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Warhammer Online Open Beta To Begin September 7th
Posted by
Soulskill
on Tue Aug 19, 2008 05:05 PM
from the open-is-relative dept.
from the open-is-relative dept.
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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Warhammer Online Delayed Again 63 comments
EA Mythic CEO Mark Jacobs, in a new 'State of the Game' address on the Warhammer Herald site, revealed that Warhammer Online has been pushed back to at least April of next year. The game was originally slated for release this fall, and then was pushed to around February of next year. As always, the fearsome demon of polish is what's keeping the team hard at work through the holidays: "When we looked at our options, two paths lay before us: 1) Ship the game on time with fewer features and less polish, or 2) Extend the development cycle and spend the needed time and money to make WAR great. We chose the latter path - to invest additional time and effort in implementation and polish to make WAR great. Fortunately, we have the resources and support of EA behind us to extend our development cycle; time that will be used to make sure the game is everything we want it to be. WAR is coming, and it will be glorious." He notes also that they'll begin a new phase of testing next month, kicking Beta back into high gear.
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Warhammer Online Sees Massive Content Removal To Make Launch 397 comments
Zonk is reporting that the Warhammer Online team has decided to keep their launch deadline firm. Unfortunately, in order to do so, they are pulling quite a few things from the game. Four of the six capital cities are being removed, as well as four of the character classes (two of which were considered the primary "tanking" classes for their race). The team emphatically claims that this has nothing to do with EA. Does this hurt their chances for success more than simply delaying the launch date?
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Road to WAR Website Launched 64 comments
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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Oh yes... (Score:2, Insightful)
This isn't going to be a disastrous release at all is it! 11 day open beta? With half the content now removed.
Earlier this year I was really excited for this game but the release looks like it has epic fail written all over it.
Hope I'm wrong, as the game truly has some innovation going on, but man...
Re:Oh yes... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:I'm in CE Closed Beta (Score:5, Informative)
And since they just lifted the NDA I can openly talk about this.
Yes, the game has some rough edges, but damn its got a lot of content.
Way too much content so I ended up skipping a lot of it just to explore areas.
Anyways, coming from the background of a GW fan, I will say that Mythic has captured the atmosphere quite well. There is always something to do and I never found myself saying to myself "Hey... I'm just grinding."
Yeah some of it was, but it wasn't a boring grinding.
There isn't an economy to speak of, but I believe maybe that was the best design decision ever to make a game without an economy rather than a broken economy that inspires gold farmers and imbalances the game.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I never played WoW but its a lot faster paced than EQ in my opinion. They use AP (Action Points) instead of mana which everyone has for special skills (melee included).
It also seems that you quickly regenerate HP as well quickly between battles so there isn't any down time which I found very nice. Of course the same applies to mobs so if you wail on a mob and then run away long enough to get you HP back up the mob will have his HP back full as well.
Yes, I find myself pounding the keyboard in certain orders
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So they removed some content, guess what. The other 95% of the game is still there.
Inevitable city and the Order version of Inevitable are pretty damn big, especially with the ranked content that is available to a ranked city (3-5 stars).
The game itself is very fun, and from the getgo (level 3) your into scenario pvps, with regular rvr by level 8. It is not meant to be a standard pve mmo. It is
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It's all live, and ready to go day one. You won't have to wait a year for battlegrounds, pvp ranks, or pvp gear. There are already more than 15 battlegrounds in the game with variations on objectives and scoring. There are realm ranks (pvp ranks), which not only allow you to purchase pvp gear, but also give you access to something like a pvp talent
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What he said.
I'm in the closed beta too, and while I've not played as extensively as I could have (got in the day before going on holiday, how cruel...) I've had a hell of a lot of fun.
It does lack some polish in some areas, but given it's competing with a title that's been out what, nearly 4 years, it seems very complete. The various ways RvR takes place are all good. My particular favourite aspect is the lack of one-shotting in PVP, you'll never get close to that, so battles are more strategic, and a go
The capital cities have been removed (Score:2, Troll)
The bean counters with their MBA's came in and removed 4 of the 6 major cities citing to move this project out by christmas rather than doing it right.
I think I will be sticking with Wow for awhile after hearing this.
Re:The capital cities have been removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:The capital cities have been removed (Score:4, Informative)
Of course, WoW never tried to put out 24 classes either. SO when they implement another 10, that's a good comparison. At their rate, if they add it to the next expansion, it will have taken them 5 years. I bet WAR does it faster.
As for the capital cities- it may actually come out for the best. With 3 cities it was going to be very much 3 separate wars with no effect on each other. Now it will be a series of interconnected battles- someone fighting on Empire/Chaos cares about Dwarf/Greenskin and Elf/Dark Elf, because if any 2 of the 3 are captures the city can be sieged.
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Re:The capital cities have been removed (Score:5, Informative)
When you play the game and realize that those cities are not just static cities like WoW, with NPCs that stand there and don't do anything, you'll understand why.
Each one of those cities is a full raid type environment designed for end-game players to capture, defeat several bosses within the city, and finally defeat the king of the city himself.
What happens is this: If one side, order or destruction, controls the keeps in all 3 pairings (dwarves v. greenskins, empire vs. chaos, high elves vs. dark elves), they have the ability to challenge the opposing side's capital city. This involves completing massive public quests within the city such as burning down buildings, killing champions (elite mobs), ransacking libraries, overtaking the sewer system, etc. The entire time, you're not only trying to complete these public quests in the opposing capital city, it's being defended by the opposing faction.
So, they chose to leave out 4 of 6 of the capital cities because it was just too much content to balance, especially because the content is not just PvE raid level bosses and the King himself, but also PvP content, essentially trying to kill the bosses and King while you're tackling PvP at the same time. It's just a lot to balance and tune effectively, and they decided it would push the release off too much.
They may release the cities later. I applaud them for wanting to make sure that the parts of the game they do release are of high quality, and not completely full of bugs.
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Re:The capital cities have been removed (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm having a blast playing. My biggest problem right now is that I'm spending too much time in it. Seriously though, play the game before you make any judgments (but I suspect you are just looking for reasons to dump on it regardless).
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Having played beta- the content in this game is PvP, pure and simple. If you like PvP, there is no competition. Wow is a sorry, sorry joke at it. If you like raiding- keep playing WoW. *Please* keep playing WoW, I don't want your everquest wannabe ass ruining another MMO.
Open Beta? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Players can get into the North American open beta by pre-ordering Warhammer Online from select retail partners."
How can it be called an "open beta" when you have to basically purchase the game?
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Re:Open Beta? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because everyone can join, whereas a "closed beta" means that only selected testers can join.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
There hasn't been a decent MMO since that didn't make you buy the game to get into beta (or at least have a decent shot). I think most of these developers realize their game has no chance so they try to grab as much money as they can before the playerbase realizes what a pile of shit it actually is (Age of Conan/Hellgate London/Tabula Rasa).
Bottom line: The demand for those beta slots is significant enough that they can 'restrict supply' to the level needed for a full on stress test, set the price of entry
The NDA is lifted, as well (Score:5, Informative)
I'm an elder beta tester, and here is my review:
The poor graphics gave me a really bad first impression, but the graphics are honestly better than WoW (not saying much), and we all know that graphics aren't everything, gameplay is king.
So, I decided to give it another shot with the 3.2 patch and jump into RvR.
So far I'm having a blast. You can level and XP in this game through either PvP or questing; you don't have to quest or grind at all. For me this is a major plus because I love levelling through PvP.
I wanted to talk for a second about some of the unique mechanics I noticed, which you might have already heard about before. The archmage I'm playing has a mechanic known as high magic, which the shaman also has, but it's called Waagh!. Basically, how it works is like this: If you cast damage spells, your healing counter goes up from 1 to 5, by a point for each damage spell you cast. If you cast healing spells, your damage counter goes up from 1 to 5, by a point for each healing spell you cast. This counter is like a charge that can be saved, but if you stop casting spells for 10 or 15 seconds you lose all the charges you have. If you cast a bunch of damage spells and build your counter up to 5, your next healing spell that normally would take 3 seconds to cast will be instant, and will heal for more. Likewise, if you build your healing counter up to 5, your next damage spell will hit harder. This unique dynamic encourages people to not just be healbots, but to be in the fray of battle, dishing out damage, and tossing out heals constantly. Every class has a similar unique mechanic, which will be refreshing for those of you used to filling a simple role (like healbot).
The RvR minigames are really well done and I jumped right into a queue with a level 3 archmage (healer, DoT archetype) and was able to contribute to battle right away. Think of instanced battlegrounds, but more fun because there are events that happen during the battle. For example, the RvR I was playing had 2 control points. If Empire or Chaos captured both of those points and held them for 10 seconds, a fireball would shoot out of the points, engulfing everything within about 100 feet and insta-killing everyone that was in it's path. It made things very dynamic because you could capture both points, and everyone would have to run out, resetting the points and allowing them to be captured again by you or the opposing team.
There are also keeps to capture in open RvR (world PvP), and with siege weapons such as catapults, burning oil, doors to break down, etc, it can be very epic. I've been in battles with over a hundred people on each side and the performance is pretty amazing considering how many people are participating.
Not only do you get XP for fighting in RvR, you also get RP, which are like PvP XP. You have two different levels, your Rank which is like your PvE level, and your Renown Rank, which is like your PvP level. When you get to certain Renown Ranks, you get access to buy
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Also Shaman is fantastic class to play, for me, the Waaagh! system combined with the fact that you have an Offensive and Defensive target makes it easy to go between DPS and healing in a group/warband.
Having played Shaman, Black Orc and Marauder mostly I would say that they all feel unique, challenging, yet fairly easy to get into. The fact tha
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WARDB (Score:2, Informative)
This coming weekend is Preview Weekend. I gather the idea is to stress-test the servers, not actually start the beta early.
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In answer to question 3, I would say that I really can't keep playing the same game non-stop. It's nice to have two going and flip between them, especially if the way they play differs radically. For example, I couldn't play WoW and DnD Online at the same time because they feel like the same game, but WoW and City of Heroes is fine.
ADD? What's that? Some kind of OH MY GOD THERE'S A KITTEN OVER THERE.
Re:I too have been in beta. (Score:4, Interesting)
I've seen plenty of places where skill overcame numbers. In the open field just last week my group beat a bunch of order who outnumbered us 2:1- by flanking them and hitting them from behind in their casters, while they engaged a small group of destruction running from them.
We won a keep battle the other day by skipping the lord and running through to the roof. When the order stupidly followed us up, we had everyone with a knockback use it to get them off the roof, and killed the remainder. WIth half the forces they couldn't stop us from taking the keep.
I won a scenario for Destruction yesterday pretty much by myself. In a capture the flag scenario, we were 12 minutes (out of 15) in and down by 20 points, neither team had captured yet. I saw their flag carrier slightly apart from the group on the right, with their group concentrating on the left side of the battle. I got 100 DM, ran in and gibbed him, expecting it to be a suicide mission. They ran at me with 5 melee dps/tanks. I hit them all with the AoE root spell, hit sprint, and got out of their safely. I then helped guide our carrier to the cap zone for the only cap and win (having to kill a few DPS who were attacking him).
Plenty of room for the good to beat numbers in open world and scenario based combat. Perhaps you aren't actually as good as you think you are?
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