Warhammer Producer Discusses Australian Launch, Game Details, and More 30
Josh Drescher, associate producer for the upcoming Warhammer Online, recently had a chance to chat with Gamespot about some of the recent changes on the horizon. Good news for Australian consumers who are slavering over EA's new title, it will not only be launched in Australia at the same time as the US and Europe but local servers will be set up to allow for better play. "From the very beginning the Australian fans were very vocal. One of the first strange packages that we got in the mail a couple of years ago was from an Australian fan who sent us a bunch of drop bear stuffed animals, and he attached fangs to them and there was blood all over their faces — and was basically threatening [producer] Jeff Hickman and letting him know that if there weren't Oceanic servers, that he would send a drop bear invasion to attack the developers physically."
Blood bowl (Score:4, Interesting)
I disaggree (Score:4, Interesting)
1. EQ2 already tried the blatant commercialism route, where even single instances get sold as "adventure packs" if they aren't big enough for an expansion pack.
Heck, most of their expansion packs are the kind of micro-transactions that you seem to favour, only priced too much. Their _largest_ expansion pack, Echoes of Faydweyr, introduced... two races, their newbie-ish areas and capital cities. I.e., it was pretty much comparable in size to the Draenei and Blood Elves of Burning Crusade, including their two zones each. But without the whole Outlands, which made the meat of Burning Crusade. I.e., it was pathetically small compared to Blizzard's one EP.
I don't think it did much to bring new players. It did, however, leave a lot of people with a bad sensation of being fleeced, quartered and dimed by Sony.
2. More classes just create more confusion, and a bigger chaos trying to balance them all. Plus, since there are only so many types of actions that even make sense in a game, you either
A) end up with classes which are almost identical, and add nothing new except confusion. (Did we really need 6 f-ing kinds of priests, among which two almost identical druids, in EQ2? One is slightly better at healing, unless you put your talents in offense, and one is slightly better at offensive magic, unless you put your talents in healing. Or did we really need Brigand, Swashbuckler and Assassin as different _classes_ instead of Rogue specs? Seriously, wtf? One class and 3 talent trees would do the same job just fine.)
B) have to restrict what other classes can do, so they don't overlap. (E.g., to have a class whose specialty is healing over time, you have to not give others such spells, or a severely gimped choice of them. Or to make a sub-class of mage recognizable by its AOEs, you have to have a different one that's got none or very few/weak. See EQ2 again. Or better yet, see COH.) Unfortunately that also makes the class less interesting to play. One of the attraction points of WoW is that there's so much different stuff you can do, and combine in interesting ways. A class which mostly just does the same thing over and over again, is repetitive and ultimately boring. And that's what you get if you try too hard to slice classes too thin.
Even in miniature games, you have more than one kind of unit in your army, and can alternate what you take in your army. So you can have narrow-focus "classes", because the player can then just make a mix of several of them.
In a MMO you play exactly one character (at a time.) If that one character is pushed into a very narrow role, and just pushes the same few buttons over and over again, it becomes boring fast.
3. Unused instances don't require any CPU cycles, because they're, you know, not instanced. And it's fairly trivial to not update some NPCs if noone is within range. I don't know how Blizzard coded it, but I wouldn't be too surprised if they're not wasting much.
4. As someone who still plays lower level alts too, I can tell you that virtually no outdoors zones became baren Wastelands.
You can't do much in the Outlands until level 58. Technically you can get a portal there earlier (I had Shattrath as my home on one char as early as level 11), but it's not like you can even take any quests or do much there. So you'll still have to level up from 1 to 58 the old fashioned way. Other than a couple of level 55+ zones like Silithus or EPL, nothing was hit too hard by the expansion pack.
The former grind instances are pretty much the only ones which became wastelands. But let's be honest: that grind sucked to start with. That's why people dropped them as soon as they had half a choice.
5. The "boosting" market isn't that horrible a phenomenon. Sure, half the people do their low level instances by following a level 70, but you still can find others which do their instances the old fashioned way.
If anything, it's more of a problem of class than an
Re:prediction for Warhammer online (Score:3, Interesting)
A bigger cause of empty zones is they are hard coded for characters of a specific level. Elwynn Forest and Dun Morogh become just a path to get someplace else, an no one goes to Teldrassil unless forced to by a quest. As you advance through levels you abandon a tier at a time. LOTRO has the same problem with parts of Bree, the Shire, and Evendim. Which seems like a huge waste of zones and quests. Not to mention there are some zones you like, and some you hate, but in the current system you have to play them all. When I find that I'm losing interest in a MMO, it's usually because I'm in a zone I don't find all that interesting. And have to stay there until I pick up 5 or so levels.
If they changed the zones so that they adapted to the character, then you could complete quests and explore the zones for your own race and then move into the next. And then go back as more quests are added to existing zones. If done right, it would also make it possible for characters with wide differences in level to group together without power leveling. If your character is supposed to be able to do 10% damage to a bear, it doesn't matter what zone it is in our how many hit points it should have. This, btw, would be a big advantage for long time players looking to introduce friends to the game.