how you play. I'm not sure how it is now in WoW as I haven't played in a few months, but at one point, if you want to be a warrior and play end-game content, you cannot be fury. BM hunters were avoided. Combat rogues were ignored. And so on. Even if you did end up in a decent group as an arcane mage or survival hunter, you couldn't contribute. There was always just one recipe to success and that was what killed the game for me.
And there are plenty of people who feel that WAR is not their cup of tea. That's perfectly fine. WAR was never intended to compete with WoW. WoW has its bright spots that WAR will never touch.
No PvE endgame in WAR. Endgame just like DAoC, a game made over five years ago.
They already discussed endgame content [massively.com] - remember, this is NOT a PvE game. End game content is there, but not completely finished. Many games do not ship out with complete end game content. WoW barely had any in the first year, and Age of Conan has a somewhat broken end-game system.
The bottom line is that you really cannot compare the two games. They seek to cater to two different groups of people - people who want an on-going raid in a realm vs. realm environment with public quests (WAR), and those that want highly polished end-game content with battlegrounds tacked on. (WoW)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, I know I am cutting your reply to hell, and I agree with most of it but...
The quests are too redundant, there is absolutely ZERO reward for exploration of the map
They are changing this with the new expansion - titles and such.
If you want to be successful in dungeons and raiding, you have to follow the same path as anyone else. You almost cannot be versatile in how you play. I'm not sure how it is now in WoW as I haven't played in a few months, but at one point, if you want to be a warrior and play end-game content, you cannot be fury. BM hunters were avoided. Combat rogues were ignored. And so on. Even if you did end up in a decent group as an arcane mage or survival hunter, you couldn't contribute. There was always just one recipe to success and that was what killed the game for me.
This is a result of people being close-minded, not the way things actually worked. I've played a fury warrior since the inception of WoW and have done quite well the whole way through. In fact, I was upset when they made several of the changes to Fury to make it "better" In some ways it was better, but in others the change sucked. That's the nature of redesigning
No, not really (Score:4, Interesting)
Actually, IMHO 20 classes are entirely too much. I don't know about WAR, but I can compare WoW to EQ2's 24 class bonanza, and actually WoW is the more fun one there.
In WoW, the classes are distinct _and_ have a decent amount of flexibility, allowing them to be more than one-trick ponies. Except in end-game raids, I guess.
By comparison, EQ2's classes are confusing _and_ 1-2 trick ponies all the time. When you spread things that thin, either you have massive overlap, or have to slice abilities too thin to keep them unique. And thus end up with linear, non-interesting classes. Or, if you're bad at it, the worst of both worlds.
E.g., did we need _two_ druid classes in EQ2? One is better at offense, but can put it's talents into becoming a good healer too. The other one starts better at healing, but ends up sucking at both. Well, I guess at least you have a choice ;)
For that matter, why do we even need the druids as yet another healer class too? At least in WoW each druid shape has its unique gamplay, and the class is a unique jack-of-all-trades. In EQ2 they sliced classes too thin, that essentially they have 6 healer classes which differ only in whether they got healing, _or_ healing-over-time, _or_ preventing damage as their primary focus. Or one flavour is actually bad at all 3. The druid's animal shapes are just minor self-buffs. (And in a typical Sony stupidity, you can have two polymorphs, like, say, be a Wolf _and_ a Lion at the same time. But let's not go there.) It just illustrates what I'm talking about. All those classes just mean that each of them gets a small, uninteresting mix of tricks, because they had to slice it too thin.
Or did it need Assassin, Swashbuckler _and_ Brigand as rogues? Wth is wrong with one class and having the Assassin, Combat and Subtlety specs as talent trees, like in WoW? And again, all that slicing classes thin, pegs you into one narrow role from start to finish. Each gets less tricks up your sleeve than a WoW Rogue, which makes for rather less interesting gameplay.
Did the mages really need to be split the hard way into single-target mages and AOE mages? WTF?
Did we really need two Bard classes, where one buffs melee types and one buffs mages? WTF?
Etc.
And worse yet, it makes you choose something from the start, when you don't even know or understand the subtle differences between them all. Which healer class suits your play style better, if you want to be a healer in EQ2? Do you even understand what you forsake by picking Warden instead of Templar, on your very first day when you bought the game? Fuck if I knew, myself.
So, basically, I'm not impressed that it has more classes. More isn't necessarily better, as I've illustrated with EQ2. Now if you were to tell me that WAR has some unique classes that can do things a WoW class never dreamt of, I'd listen and be interested. But just splitting the same abilities among more slices, doesn't make a game better.
Still sounds like a half arse launch to me, either way.
Ah, yes, that cate
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If ignorance was bliss, the majority of posters would be orgasmic. You fit right in with that crowd.
Re: (Score:2)
I agree with the other response to your post. I've even heard it from blue posts in WOW: 'one spec to rule them all' is caused by players, not game design. They can make all the numbers work out on paper to be perfectly balanced, but if people in the forums and game keep spreading rumors that X is the only viable spec, then that becomes 'truth', because no one lets other specs into groups, etc.
Used to be that everyone said 17 arcane was 'required' for mages to get Imp. AE. The devs gave that to mages fre
Re: (Score:2)
Blizzard did ship WoW with just Stormwind and the Undercity as capital cities, I don't know if you ever went to Darnassus but it's just an empty shell. ie: completely dead contentwise, even 2 years after launch.
In fact, most of Kalimdor felt unfinished until content was patched in later on (Theramore is the most recent example of this).
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[2. Trade]Noobzorrz: I wanna buy an chant! for my daggarz!!! Who have daggar chant?
[2. Trade]Ptwink: Sure, I can do it, where are you?
[2. Trade]Noobzoorz (1):Shattrath!
[2. Trade]Ptwink(1): np, omw.
[2. Trade]Noo
Re: (Score:2)
In terms of quests/content, I would have thought the undercity was a lot more fleshed out. But I'll admit I never got an orc character to the point where they would have been getting quests out of orctown.
In any case, what I'm getting at is that as a rule of thumb the Eastern Kingdoms was far superior to anything in Kalimdor, either because they did Kalimdor before EK and learned how to do it better. Or because they did EK and then rushed it out with Kalimdor half done.
It's hard to say which is the case.
Re: (Score:2)
On a related side note, I liked reading Malcom Gladwell's The Tipping Point [google.com], which did an excellent job of explaining trends.
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The interested parties are probably still pretty pensive considering the previous announcements on what they had to excise from the game in order to meet their self-imposed release date.