WAR Dare to dream poll results

The latest poll here at BBB posed the question: Dare to dream! What would you most like to see in WAR?

I decided against making the poll multiple-choice as I figured people would just pick all of them and really I wanted to see what would be everyone’s single pick. The results are now in and came out as follows:

1. 3rd faction 39%
2. Expand the existing RvR areas 20%
3. New zones 12%
4. New races & careers 9%
5. Missing Cities 8%
6. DAoC style relic fortress raids 8%

Not a shock result by any means. We all know that a third faction should have been included from launch, it was a total no brainer, but one that for some strange reason Mythic decided against. If any one thing could transform the fortunes of WAR it would be the introduction of a third faction, that and some bloody advertising... Unfortunately, whilst it’s not impossible to introduce a third faction this late in the game, it’s a big task and I would imagine extremely expensive to do. Still, I did say “dare to dream”, so a glorious pipe dream wins and I must say that I 100% agree with everyone that voted for it. I would love to see a third faction introduced and as I’ve said in previous posts I’d really like to see one themed around either Nature or Disease.

What is interesting to see is the second placed choice of expanding the RvR areas. I say this not just because I’ve mentioned it many times before, but because this is one where instead of voting for new content, people are actually voting for Mythic to simply make the most of the content they’ve already got. It’s also an option that s completely viable and Mythic could actually do this, if they’re brave enough. Also as Epikk recently mentioned in a comment on a recent post I made, it’s a little surprising that they haven’t done so when you consider that with the level and renown bracket changes, people are now staying in tier 3 until they hit level 40 and are able to acquire renown items that are FAR superior to any PvE items outside of Tier 4’s LV and TotVL dungeons. So the entire Tier 4 PvE landscape is now not just unpopulated and unused, but is now completely and utterly useless. LOL it’s not PVE anymore, it’s UUUU! Unpopulated, Unused & Utterly Useless.

One of the most entertaining battles I’ve been in recently was one where it spilled out into the landscape to the west of Southern Garrison in Praag. It started with Destruction being pushed well away from the keep and turned into this huge battle that for the first time in, oh 2 years, was taking place in somewhere that was effectively entirely new surroundings… Turn some of the PQs into battle objectives, make some of the castle type buildings into DAoC style towers (mini keeps basically) simply by adding doors and TADA! A revolutionised game that has suddenly got a LOT bigger (about 3x bigger) and in effect has masses of new content, since not that many people have even looked at all the PvE landscape anyway! Yes, I know I’m going on about this a bit lately. But people keep mentioning it to me and I just can’t help but think it’s just so damn obvious to do and the effect would be a truly magnificent change.

Yet, from this poll the first choice would be the best, I have no doubt at all about that, but it’s not very likely unless Mythic really do have something awesome in the pipeline that would be a shock to almost everyone. I say almost everyone… You maybe hearing some interesting theories about WAR’s future soon from other sources… I’ll just leave that cryptic statement for you there. Anyways, if we can’t have the first choice, I’ll gladly settle for the second.

Be bold Mythic, be brave, be the company that turns their long suffering game round with an unexpected move and show your players some sodding aplomb.

RIFT - Zones, a mixed bag of goodies, mainly.

When deciding if I will stick with an MMO beyond its first few levels, one of the key elements is the atmosphere and theme of the game’s zones. RIFT has predominantly delivered the goods in this regard, certainly enough for me to be quite content and fast approaching level 40. While working my way through the land of Telara there’s been a whole load of OMG moments and some seriously spectacular views to take in. Great art design combined with some excellent environmental sound effects, proper changing weather and a day/night cycle, has been a refreshing change compared with many of the other MMOs I’ve dabbled with recently. However, whilst in the main it’s been great, it’s not all been perfect and some areas I’ve found a bit more meh than I would have liked.

I’m so bored of generic desert zones that every sodding fantasy MMO deems essential. They’re almost always decidedly dull and uninspiring. Actually I have to say for all its flaws, from an atmosphere and “being interesting to look at” viewpoint, WAR’s Land of the Dead pisses all over pretty much every desert zone in anything else. So far I’ve found RIFT’s desert zones to be sitting very much in the meh department, they’re not bad or anything and I’ve got friends that really like them, but personally I’m bored of deserts. So for me the Scarlet Gorge, Droughtlands and Shimmersand zones were rather uninspiring. Sand is so last year.

Again from a purely atmospheric viewpoint; Gloamwood, Scarwood, Stonefield and in particular Iron Pine Peak have all been much more enjoyable places to explore. Gloamwood is the creepy forest style zone, which has of course been done before, but it’s very nicely done indeed and has absolutely nailed the theme. It also flows very well into the next area Scarwood Reach (next if you ignore the canyon zone between them..). Gloamwood is dominated by these truly giant trees and Scarwood also has them, but for reasons you can discover, the landscape is being destroyed as the giant trees are being cut down and having their monumentally huge roots exposed and unearthed. It’s a very interesting concept for a zone in that respect, exploring the roots of trees.

Stonefield, a defiant zone, is one of my favourites. It’s rather like the Scottish highlands, but with the bones of colossal giants and beasties all over the place. It’s a wonderful zone in the rain too, with thunder and all that… love it. And then there’s Iron Pine Peak. A HUGE zone with a winter theme and winter is something that Trion have got in the bag; their snow and cold weather effects are very nice indeed.

Of course visuals and sounds are only one way of considering whether a zone is any good or not. My comments above about those zones are purely based on that and as such should not be taken as a rating on the overall experience. Scarwood for example, is not a particularly enjoyable zone to quest in; something I can’t quite put my finger on is a bit off. I think it’s to do with the layout and flow of the quests. Yet Doughtlands, which I thought looked immensely zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, as a levelling experience worked extremely well.

This has all added up to a generally pleasant and enjoyable levelling experience in RIFT, in fact in many places it’s been extremely good indeed and one of the best in a very long time. Whilst there have been a few zones I’ve not rated the atmosphere so highly in, they’ve worked very well and not been a hardship to play in. With two exceptions anyway… Scarlet Gorge is a pain in the arse and I was happy to get out of it. Too much up and down travel with a bazillion mobs everywhere and a huge area with a DoT gas cloud that is just pointless and annoying. Moonshade Highlands is the other zone that got up my nose, it starts well, but then ends up with a giant clusterfuck of quests and mobs all lumped in one relatively small part of the map. Since both factions are doing the same quests there, it concentrates the players too much into one area and it’s just a bit of a mess. It’s also visually half great and half… like whateveeeeeeeeeer. They ran out of ideas for it I think.

But you know what, that’s actually pretty damn good going. Out of the 9 zones I’ve spent a decent amount of time in, it’s only 2 that I really don’t like. All the others (for varying reasons) have been good. Just a shame about all the poxy sand.

One change to rule them all

If you could pick one thing to change in WAR, just one fairly focussed thing (so don’t say “everything” :P ) what would it be?

My first thought because of current issues was all the armour sets from Annihilator to Warlord and I’m still wavering on that being my choice. I really do think it would be of great benefit to the game to level the playing field a bit and encourage new players to stick around. It certainly would have helped that low RR White Lion we saw the other day with 48 deaths and zero kills over the couple of hours we were fighting in the same zone…

But that’s not what I’ve decided to go for, instead and probably fairly predictably for me as I often bang on about it, I’ve gone for expanding the RvR zones. It would just revolutionise the game and make it feel so much fresher, bordering on the way an expansion does. One of the main reasons I’m not playing my Chosen right now is because it’s the same grind, with less carrots and all in the same scenery. Yet if I had all that new scenery to fight in, then I believe it would provide a pretty damn major distraction and breathe new life into things.

So pretty and so wasted... reminds me of a lass I met in Luton once...

If you look at Praag for example we only fight in roughly 1/3 of the actual zone. So if it went full RvR (with more objectives, etc ofc) we are talking about tripling the size of the zone! That’s pretty immense. And the building blocks are all there, it’s just those objectives that need adding. Also remember we used to have full PvP servers, so it’s not that radical a thought really.

Yes it’s recycling old content, but then it’s content that we’ve rarely (if ever) visited. There are LOADS of the PvE areas that I have never been to and I know for sure I’m not alone there. Of course there’s also the concern that it could disperse the players too far, but then as the last changes have shown and the intensified zerg they brought, I would say it’s needed. Plus careful and considered placement and creation of Battle Objectives and Towers (DAoC players know what I mean here…) converted from the existing scenery will drive people into combat. I want this in WAR more than anything, even more than a third faction...

So what about you folks? What is the ONE thing for you?

Balancing zones, keeps and sieges

Something I’m wondering about with 1.4 is how often will city sieges happen? I’m struggling to make any prediction I’m happy with because we quite simply do not know how the new system will play out in the end zones. Locking zones like Kadrin Valley or Black Crag are already quite different challenges strategically to say Praag and with the new campaign system I think the layout of zones is going to have even more impact than before.

Kadrin Valley is a prime example of this with the southern keep being so close to the warcamp; how will that work out with people rezzing in the keep, new people joining the zone so close by and the resource gathers arriving next door? And that’s before we start thinking about the routes that resource carriers take and any potential bottlenecks. What could happen though is perhaps we’ll actually see zones that are dramatically easier to attack or defend for certain factions, which in turn will change the way an entire faction views what zones and actions are important strategically. If for example Kadrin Valley was an easier zone for Destruction to take and hold, then it really starts to put pressure on Order to not let Destruction capture Thunder Mountain in the first place. That could actually be quite an interesting thing for us to deal with. I don't think every zone should be perfectly balanced, though the number of zones balanced different ways should be even.

Also, how hard is a fully upgraded and defended keep to take in 1.4? From what I hear it’s bloody difficult, but is that a good or bad thing? If it means less city sieges then I would say yes its good, but if it means no city sieges… that’s not so great. City sieges should be unusual and special enough events that you want to attend, but they shouldn’t be so rare that you don’t get a chance to unless you play 24/7. About the keeps though; I really think they should have a mechanism where they start to downgrade if the controlling side does not continue to gather resources. Otherwise we’ll get situations where both keeps are max level and it’s just zergs at keeps. Laggy, shitty and annoying zergs, the horrible thing this patch is trying to get away from. AND it puts even more importance on Battle Objectives, which is a good think in all respects.

Unless they already do downgrade? Please correct me if they already do.

Undoubtedly some tweaking will be required by Mythic over the coming months, the detail of what tweaking is required will only come out as we start to properly play the campaign on live servers. I think that’s actually going to be a lot of fun to play through, as potentially everything we’ve got used to is turned on its head.

Zone lock reward changes of OMFGness

OK some big changes are coming that will change not only the way we view controlling a zone, but also zone locks in every sense. At least it will if you're interested in renown, which of course most people will be with the new 100 renown cap.

Check out this post and this one too, or just read below..

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New addition that is currently live on PTS (as are all other adjustments up until this point):
Resource Carriers now reward a Realm with Experience, Renown and Influence upon making a Resource delivery. The Reward scales based upon the distance of the path that the Resource Carrier has chosen to take. The longer a path is the more Reward that will be granted to players within the RvR lake.

It's everyone in the zone that passes a server-side requirement check - in the current case, it's anyone who would normally qualify for Zone Capture rewards. I'm continuing to investigate idle hands support punting people to the Warcamp.
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So this should provide people with further reason (beyond gathering resources for keep upgrades) to keep control of Battle Objectives and ensure that Resource Carriers make it to the warcamp safely. The selfish renown-whore in all of us will see the obvious benefit.

And now the big news...
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Also - since it hasn't been made very clear at this point; Resource Carriers who have further to travel carry more Resources.

As an example; a Destruction Resource Carrier coming from Hallenfurt Manor carries about 4x as many Resources as the one from Verentane's Tower.

Also - if a Resource Carrier is defeated and drops their barrel; it only contains 25% of what was being carried. It is always better to control the Battlefield Objectives for your Realm's advancement. You lose a lot of time by ignoring the Battlefield Objectives.

We're also hooking up Zone Flip Rewards in a manner where the rewards are divvied out to both the winning and losing Realm based upon how long the battle has been active. Imagine that each zone is worth 200 points and every 12 minutes, 10% of the 200 points goes to the "loser's pool". This would have the pool values at 180 to 20. This mechanic would continue until the pool values are 120 to 80; the rewards handed out would then be scaled against those values.

The intent here is that even if a Realm loses - they are appropriately rewarded for how well they did. Holding the enemy off and defending your Keep has tangible meaning in terms of reward. In the case of AAO - these rewards would be modified by that. It is feasible that, even being outnumbered 4:1, the losing Realm could actually walk away with more reward than the winners received.
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Crikey... Rewards for putting up a stubborn defence? Rewards that are effected by AAO? Oh wow, this I really, really like.

Will it get leeching swines sitting in the RvR zone afk? Of course it will, but that will never, ever, EVER get fixed while there are zone wide rewards. People will always try and leech, some more than others. It also doesn't matter that much in the grand scheme of things. But what this change will mean is there will always be a reason to put up a defence. Think of those times where your group/guild/alliance/whatever put up a long, desperate and ultimately doomed defence of a zone. In the future you'll get renown rewards, rewards that are effected by AAO.

This has massive potential to change how everyone views what is worth defending or not. And that my friends is no bad thing.

WAR's Lost Lands - Chaos Wastes

I wrote recently about my thoughts on how Mythic should be “Changing Tier 4 zones from OK to awesome”. I was suggesting not only opening up the zones to become full oRvR enabled, but also changing all the existing quality scenery from completely unused Public Quests into PvP themed objectives or events. This would give the rest of the zones more purpose, would spread the combat out better and help to reduce lag, as well as give alternatives to the constant and oh so bloody tedious zerging. In the post I included some screenshots of some of the awesome wasted scenery from Kadrin Valley’s PvE areas, which after posting got me thinking a bit more about how much of the game people just don’t get to see and what amazing potential there is for RvR if those areas lost the PQs and gained some PvP hotness.

As a result, I had a chat with Biggsie and we decided that we would go exploring, taking nothing but our heavily armoured (or mutated in his case) arses and a camera (AKA printscreen) across the Tier 4 landscape on a journey of visual stimulation. As we travel the lands, we’re going to post our findings between our two blogs with a series of articles showing some of the cool scenery and potential for RvR goodness that we encounter. This includes sneaking around the Order PvE zones, so certainly for me I’ve found things I’d never seen before. Didn’t find any players in the PvE zones mind you! :P

I’m starting off with the Chaos Wastes and Biggsie is visiting Reikland which he'll be posting very soon, so keep an eye on his blog. The Chaos Wastes are a mutated and rather freaky land, that’s also very, very blue. In fact it’s safe to say that this is a landscape that went down to the Crossroads and fell down on its knees.

This is how RvR is limited at the moment. Note it's a very open zone, so within the red boundary you are able to roam all over.

And this.. is what it could be like.. A huge zone with an incredible amount of freedom. I've marked the roads, but they're really not very restrictive in the Chaos Wastes. Unlike my first post I've not marked where I think other objectives should be, simply because there are just so many options. Basically anything marked with a Public Quest marker, camp or scenery will do!

Click images for the full size screenshot.

There are load sof strange looking castles, towers and ruins scattered around. They could be used for something like the keeps we get in RvR, standard objectives, or for RvR driven events akin to the new city siege. Imagination is the only limit. Posh door on this one below.

The Wastes are covered in these thorn bushes gone mad, they're a real wasted opportunity. You could have some crazy fighting amongst them, with line of sight being broken and chasing people through a forest of thorns.

I love the look of these towers. What a waste of a great bit of scenery! By the way, check out the snowflakes... Chaos Stars! Very cool.

All over the Chaos Wastes you'll find this huge metal circles, I'm not sure if they're meant to be man made or if it's the Chaos Gods chucking weirdness around. Not got any PvP use springing to mind, but they look great. ;)

This temple (?) is on the Order side, but you can see it for miles around. It is absolutely huge, and... uhm empty?

Yup, empty! Well apart from like 3 NPCs. Surely we should be fighting in there no?

It's worth a third screenshot, check out all the detail in the walls. All this effort and most people will probably never go in there,

I found this like field of frozen or petrified bodies. I've no idea what it's about, but it was a pain to move through. Perhaps getting stuck here would be too much of a headache in PvP. Or maybe it could be the point of it...

Looks like the Maw of Madness scenario. Like the thorn forests, this is another bit of terrain that could be fun to fight in. We just need a reason to do so.

Strange looking tunnel...

Teeth???

No idea what this once was, it's dead now anyway. I suspect it was angry when alive.

Another of those great looking towers. Another opportunity.

 This one is the first of the towers I pictured above, obviously from a distance. The water you can see, some of it is frozen, some not, but I swear it changes. Either that or I just got confused. Imagine that though, fighting in a zone where the water is sometimes solid... 

And here concludes my little tour of the Chaos Wastes. I'm sure some people will have seen all of these areas before. However if you're started the game after Land of the Dead was launched then it's quite likely you leveled from 25-40 there and/or the RvR lakes, in which case you had no reason to visit any of these places. Which I think is a shame.

Changing Tier 4 zones from OK to awesome

A common topic for my ramblings is the small size of the oRvR lakes and how so much of the tier 4 zones are completely wasted, empty and utterly devoid of life. Admittedly I originally wanted to play on a full PvP server, but there was a lot of scaremongering about the chicken system and we decided not to risk it being a disaster. To be honest the difference turned out to negligible, since even on full PvP servers the oRvR lake is no bigger and Land of the Dead emptied the PvE quest areas anyway. Today I think that regardless of my old bias WAR desperately needs to expand it's Tier 4 oRVR lakes.

 Well it’s all good and well saying that and go on about how they could be better, even bashing Mythic for it, but I figured I should also post to demonstrate this more clearly and give some examples of how I think they could be improved. As I’ve said before, I think the Tier 4 zones should become fully oRvR active, it would give us a lot more to fight over and there is absolutely nobody using the zones for PvE anyway, since levelling in Land of the Dead (a fully oRvR zone) is a much more efficient way to get XP. While thinking and preparing for this article I scouted various Tier 4 zones to make sure this is not just my assumption. On my travels scouting multiple zones in detail and at a range of difference times and days, I have seen ONE Choppa in the PvE areas. This is on Karak Norn which is a very busy server. So I can say with confidence that there is barely anyone doing any Tier 4 zone PvE or their PQs (Public Quests).

I decided I’d use Kadrin Valley for this example.

It’s a great looking and very well themed zone with some mark out moments for the Warhammer lore whore in me, but it’s oRvR lake is somewhat flawed. I've highlighted it below:

Basically it’s a big circle and that’s about it. There are a wide range of ways you can travel through the zone as a whole, yet it's only the yellow roads below that are RvR enabled.

You can take alternative routes through the PvE areas, but it is rare anybody bothers. I think this is because they are PvE; people don’t bother learning their way around in the first place, there is no sense of threat when in them, there are no RvR objectives in the PvE area annnnnnnd as alternative routes... they just don’t work very well. You can sneak across to get behind the enemy, but with all the objectives on the big circle oRvR lake, the enemy will just zerg around to you in no time anyway.

So what would happen to our possible paths of travel if we made the entire zone oRvR enabled?

Bloody hell! That's suddenly become a much more complex zone, with a massive array of places to go, but as of yet no reason to do so. It still leaves all the oRvR objectives around the circle and the other routes are still of no use. So what we need to do is add a few more objectives (in a general sense of the word) to what was once the PvE area. I'm just going to add 4 for now, though I think we'd want to add more to the left side of the zone.

You will notice I've used the keep symbol. The reason being is the zone already has loads of keeps and fortified buildings in it. They're PQs mainly, empty of course, but with more character than the ones in the oRvR lake. It's actually a bit of a travesty that they're not being used and that so many players probably never even see them.

1) Tucked away in the south east is this castle with a classic dwarven style keep and other buildings. It doesn't have to work exactly as the old keeps, perhaps it would have multiple keep Lords spread around that need to die within a certain amount of time between each other. Or something...

2) Here we have yet another keep, but with a different awesome look and interestingly it's at one of the highest points in the entire zone, which is a loooong way up. I really like the giant statues and clouds that drift around.

3) The Slayer Keep. A massive fortress, which should be so awesome, but is just another empty PQ. It's gagging for something cool, not just another keep or fortress. Perhaps it could be turned into some kind of RvR enabled PQ, inspired by the City Sieges? A big RvR PQ of some kind...

4) A dwarven brewery... Stunties take their drink very, very seriously. As such these places are heavily fortified. Perhaps it could just be like one of the normal battle objectives or could be turned into something more akin to a Dark Age of Camelot tower?

I found loads of other things I could have used here. And I mean LOADS.

By adding these (and more) extra objectives, using the existing excellent terrain, we now have reasons to fight all over the zone and not just zerg round a bloody great circle all day. There's room for zergs, warband and small group play, all with choices in what to do. I’m sure whoever designed the PQs may have a tang of sorrow at my suggestion to remove them, but sorry chaps, they simply do not get played. You’ve given us really cool looking stuff, but the system that uses them does not give us any motivation to go there. Change them from PvE to PvP and not only do you give reason to your high quality graphics, but you also reinvigorate an entire zone and oRvR itself.

Most Tier 4 Warhammer zones are like this. The terrain is awesome, but we get forced away from so much of it and spend our game time ignorant of the amazing art and design in vast swathes of WAR's game-world. If we want XP we do land of the Dead, if at 40 we want PvE we do instances, we don't ever do PQs. WAR's existing landscape could be the most amazing RvR zones ever, they just need a little tweaking and the decision to really make WAR's Tier 4 about PvP.

What WAR needs from DAoC – Part 3

Seeing as this is part 3 it would seem a sensible moment to look at the whole 3rd realm malarkey. We’ve all talked about 3rd realms a lot in the past and I think everyone agrees that this far in to the game it is probably the most difficult change Mythic could make…


DAoC’s three-realm system provides the campaign with a couple of very important things: paranoia and fragile power.

Paranoia
Whenever you’re fighting in DAoC’s vast oRvR frontiers, you’re always paranoid, always suffering (or rather revelling in) a sense of nagging uncertainty. Any straightforward fight can escalate into utter carnage; you just can’t tell what’s going to happen...

I’m logged in and grouped up with my Midgard hunter and fighting the foul tree hugging Hibernians, when suddenly a large force from Albion appears from the forest to my east. They don’t engage at first, they just stand there, watching… In that brief moment a range of possibilities ran through my mind. Will they charge us, or the Hibs, or both? Will they let us kill each other and just mop up the survivors? Perhaps they will ignore us all, leave us unable to fight and use this as an opportunity to make a strategic move of some form… But then it’s not just down to them, what about us? Perhaps both Hibs and Mids will see the Albs as a greater threat and attack first, yet that is relying on both factions reacting in the same way… What if we break for the Albs, but the Hibs don’t? Bloody hell this could get messy fast!


In that particular fight I’m remembering the Albs charged, but unfortunately for them both Mids and Hibs saw them as the large threat. With almost psychic coordination both realms ceased fighting, swung round to meet the Albion charge and after a protracted fight defeated the new enemy. However it was then our turn for some misfortune as the Hibs finished that fight in a better state than us and kicked our arse immediately. It was epic fun though. When fighting in WAR’s 2 realm system you just can’t get those moments, it’s always going to simply be us and them.

It’s worth noting that above I’m referring to a particular sense of paranoia and tension when fighting the enemy and making strategic moves. However you’ll find a different kind of tension throughout all of your frontier oRvR experiences, but that’s more to do with the way the zones work than the 3rd realm. I guess the easiest way to compare it to WAR is it feels a bit like solo roaming in Land of the Dead, when the enemy has the zone controlled and death means game over.

Fragile power
The 3 realm system means any attempt at being the dominant realm is a fragile thing. If one realm starts to dominate the campaign, they will find themselves under attack from both of the other realms. Not normally in any kind of official alliance, more just an unspoken agreement to deal with the bigger menace. Really it is just like that fight I described above, but scaled up a lot. With the open zone system this means that if one realm gains a lot of territory, they now have to maintain control over a lot of territory and against a lot of enemies. If the only RvR you’ve played is in WAR, it’s hard for me to get across quite how vast a task it is to control a lot of land in DAoC. It would take a lot of effort with just 1 enemy realm to deal with, but with 2 enemies it doesn’t take much for the cracks to appear.


Time once again to ask: what if any of this could WAR introduce?

A third realm IS doable and DAoC’s “New Frontiers” expansion proved Mythic are capable of making changes on the scale required. However, that was a different game in a different time. There’s no escaping it would be a massive undertaking today and I imagine would cost so much money to do that it couldn’t be seriously considered by Mythic. Playing make-believe for a bit though, if they did go for it there are a few obstacles to clear.

Q) In the current oRvR zones, if 2 realms have little room for manoeuvre, how the hell do you squeeze a third in?
A)  As per my previous post you make Tier 4 zones full oRvR and give us much larger battlefields. And remember it’s not just the 3rd realm thing adding an extra sense of tension and paranoia to DAoC. The large openRvR zones and more dispersed roaming players create a much larger wilder feeling world. You can see how this could actually work in WAR when playing in Land of the Dead, only 2 realms but a large open zone without funnelling and a constant sense of danger.

Q) How do you connect new lands to the existing racial pairings?

A) You make a T-junction in the central zone of the existing pairings. I made a post about how this could work a while back. In that post I was working based upon the premise of zone-locking and went with Wood Elves as you can see, but the T-junction works regardless of zone-locking or the superior open zone campaign system. Slightly changing my original idea, take West Praag, Cinderfall or the Elf one I’ve forgotten the name of, and turn those into the gateways into the other realm’s lands. In my head this would require the least amount of change to existing zones.

Q) Who’s city gets sieged?
A) Again check out that post of mine from before, for more nice pictures with a suggestion for using the current locking zone lark. That said, I'd much prefer it if we also got rid of zone locks, in which case we could have a system linked to keep and territory control. Once your controlled points reaches a certain low, your city is attackable by the realm with the most controlled points.


Q) WAR’s realm’s have 3 races each, so what races for the new realm?
A) Disease. This is one discussed in comments plenty of times on here before, so credit to all involved in those discussions. Skaven, Beastmen and Nurgle Chaos (Nurgle is the rival of the already playable Tzeentch Chaos). This is the ONLY combination of the remaining primary races in the Warhammer lore that doesn’t have a serious lore conflict. Those 3 are made for each other.

However... time to stamp on this dream. :(

Whilst it could work (it really could, honest!), I very much doubt its feasible to do because of the scale of it and the costs I presume it would involve. No matter what we all want it all just boils down to this.
So when WAR gets new playable races I fully expect them to be part of the existing 2 realms, but maybe that's not such a bad thing...


Next: Summing it all up, what should and might actually be done.

Ahhh look at the ickle baby zoney woney

Over the last week or so fate conspired to buff the crap out of my spare time. Due to a variety of real life issues I ended up with a truckload of time to myself and being the red blooded male that I am, I just couldn’t stop myself from revelling in whores, booze, a gigantic pile of Columbian marching powder and a rather awkward encounter with an aroused badger, in lederhosen.

Or perhaps not… In somewhat less dramatic fashion, what actually happened was old age and sensibilities kicked in and I instead spent the time watching boxing (a job well done Mr Haye!), football (Rafa wtf did you sub Torres for???) and OMFG SHOCK HORROR!, I played a lot of computer games…

This included getting my Zealot to level 21, my Squig Herder to 34, gained a smattering of renown on other characters and also acquired some nice new armour for my Magus. Not much new there, but the Zealot was a real surprise for me to be honest. I’d left him ages ago at a mere level 8 after I received a mouth full of bad tasting gunk (reminds me of a French lass I met once). I just didn’t get into it at all. Then last week on a whim I decided to get a couple more levels and with a loud “CLICK!” everything fell into place. I now officially like Zealots. It’s an interesting class and has a lot more potential for hybrid play than I had previously realised. My current alt-oholic plan is to level my Squig Herder to 40, closely followed by the Zealot.

The other big event of the weekend for me was, and I can’t believe I’m about to say this; I started playing Dark Age of Camelot again. Yup, back to the old school. A few days back a bunch of my mates started playing the free trial on the US servers, oh how I chuckled when I heard… The fools, the rose tinted fooooooooools! And then it happened, whilst chatting to them on vent, I got curious. Doh. Curiosity leads to consideration, consideration leads to interest and interest leads to downloading a free trial client, rolling a Midgard Hunter and getting some levelling (or should I say leeching) done.

Playing DAoC again has been fascinating. There is so much about the game that is incredibly obtuse, annoying and downright dated; yet at the same time it still has so many wonderful things to teach modern MMOs and in particular WAR. Which is a little ironic considering both WAR and DAoC are Mythic games. The detail of those things is a topic for another post, something I’ll think about writing depending on how much I play DAoC, but there is one big over all concept, feeling, sense, thingy that WAR really needs to pick up.

SIZE!

DAoC feels huge, open and monstrous. It feels like you are let loose in a massive wild world, a place where you can actually adventure. This is not because of the expansions and added content expanding the game, but due to a wide range of factors and not just the way its zones are made. DAoC has since launch just seemed “big”. Where as WAR feels enclosed and restricted. Regardless of the zones actual size, the way WAR funnels us into small areas and has huge chunks of irrelevant and unused landscape, it constricts the game’s sense of scale. As I said before there are a lot of factors that contribute to this different feeling of scale, it’s a lot more than just how the zones are designed and again this is something I may go into more detail about another time. What I will say though is whilst it is probably too late for WAR to address a lot of those factors, it is not beyond the realms of possibility to greatly improve WAR’s sense of scale. Mythic could work some magic, if they felt so inclined anyway. Here’s a thought…

West Praag! What’s the point of it? Once visited by a group of tourists in 2008, the area is now completely without life. So why not turn RvR on, change some of the existing terrain into objectives of some form (that influence the overall Praag zone locking) and pow! You’ve dramatically expanded the main Praag RvR area, added life to a dead zone and reinvigorate the main part of the Empire/Chaos campaign. Why not, my Mythical friends, why not just try it? Just this one zone, try it out see what happens, you could always turn it back if its fails. And what is the worst that could happen? A completely unused area gets visited.

Regardless of if that idea is shite or not, I would highly recommend that Mythic give serious consideration to this feeling of scale. It’s something that DAoC has so right, yet WAR could do so much more with.

There and back again

City sieges are quite probably WAR’s weakest point. Which in my humble opinion makes it rather strange for Mythic to use the 1.3.2 patch to put such massive focus on them. Yes, city sieges are MUCH improved from their past (almost) pure PvE incarnation, but they’re still not exactly good.


Limited gameplay
The cities limit your gaming options far too much. Unless you’re there at the start of the siege, you’ll find yourself stuck with either PUGing the 48v48 instance (which is almost always a terrible experience), or having to log off for hours, because there’s simply nothing else to do. I’m sure we’ve all experienced the tedium of joining a guild warband that’s already inside a city and then having to sit outside alone for ages, all with the vain hope that a spot in the instance will become available… That’s not fun in anyway or form and I’m simply never doing it again, instead I’ll just log off and go to a lower tier, or play a different game. We need more things to do. Scenarios perhaps, so that if we do get online a bit too late and can’t get in our guild/alliance warbands, we will at least have a chance to do something.

The 3 BO capture, 48vs48 instance
Actually this first large scenario/PQ is quite good. The scenario’s simple objectives provide an entertaining and at times even tactical challenge. So why am I listing this as a problem? Well, continuing from the issue of limited gameplay, the problem is that it’s a bit shallow when it’s the only thing to do. The simplicity is great when you don’t do it often, since it lets you get straight into the action and it is fun, but as a regular event it lacks longevity. Same 2 cities, same 3 flags, every night… Familiarity plays the field a bit, then breeds with contempt, only to end up marrying boredom.

The stage 2 PvE raid content
It’s buggy and there’s a problem with the whole concept. As every MMO veteran knows; PvE raid bosses that require tactics to beat, also require practice and a united warband working together. On a competitive server like mine neither side gets to stage 2 often (plus the victory points are often bugged anyway), so the practice does not happen. Also because of the whole city instancing experience, by the time you get to stage 2 it’s very likely you will no longer have a full guild/alliance warband left online (if they got in with you at all). Sods law now decides that you end up with some random bastards who are determined to ruin everything.

Now Mythic, if by chance you read this, please do not see this as me saying we should get to the advanced stages of city sieges more often. We shouldn’t. It should be rare and be a big deal (more on that shortly). Likewise I don’t think the raid itself should be dumbed down. It should be challenging, but it needs to be fair, it needs to be something realistic for people that don’t farm the instance every night. Is that careful balance too much to ask for? Regardless, whatever happens it should be completely bug free. Getting to stage 2 and then have bugs ruin everything is utterly unacceptable. Plus any bugs in this part of the game are a sure way to generate bad feeling.

And further more, does it have to be PvE? When you look at all the buggy instances, PvE hasn’t exactly proven to be Mythic’s speciality. Maybe some sort of more interesting PvP based Public Quest would be better?


There and back again, and again, and again, and...
However, the biggest problem of all is not the city itself; it’s the path to getting there. WAR’s campaign system as a whole is the worst thing about cities…

A while back zone locks became much easier, which was both good and bad. Then with this latest patch and the removal of forts, the game has taken a huge step towards all sense of drama being removed. City sieges are now the norm, something you’ll get to do multiple times a day, every single day…. Getting to a city used to be an achievement, a moment that actually meant something. Alas this is no longer the case and now the whole feel of the game has changed. A friend of mine summed it up well the other day when he said, “they’ve turned the campaign into a death match”.

He’s completely right. WAR needed changes and the forts were almost universally hated, but they did add a speed bump, something that gave the campaign at least a bit of longevity. Without them and with no change to the campaign’s core system, there are no stumbling blocks. A dominant faction becomes more so and more balanced servers turn into a game of table tennis. It’s kind of like the campaign isn’t really a campaign anymore. If you think about what you expect from the very word “campaign”, it implies something long term, something that requires planning, thought and effort. Unfortunately that doesn’t quite work when we ping pong back and forth through the ENTIRE campaign structure in an afternoon. All of the “epic” has gone.

Now this post may have seemed very negative, but I’m not trying to be, I’m just trying to be realistic. In their attempts to improve the campaign experience, Mythic have actually weakened the whole concept of it. This is most definitely not what I wanted, nor is it wanted by anybody else I’ve spoken to. Perhaps that’s because of the server we’re on, but seriously, who wants to play WARlite?

Having said all of that, perhaps Mythic aren’t a million miles away from something great. With some tinkering they could slow the pace right back down, add/change a few things to provide more variety and give us the “epic” we're missing (and add a third faction! HAH Got it in there!). The game today feels small and for me this is mainly down to the small RvR enabled areas and how we blast through them so damn quickly. As I’ve said before, I really think Mythic need to expand the size of the oRvR zones and stop wasting so much space. That’s probably quite a lot of work to do, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be done and there are easier to implement short-term solutions in the meantime.

The easiest and most obvious is to make it so you have to lock all 3 pairings to access a city. This can still be quickly zerged through, but it would make it a little bit more difficult at least.

A more entertaining way would be to make all zones active at once. Allowing people to attack in different places and apply some more involved strategies and tactics. Each BO and Keep would be worth a certain amount of “control points”, if you want to lock a pairing you’ll need to capture 75% of those control points in that pairing… Now that’s more like it. In fact, I think I’d be happy with this. It could even lead into a system for reintroducing the other cities, hah!

In the end
I’m glad forts are gone, they sucked royally and I have to say that the decision to remove them is not the only factor in the watering down of WAR’s campaign, but it is a big contributing factor. I’m kind of surprised to find myself saying this, but I miss the days where locking a zone took hours and getting to the enemy city would take effort over many days. I don’t miss what we actually had to do to lock them, but I do miss the feeling of zone locking being an achievement. Actually, that’s not correct. I think I’m missing any feeling of achievement in WAR’s campaign. It’s just too damn quick. All too often lately when I log in, if we’re not already in a city, it’s only an hour or so before we are. And then, the moment a city becomes available, people start logging off.

It's a real shame because right now I'm really enjoying the combat in WAR, but the campaign is total meh.

Big mountain, big missed opportunity

A while back I posted about how Land of the Dead does not replace the main campaign. In that post I put up an image of the Thunder Mountain zone to show how little of the map is actually available for RvR. Earlier today while I was gazing up at the big mountain in that zone I realised my map was inaccurate and a guildie reminded me of this image from my blog. So I present the updated version:

Other than looking pretty in a blurry ash covered kinda of way, what is the point of it? We can't go up there at all and it just puts further emphasis on the limited movement options in Thunder Mountain. It's just a GIANT waste of space in the middle of the zone.

Wouldn't it be better if we could fight up the mountain itself? Chuck an objective of some potent form up there and have us scrapping up winding paths to reach the summit. Then we could battle around the rim of the volcano, with extra tension added by the fiery pool of lava death below...

Or is there a good reason to keep massive chunks of terrain you can't enter?

How many other zones suffer from this?

Land of the Dead does not replace the main campaign

Land of the Dead looks awesome.

All very exciting and it’s going to totally turn the game on its head. However what exactly it will mean for the vanilla WAR campaign is not really clear. It’s not been made redundant that’s for sure, as access to LoTD is reliant on the vanilla campaign, but will people drop it the moment LotD access is available and jump into an Airship? When one faction gains access, will the faction left behind spend their time RvEing until they too can get into LotD? Will we see attacks on undefended Fortresses and ghost town cities?

In the first few weeks I would say most definitely. We’re all going to be desperate to get in LotD and sample the wonders of the ancient world, but the novelty will wear off. When it does the big question will be; Is the vanilla campaign interesting enough to draw us back or will it become just a chore whilst waiting for LotD again?

I think potentially the answer is a positive one, but it will need some livening up to avoid feeling stale compared with LotD and it’s full on RvR. LotD is going to open people’s eyes to the joy of Darkness Falls style zones and I think going back to the segregated PvP/PvE will be a disappointment. How then, can Mythic reinvigorate the vanilla campaign?

Cities
Guess what? Bring back the missing cities! Come on, you didn’t think I wouldn’t drop this one in eh? ;) Seriously though, if the entire campaign wasn’t locked down, we’d have the option to go fight elsewhere if we can’t get into Altdorf or IC. A huge topic this and one that I’ve gone into a fair bit lately, so I’ll move on.

Aside from wanting the extra cities, the current city instances need lots of work. They’re not enjoyable enough and the queuing system we have now is annoying. It’s got to the point now where I’m sick and tired of our groups being left outnumbered in instances with the uber opponents that nobody wants to bloody fight. Even our enemies have acknowledged this happening to our guild. I have to admit over the last few sieges I got so sick of it that a few times I just changed instance myself and went to one where people were farming Invader. I hated doing that, but I couldn’t face another hour of being farmed at our spawn by 3 times our number.

There's all sorts of things that could be done here, but just sorting out the lag and how you get in to the instance would be a great start.


Fortresses
They need a complete revamp. They need to be separate zones entirely to the one leading to them and on different servers (or however it works) to help prevent lag./crashes. The forts themselves need major changes to improve game performance and make them more than just another keep take with a bigger wall. I’d say these should be almost like RvR enabled dungeons, with various objectives, capture points and things to spread people across the fortress. Maybe including instanced areas, scenarios or even RvR events like Altdorf or IC. Certainly it would be better than the current glorified keep with a player limit.

Whilst I’m here, a few words about the player limit teleporting people to warcamps.

It’s very frustrating to travel all the way north through Kadrin Valley, only to get ported back to the warcamp in the far south and have to repeat this journey over and over again until a spot comes up. It’s also causing problems before the fort where people refuse to guard the Battle Objectives & Keeps furthest from the Fort. This can make zone locks a pain and causes friction between guilds. On my server guilds reputations are being tarnished because some players mysteriously ALWAYS decide to guard the BO nearest the fortress… Of course if they then whinge at other people for not defending the further BO, well… it does provide some comedy in region chat when it all kicks off. :P

However putting that comedy aside, it’s the game mechanic at fault, people just want to get in the fort, but they won’t be able to if they do the decent thing and guard the more distant objectives. This is wrong. We shouldn’t be penalised for fully defending the zones. The player limit has reduced the frustration from zone crashes and it sure is better than it was, but it has brought new frustrations with it.

There’s so much that could be done with a Fortress. It doesn’t have to be just another keep with bigger walls. I would seriously consider separate zones, more objectives and instancing.


Tier 4 zones
Once you hit 40 you’re effectively stuck in Tier 4 forever, so why is half of each zone irrelevant to a level 40?

The current RvR lakes limit our movement too much, which puts emphasis on zerg mentality. More options and routes around the zone will dramatically improve small scale RvR. If you travel through the PvE areas of any tier 4 zone, you don’t see many (if any) people. So do we really need all these empty PQs? Perhaps if Mythic changed some of these PQs to have more of an RvR slant and more relevance to the campaign, they could then enable RvR over a much larger area.

Considering how fast it is to level in tier 4, keeping such large amounts of the map for safe PvE XP grinding is a poor reason to have such small RvR lakes for the main game. Yes, the PvE areas cater for people that only want to do PvE, but I’ve not seen any of these people myself. Anyone really interested in pure PvE would be playing something like Warcraft, Everquest 2 or Lord of the Rings Online. WAR’s end game zones should be totally built around the game’s focus of PvP and RvR.

I suggest Mythic should seriously consider making all tier 4 zones fully RvR enabled and adjust the PvE elements accordingly. LotD is bringing us full RvR zones; maybe WAR should embrace that concept and apply it to the rest of Tier 4.



Land of the Dead looks brilliant. I’m really looking forward to it and I’m expecting pant-wetting excitement. But it doesn’t replace the traditional WAR campaign; it’s an addition to it. We will still have to play the vanilla campaign. So if WAR is to reach its true potential (a slice of epic pie, with custard, served by a naked Kelly Brook and you’re wearing sex panther), then we need more than flashy live expansions, no matter how great their content maybe.