Producer's Letter is out

Link can be found here. Reading now, digesting and posting about it later.

Skaven, my Chosen and me

I was having a natter on twitter the other day with people about the new Skaven, some folks are bit disappointed with how they’re being implemented and others, myself included, are not. However it wasn’t that long ago that I had been saying how the very concept of Skaven not being a traditional MMORPG level from rank 1-XX style character was NOT what I wanted. So what changed?

It boils down to a moment of self(ish) realisation that I had while pondering on the Gamesday UK Skaven news. My Chosen isn’t RR80 yet (RR76), for the simple reason that I am constantly being distracted by other playstyles and characters; after all it’s why I have 8 level 40s… So if Skaven added to that, well let’s just say my Chosen stands no chance of hitting RR100. I would end up being too busy going off on constant tangents and developing new characters.

However with this new system, my Chosen will effectively have access to 4 entirely different class playstyles AND still get all the renown earned. The downside of course is it doesn’t sound like I will really ever get that RPesque (new word ftw!) feeling of a true Skaven character and representing the little rat bastards properly, something I was quite keen on experiencing in an MMORPG, but for once I think I can happily live without that extra immersion. It’s going to benefit my overall progression so dramatically that I am pretty much converted to embracing the new Skaven.

With just one character we’ll have all these new options, but it is at the cost of our traditional expectations of new classes and expansions. Perhaps we have been too blinkered by the standard MMO mould for expansions and in fact Mythic are going to be stirring up a bowl of awesomeness, or perhaps being blinkered is right and it’s a case of “if it’s not broke don’t fix it”. I don’t know for sure yet, but at present I’m feeling very optimistic about all of this. It will be very interesting indeed to see how the rest of the WAR population and those watching from the sidelines react, particularly once it all goes live.

I know Gaarawarr was considering posting something about this, more from the slightly concerned viewpoint, so if you’re interested in this topic be sure to keep an eye on his blog (which you should be anyway).

Lokax posts an interesting idea on tanks

I was having a chat with Lokax the other night and he suggested some ideas of his about further defining the role of defensive tanks by using tactics to improve Taunt and Challenge. He’s got a quick post up on his blog Mmmmm Gud about the idea and I really think he is on to something good there. Go have a butchers and encourage further debate and discussion.

It links into something we were discussing at Gamesday about how it would be much better if Guard only worked if a tank was using a shield. It’s an idea a guildie of mine has often mentioned and when we were asked about our thoughts on it at the weekend (but this time it was raised by someone else) everyone thought it really would be an excellent change if it were to happen.

Further defining and rewarding tanks that play shield specs is something that would be good for the game all round. At present I am great weapon spec again, despite having been a shield tank for over a year and shield being my preferred play style. The problem is since the latest patch the loss in damage and gain in defence is just not worth it, particularly as by using a great weapon I barely lose any of my utility. I do miss my knockdown ability mind you, but the damage gulf really is so huge for a Chosen now that it’s just not enough.

So OI! Lokax! Take this idea further and post more pls ;)

Bootae interviews Andy Belford at Gamesday UK

Gamesday UK was a great day out, we got lots of solid news about WAR and there was a truckload of WAR EU players in attendance at the main event. However the highlight was I got absolutely drunk as a skunk with Andy and a collection of people from the EU servers. Well I say a collection of people, there was one representative from Azgal, one infamous Norn player and a bunch of people from my alliance that went out on the beers. Andy proved to be a quality bloke, a good laugh and a seasoned drinker, important to fit in over here which he did admirably.

I could tell you all about the many, many hilarious and at times totally bizarre events that happened, but there’s just too much mentalness to type. Let’s just say it featured a copious amount of beer, a real life pirate, about 100 extremely drunk and glammed up women from a Hairdressers convention and a very rude south African lady. Oh and I got lost for an hour at 3am trying to find my hotel and almost decided to sleep alongside a motorway, thankfully that worked out ok though and I did find the hotel...

Anyways, thanks to an epic hang over and delayed trains, it’s taken ages to get back home and meant I missed breaking the main news of the day. I won't repost what has already been covered very well on both Bruglir’s blog and WAR Aura, be sure to check out the news AND then come back here for further goodies... However we also found out a lot of little bits and had many interesting debates through the night, so there maybe some more things I post about as my brain gradually recovers.

I did however get an interview with Andy. Questions were obviously all focused on the new changes and the future of WAR.

Bootae- First thing I was wondering about, you know you talked about the resource gathering from the BOs, is that going to be the current ones so you’d have multiple resource gathers moving around at once?

Andy- It’s gonna be all the current BOs, so there will be four resource nodes open at any point and they will be capturable at any point in time. So you’ll have to actively defend them all, if you want to hold them all then you’ve got to spread out and defend them.

Bootae- And defend the resource gathers themselves?

Andy- Exactly.

Bootae- So you’ll have multiple groups of people all over the zone guarding or attacking different things.

Andy- Yup. Because even if the resource runner is moving, the resource node can still be captured. So you’ll need to protect the resource node, the runner and probably your warcamp as well.

Bootae- You mentioned the resource runners being upgradeable. Does that reset if their node is lost?

Andy- No, that’s based on what rank your keep is.

Bootae- So now we’ll never again have a situation where you’re attacking both keeps, because we’ll always start off owning one and have to capture the other, while managing and controlling everything else in the zone.

Andy- Yup.

Bootae- The campaign itself then, this continues with the one zone open in each pairing, that locks, moves onto next zone, etc? We won’t have multiple zones open per pairing?

Andy- That remains the same. We had considered changing that, considering revamping how that works actually, but we decided it would be too radical a departure from the way things currently work and that it may actually having a negative effect on the game for people that were comfortable with the way the campaign progresses, but not happy with the zone locks. So we thought we’d change how zone locking works first, see how successful it is, see how it goes over with the players and then if we need to continue with adjusting the campaign mechanism we’ll go from there. But it’s part our approach incremental changes, it’s how we approach our development. We change things incrementally one step at a time.

Bootae- Regarding the Fortresses and the revamped campaign, is there a planned way they’re coming back into the new system or is it still very much up in the air?

Andy- We have it in our mind yeah, but we’re not set in stone or prepared to talk about their implementation just yet. It’s definitely one of those things on the forefront of what we want to do, the reintroduction of fortresses, however it’s not something we doing right now. That’s not to say the next patch set afterwards wouldn’t reintroduce them. Is that possible? It’s possible if we have all these changes go according to plan, everything works out brilliantly then if something falls into place with the fortresses that allows us to reintroduce them in a way that we think will be fun and dynamic then yes, we’ll move forward on that. So while it continues to be a priority right now, no we don’t have any definite plans.

Bootae- The next bit then for the campaign, the new Skaven zone… How does that fit in? The general idea in the community is about a tunnel system linking up all the zones, is that anywhere near the truth or is it more like a Land of the Dead entry?

Andy- You’ll find out this month.

Bootae- Moving on to Skaven, are Skaven something you can log in and play whenever you want or is there like a gated access of some form?

Andy- It is gated and it ties into the new Skaven area. How exactly it ties into the new area we’re not discussing right now.

Bootae- So will you be able to have both factions playing Skaven at the same time?

Andy- Yes.

Bootae- The four classes mentioned today, are there more to be revealed?

Andy- No, that is it.

Bootae- So no Stormvermin or things like that. It seems like the Skaven are being very much built around being a component of the new siege system.

Andy- The Skaven are there to enhance the ORvR experience. To make ORvR more fun and more compelling.

Bootae- So it’s not a third faction as such as we were thinking before, its more enhancement for the existing factions?

Andy- That’s correct.

Bootae- So Order players can have Skaven fighting alongside them?

Andy- Don’t worry, we got approval from GW (Gamesworkshop) on that.

Bootae- Hah, yeah you know people are gonna go for you on that.

Andy- Well the thing is if you read the Gotrek and Felix novels then there’s actually a point where the Skaven work with Empire. Even though the most recent edition of the Warhammer playbook has grouped them with Destruction, they really are very mercenary.

Bootae- They’re out for themselves.

Andy- Yeah, they’re out for themselves yeah. As long as you have enough warpstone to satisfy their craving, they’ll do whatever they can to get that warpstone. Including stabbing you in the back.

Bootae- So the RvR packs are one thing, but it sounds like from all this that it’s really 1.4 that needs to be in place to enable all of this.

Andy- Right now 1.4 is a component of the RvR packs, I would say that.

Bootae- You’ve talked before about how we’ll be getting these packs more often than a game would usually get full on expansions. So in future are we always going to see a major 1.4 style patch accompanied by a pack? So there will be the free patch and then the extra purchaseable components like the packs alongside that?

Andy- We’re not gonna stop free updates to the game, that’s not gonna stop. There’s always gonna be free updates to the game, we’re always going to be improving content, we’re always going to be making things better and some of that just happens to coincide with the RvR Pack. So yes there will always continue to be free improvements for players, regardless of if they purchase the RvR pack.

Bootae- So this current timing of pack and patch is just a timing thing.

Andy- Yeah, it’s kinda the logistics of the development schedule.

Bootae- PvE pack? Now I don’t give two monkeys about PvE really…

Andy- Neither do we.

Bootae- …but some people will do. So is the future of PvE pretty much out of the window?

Andy- The immediate future. You know, we’ve embraced the fact that we are an RvR game. Some people say it’s niche, some people say its you know, it is what it is, but people play Bioware Mythic games because they like to kill other players. That’s what we’re good at, that’s what we do. We are dedicated to making our RvR experience the best it can be.

Bootae- So thoughts of dungeons and lairs gone?

Andy- No, no, no. There’s actually a lot of lairs that are attached to the RvR lakes. Like the one in Chaos Wastes near the north keep. It’s kinda hard to get there, it’s like a jumping puzzle to get up.

Bootae- Ah yeah like the one in Norsca.

Andy- Personally I would love to see some of the lairs and stuff repurposed into RvR fights, I think that would be very cool.

Bootae- Like the invadeable Land of the Dead style?

Andy- yeah.

Bootae- We were talking earlier about a PQ in tier 1 Orc/Dwarf, where for whatever reason it’s RvR enabled. That’s probably the best PQ in the entire game, but then it doesn’t happen anymore.

Andy- We should have done more of those. We should have continued to build upon the PvP foundation interspersed with the PvE. Unfortunately that one PQ is one of the only places in the game where that happens with a PQ, up until the city revamp of course. So you know, it’s lessons learnt, no development team gets everything right, no development team is perfect. And I know a lot of people like to point at warhammer online and bash warhammer online, it’s the cool fashion. But you know, we’re still here, we’re still going, we’re still developing and delivering a visceral, heart-pounding experience for our players. And you know, our community is right now in a better place than its been in the last 2 years. The players, while they’re critical and while they still let us know what they think, they really do love the game and you can see it, you can see the passion.

People sometimes like to attach the word failure to our game, but you know we are not a failure, we are profitable, we are making money for the studio, we are still developing new content and we’re doing something that a lot of games are afraid to do, you know we’re saying yeah we made a lot of mistakes when we first launched the game and we’re gonna take 12 months, 16 months, we’re gonna take however long it takes to go back and fix these things.

+++++++++++

My recording went a bit dodgy from here and I’ve got a horrible hangover clouding my memory, but I asked a cheeky question about sub numbers and while Andy wouldn’t divulge the numbers, he did confirm that subscription numbers are increasing. We also talked about the amount of people in one zone and Andy mentioned recently Badlands saw over 700 people in one zone, 500 of them attacking a keep. I also learnt a few things that I've been asked not to blog about, but lets just say I'm very positive about the next few months and the future of WAR.

And that was that for the interview, Andy had to head off to do yet another presentation to the masses and I went and joined the mass debate amongst WAR players about all the announcements. I'll post thoughts and stuff over the next few days.

So thanks to Andy for his time, the beers, chicken wings and a bloody comedy gold night.

Norn in pictures

On Twitter recently I've had quite a few people asking me what Karak Norn is like to play on, is it busy or a ghost-town? In general I would answer this by saying when it comes to activity and being competitive it's bloody excellent, in fact it’s quite possibly the best of them all in that regard. But today I shall answer through the medium of screenshots!

 

So yeah, if you want a busy server with plenty of fighting and you're on EU timezones, Norn is pretty damn good..

Gamesday INC!

This Sunday is Gamesworkshop’s UK Gamesday. It’s the biggest and most important event in the worldwide Warhammer calendar, but despite a long term interest in Gamesworkshop stuff I’ve not gone for many, many years. Too many annoying kids, too many strange people and too insanely busy. This year however I am going, partly to have a few drinks with folks from Karak Norn, but being honest as much as I wub my fellow Nornites, it’s mostly because it’s a chance to meet people from Mythic and possibly get some real news.

So I bought a ticket ages ago… which proved to be a mistake as I found out yesterday I could have gone for free, but at the time of me ordering a ticket and knowing how fast they sell out, I didn’t want to risk assuming I might be offered one. Still, I appreciate the thought ;) Anyway, since its a few hours on the train to Birmingham and is on a Sunday when the trains are extremely limited, I can’t actually get home afterwards. So I’ve got a hotel booked too AND the Monday off work, which means I can sink a few beers! With luck Andy, Carrie & Co will be up for that too. :D

The big questions are about, well, questions. Will anything of real substance be revealed at Gamesday? Will we have the opportunity to ask questions and if so, will they get proper answers?

I honestly don’t know. We expected too much from Gamescom, the same could well happen here. No bloody clue.

I keep thinking I should write a list of questions in case there’s a chance of an interview, or a Q&A but everything I would want to ask depends on either more news being revealed first or it has already been no commented before. So I dunno yet, we’ll see how I feel about it all nearer the time. I tend to adlib in general, so whatever happens I’ll blag it. One way or another, I’m sure I will have plenty to post about.

2nd post of the day??? YES! FOR THEY BRING US MARAUDER LOVE!

Stance changing no longer effected by or causing global cooldowns? Oh my that is a GREAT change.

And excuse my ignorance on Marauder technical details, but does the rest of it mean Brutality has finally been made worthwhile?

Linkage