"Live Expansion" Announced for Warhammer Online 170
Zonk brings word that Mythic has announced their plans to expand Warhammer Online in the coming months using a series of live events that will open up new careers, gear, and zones. The first event, planned for sometime in March, will allow access to the Dwarf Slayer and the Orc Choppa, as well as a new RvR scenario. Later, players will race to unlock a massive new zone, the Lands of the Dead. The expansion itself is titled "A Call to Arms," and it will be rolled out free of charge.
Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. " (Score:4, Informative)
Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. " (Score:3, Informative)
Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. " (Score:5, Informative)
I completely forgot, but Mythic has a bit of a history with "Live Expansions".
Typically their cycle in DAoC would be a free "Expansion" during the late spring/early summer timeframe, with a paid expansion in the late fall/early winter timeframe.
Examples of free "Summer" expansions would be Foundations (housing) and New Frontiers, and sometimes major game mechanics patches (such as spellcrafting the year before Foundations). There were fewer of these than paid expansions.
The paid expansions were typically yearly up until the past year (or was it two years ago they stopped?), when instead of another DAoC expansion, WAR was released. The paid expansions were Shrouded Isles, Trials of Atlantis (which led to DAoC's demise), Catacombs, , and Labyrinth of the Minotaur.
They Had Me, Then They Lost Me (Score:4, Informative)
That game brought my machine to it's knees, and I have an Intel Q6600-based quad-core machine with 4GB memory with an nVidia 8800GTS video card. It wasn't bad in most of the world, but when I was in the chaos city it became completely unusable.
When I first logged in, there were some people in the beginning areas. Then I didn't log in for a couple days, and those areas were completely deserted. I couldn't find anybody to do the group quests in. I was also getting tired of being one-shotted from a ridiculous distance if I happened to stray to close to an order town.
In the end I was completely underwhelmed with the gameplay, disgusted by the performance, perplexed at the unbelievable linearity of the game, and simply unwilling to waste any more time on it.
Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. " (Score:5, Informative)
- Netherwing quest hub
- Shatari Skyguard quest hub
- Ogri'la quest hub
- Zul'Aman 10-man raid and associated quests
- Sunwell Isle, including multiple quest hubs and a new 5-man instance
- Added a new quest hub in Dustwallow Marsh for people leveling new characters
They also progressively nerfed the crap out of the raid content to make it more accessible for casual players.
On top of that the vast majority of content in the TBC and WLK expansions is for "casuals". Look at the amount of quest content, the number of 5-man dungeons, new battlegrounds, etc. as compared to the amount of raid content.
If anything Blizzard is completely catering to the casual player.
Re:They Had Me, Then They Lost Me (Score:4, Informative)
Interesting; I have a very similiar system (Q9300, 4 GB, nVidia 8800 512 GT), and it ran pretty well on max settings, 1680x1050 in a Window (on 1920x1200 desktop).
Did you update your drivers? If I recall there was a known issue with older nVidia drivers.
The server migration did wonders - they overestimated expansion based on early demand and expanded too quickly, but by allowing people to migrate from lower pop servers to some mid pop servers, things really picked up.
That said, I did get bored and quit after a month, but I get bored of every game after a month or so (even WoW).
Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. " (Score:3, Informative)
Also, if you've been playing since release and bought the expansions, you've paid $700 (50 mo x 15 + 50 x 2). Since when was $700 reasonable for a game?
If you're a casual player, and you log in 10 hours per week, then you're getting 2000 hours( = 50 mo x 4 [wks/mo] x 10 [hr/wk]) of gameplay for those $700 dollars. Let's round that to 3 hours per dollar. The alternative, to a casual fantasy-loving gamer, would be to keep up with the steady stream of console RPGs that keeps coming out. If you don't care about getting the infinity plus one sword or reaching 101% completion (which you don't, because remember that you're a casual gamer), then it takes roughly 50 hours to beat any new game of the Dragon Fantasy variety. Last I checked, these games cost around $50 each, giving you about 1 hour for every $1 you spend on it. Sure, you could go for 101% completion if you wanted to, and that might stretch the game out to 150 hours and make it a match for WoW, but if you were that hardcore then you would probably be logging 30 hours per week in Azeroth and keeping the ratio about the same. WoW is cheap.
Re:They Had Me, Then They Lost Me (Score:3, Informative)
I have almost your same configuration and I'm running it without a problem:
MB: EVGA nforce 780i
CPU: Q6700 (not much difference)
MEM: 4GB OCZ
VIDEO: 8800 Ultra
I even tried it in a friend's Toshiba laptop and it worked perfectly. I don't know why it didn't ran well on your machine.
Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. " (Score:4, Informative)
... seriously. Is it "catering" at that point or "producing the product their player base is expecting?"
I never said it was bad. The OPs point is that Blizzard only cares about and only releases "free" content for raiders, which is demonstrably not true.
Re:They Had Me, Then They Lost Me (Score:3, Informative)
What did annoy me is that ranged had SUCH a far range that if an archer was on top of a hill he could blast you and you could not get away from you or out of his LOS so you were literally toast. But that is just gameplay.
With regards to LFG - the game is based on PVP you should have gone for the scenarios not the world events.
City of Heroes... (Score:2, Informative)
To All Those Posting About System Requirements (Score:4, Informative)
I am going to post this because I have seen so many people complain about system requirement issues in warhammer.
There is a CUSTOM button in your preferences for graphics.
If you click this button, you can do the following:
You can set spell abilities to off, yourself, your party, or everyone.
You can adjust the buffer to use more of your cards RAM (this is set to 0 by default but moving the slider 3/4 of the way speeds the game up immensely for me).
You can change the resolution.
You can change the way shadows are displayed.
You can adjust the detail level of the textures in the game.
I run a 2.4 ghz dual core intel with 2 gb of ram and a 3870 vid card and the game runs fine. I've taken keeps with 4 warbands (thats 96 people folks) and have had some slowdown, but it was not a slideshow.
The game handles massive amounts of people very well, and adjusting your in game resolution settings should be a no brainer for anyone playing video games on their PC.
With all that said, i am VERY pleased to hear of the updates that are coming.
A suicidal dwarf and a berzerking orc will be fun to get to play around with.
Getting new lands? I'm still exploring the ones we have!
But yeah, this game is rocking along very well and I have to say, the devs have been really responsive on whats being done.
I have no complaints, and have absolutely no reason to get into another MMO with how fun this game has turned out to be.
Re:They Had Me, Then They Lost Me (Score:1, Informative)
I have a much much worse PC than the one you describe and I can play with medium to high settings without any problems. I'm running a dual core 2.2ghz AMD, an old AGP Nvidia GeForce, and 3GB RAM.
Update your drivers and update the game, there were a lot of graphics related bugs in the beginning
Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. " (Score:3, Informative)
As a generic form of entertainment, $15 a month for ~10 to ~40 hours of entertainment a month is a damn good deal.
A movie will run you $8 and only get you about ~2 hours of evertainment.
Re:They Had Me, Then They Lost Me (Score:1, Informative)
Funny, I have a Dual Core 6600, 4 GB Memory and a nVidia 8800GTS, and Inevitable City runs fine on my computer... though in massive PvP battles of 40 vs 40 it lags down a bit, not unplayable, but still a bit too bad.
Anyways, Warhammer is in no way as polished as WOW, but in my opinion the PvP is more accessible, as in I can find PvP where the teams work together and the healers heal, while I so far haven't been ganked (in a fight where I stood no chance) more than once or twice.
It's a different game, and I like it.
Re:"and it will be rolled out free of charge. " (Score:3, Informative)
Although rather than add new classes (which always makes class balance harder) I wish they'd fix the existing major realm population and effectiveness balances
Not in this case. Every Race is supposed to have a melee DPS, tank, ranged DPS, and support/healer. Currently Dwarves and Greenskins don't have their melee DPS. Was pretty bad for Empire and Dark Elves since they didn't have their tanks until a few months ago. The game is balanced around each side being able to have these kinds of roles, and for a new game its balanced pretty well.
A lot of players don't realize what is happening in combat so they cry out that a specific class is overpowered. They're wrong, but even when you show them statistics from combat logs going over a month they don't listen. There WERE some major balance issues/bugs in combat regarding specific abilities.
The Bright Wizard/Sorcerer classes were doing too much damage off of criticals from their dots, all the RDPS classes had a bug with their player based AOE root that caused it not to break properly were the two biggest ones. They fixed that in a patch and while the BW/Sorc does more damage in the long haul, their spiking was nerfed a bit so now 3 of them working in tandem can't waste a team of 12 people on their own.
Honestly though, the PVE is fun and fair, the Open RVR is getting performance improvements and extra rewards, and RvR in general is balanced between the two sides (there is a mirror of every class and while they don't work identical, they are pretty close in what their skills actually do) and every class has a counter-class. The key is organization and on 4/5 servers I've been on Order is more organized and more willing to help their fellow players while Destruction is full of self serving wankers. At least it keeps the RvR games interesting.
I wish they'd fix the existing major realm population and effectiveness balances
They are. They keep moving server populations on a monthly/weekly basis. The populations in total are pretty damn close, especially on the larger servers like Badlands or Dark Crag. This varies depending on the time of day, but not by much. Really its kind of sad. Mythic has this great game here that seems very well made but people aren't behaving how they assumed. They thought people would want to play the game, but so many people are looking for instant reward situations like in Guild Wars.
At least as of November, Destruction far outpopulated Order on nearly every server to a great deal because their classes simply had an edge... I made it to rank 15 or so before I got tired of Order getting constantly slaughtered in scenarios.
Um, no. Destruction is typically a higher population than Order because far more players want to be "evil" or an Orc. Having been in the closed beta, played both Destruction and Order, and played on Core and Open RvR servers I can tell you the Destruction has the numbers, but Order has the players. The maturity level is vastly different, with far more of the bitchy self-serving 13 year olds rolling a Chaos Chosen or a Dark Elf Sorceress/Wytch. Also, the Order players work together and are far more organized than the Destruction players. Again it goes back to the maturity level, most Destruction players want to be the hero rather than just accomplish a goal.
Made me rather sad actually. I've never liked the Order armies in tabletop Warhammer. I like my Greenskins a bit too much. But you can't work with people who think Guilds have to be huge (they don't in WAR) and that they don't need to use tactics/strategy to win. They spend most of their time bitching or trying to "get kills" rather than take out the enemy team. There's a great game there for organized PvP/RvR but its being wasted currently.
I imagine that Mythic will have paid expansions out as they add other races. They get the whole Warhammer universe to play with. There have been 18 different armies in th