Warhammer Online Open Beta To Begin September 7th 144
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."
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).
Re:Open Beta? (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 at 'full retail', and still have enough people signed up.
There is no reason whatsoever for the game publisher not to capitalize on this situation.
I don't blame you for not wanting to participate in these idiotic frenzies, but your contempt is misplaced, it belongs squarely on your 'fellow gamers'. They are the ones falling for this nonsense in droves.
That said, 'open beta' has multiple purposes:
1) Its good advertising, part of the hype
2) Once the game is 'done' it gives you some final stress testing before launch.
3) Because these games can't really have 'demos' the 'beta' is the best chance of getting a preview.*
* Its not usually until well after launch that you can create 7 or 14 day trial accounts. And this is for a few reasons, the biggest one is straight up pragmatic capacity. They want to provide a playable game for the paying customers, and having everyone dogpile on with a free trial account will overload their capacity, without providing any revenue to increase capacity. During the beta, its ok for the servers to be down, for logins attempts to be rejected because its 'full', etc, but you can't do that to paying customers.
As applied to Warhammer Online --given that we already know the content has been stripped down for launch, the short open beta window and pre-order arrangement to get in suggests the following to me:
1) They are running behind and over budget, and can't afford to delay launch. Meanwhile just getting the what they are still committed to getting done for launch is still squeezing them for time, and the open beta window is as long as they can make it. This does singal trouble, but isn't necessarily a disaster. That explains the short window, but not the cost of getting in...so
2) The hype machine has done its job well, and the number of people lined up for open beta and anticipated at launch already exceeds their launch capacity, so they don't really need or want to offer any 'freebies' to grab more people. It doesn't say anything about the quality of the game, but from the business side of things, it means the game is going to sell well.
Your alternate explanation, that they are desperate for cash, and the game is shit, so they are making getting into the beta a pre-order situation to extract some cash before the world catches on to the fail is needlessly complicated. All that is required for this to happen is for their to be massive enough demand. The game can be simply 'ok' or even 'good' and the massive demand to be in the beta would enable them to link it to pre-ordering and capitalize on the hype.
Soney did this first with Everquest2, as I recall. They had a variety of contests and whatnot to get into the eq2 beta, but the one sure-fire method, was to buy a copy of "Heroes of Norrath" or whatever their idiotic EQ related RTS [real-time-strategy game] was called, which came with a 'beta slot' for EQ2. Personally, I think more people bought the RTS for the EQ2 beta slot than for the actual game.
And EQ2, while it wasn't "awesome", it wasn't "epic fail" either. And the selling of beta slots via their RTS wasn't indicitive of them trying to cash in on EQ2 before people caught on that it was shit, but rather it was simply because there was enough demand for the beta, that, in their case, by bundling beta slots to a game that nobody really wanted, they were able to sell a LOT more copies of that game, and capitalize on the demand. They phrased it as a bonus for buying the RTS, because like you a lot of p
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?
Re:Oh yes... (Score:3, Interesting)
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 a pvp mmo with a little bit of pve content tossed in, which is there mainly to align the story line for each of the 6 races. As far as exploration goes, it has quite a great deal of content.
As a Closed beta person, I don't crash, I don't lag, I don't get dc'ed (except to patch). I have fun, and there are not that many bugs to actually report. For a 'beta' product, this is almost unheard of. Especially having done several other beta's (9 or so) over the past few years. Most beta's are terrible products (wow, hellgate, several of the uo's, shadowbane, to name a few).
And yes, the lack of economy is a very, very, good thing. Crafting is in, but its not an important aspect. If you need something, you can either quest for it, via the Public Quest (great damn feature), or you can kill folks in rvr to nab your skills and loot.
Blizzard best hope that WotLK is damn near perfect and has some great pvp, if not, they are gonna loose quite a bit of clientele.
Re:Oh yes... (Score:3, Interesting)
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 point system. Sieges are in and have been stress tested for days.
Battles are epic and because of the design choices they made with regard to player clipping, push backs, and knockdowns, you will find that position matters a lot more in this game than others you may have played. The "tactic" system is very good and adds another level of depth to the game. Tactics are like passive abilities that might improve certain skills or resists, but you can only have a few active at once while in combat. Combining tactics with talents and the pvp renown points makes for a high degree of variety in what build you want for your character.
Lingering issues are some class imbalances and the graphics, plus the cities and classes they took out. The game as it is is very, very enjoyable for a beta.
Re:I'm in CE Closed Beta (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 based on certain combos of spells. I've been playing a magus which generally I start out by summoning a demon first and sicing him on the target with me hitting him with a no time cast but 10 second cool down spell and then follow up with another ranged 3 second cast by no cooldown spell and then again and then the burst spell.
Its not like playing a console fighting game with combos but its not simply click on the enemy and press auto attack either.
Somewhere in between... I personally don't find it overwhelming but its not that slow either.