Brief comment on Land of the Dead first impressions

YAY!

Purge was great fun.

PQs were cool.

Level of gear dropping for me was meh (cos of my existing gear).

Guild chat not working bug is ridiculous. How did that get in???

Tomb of the Vulture Lord was awesome. Didn't get that far, but my group loved what we saw.

Can't wait for more! Time for work alas :P

Not merging and not drowning either.

Going to quote a few posts by Mythic staffers since yesterday's announcement, just to help allay any fears and give some more info.

All taken from this "Breath of fresh air or Mantainence mode?" thread at The Vault

If by maintenance mode you mean a full production staff and pushing forward with great improvements and new content...

Guys, it's still business as normal (a statement I'm sure I'll get torn apart for...do your worst ) in our offices. We are not being put on the back burner, we are still developing WAR and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

In short, we're doing science and we're still alive!

Said it once and I'll say it again...

There is no magic way to reallocate resources from creating new content to fixing bugs, improving server stability and other items which are hot button issues. Anyone who says the opposite has never worked in a MMO Game studio.

Bug fixes and things like Combat and Careers and RvR endgame are all still very important too us, and making them better and more enjoyable is part of "business as usual". The teams working on these aspects of WAR are working night and day to improve upon these areas, just as our content team is constantly at work designing new Live Events, Quests, Public Quests and even more goodies for the players in the coming months.

Please keep your eyes out for the producers letter (part III) tomorrow then. Jeff's top 5 list in part II (Electric Boogaloo) was a primer for that letter.

Not saying that his letter is going to be the OMGTHISANSWERSEVERYTHINGIEVERWANTEDTOKNOW but it will address many concerns and give a good idea of where we're heading in the coming months.

Edit: We're still Mythic Entertainment, an Electronic Arts Studio, as we have been. I've posted this elsewhere, but we're not "merging". We are still a completely separate entity within EA, just as Bioware is, simply now grouped under the same MMO/RPG grouping and reporting to one person, collectively.

So perhaps not going to turn everything upside down. Looking forward to see this part III letter and what we've got coming up in the future.

Mythic and Bioware merge/combine/something! Good news?

I think so. For me the big problem Mythic has is a lack of polish and bloody awful quality control. WAR could be competing with WoW if it wasn't for that. For example if this was a Blizzard game then Lost Vale wouldn't be broken anytime there's a patch. Hell, it wouldn't have been released at all in the state it is right now, months after its launch... Mythic have the ideas and concepts I want in my MMOs, far more than Blizzard, it's just the execution needs help.

Bioware games are polished, classy affairs. This is what WAR needs.

Here's a copy of the announcement:

Today we have important news to share with the community. EA is restructuring its RPG and MMO games development into a new group that includes both Mythic and BioWare. This newly formed team will be led by Ray Muzyka, co-founder and General Manager of BioWare. With this change, Ray becomes Group General Manager of the new RPG/MMO studio group. BioWare’s other co-founder, Greg Zeschuk will become Group Creative Officer for the new RPG/MMO studio group. Rob Denton will step up as General Manager of Mythic and report to Ray.

BioWare’s studios remain unchanged and continue to report to Ray. Mark Jacobs, current General Manager of Mythic will leave EA on June 23, 2009. We thank Mark for his contributions at Mythic and wish him the very best going forward. Mark played a major part in the success of Mythic with his contribution as General Manager and Lead Designer of WAR.

Mythic retains a strong team led by Rob who co-founded Mythic in 1995. Rob played a critical role in the development of Dark Age of Camelot. In his previous role as COO, he was responsible for all day-to-day management of the studio including all development, operations and support. Please join us in celebrating the union of these two award-winning studios.

With the top man being from Bioware, could this mean WAR gets the injection of quality it needs? Mark Jacobs is an MMO legend and Bioware aren't exactly experts at MMOs, so big shoes to fill. No pressure guys, no pressure :P

http://www.warherald.com/warherald/NewsArticle.war?id=841

UPDATE!
Ok I'd described this as a merger, but it seem Mythic are being quick to point out that this is not the case and in fact the 2 studios remain seperate entities, just within one corporate group/portfolio/whatever type thing. Loads of posts stating this, but I'll just link this one at WHA.

Handbags at dawn

Lately I’ve been spending a bit of time going into the RvR lakes solo. I’ve changed the balance of stats I use on my Chosen, so I wanted to test him out a in some 1v1 or 1v2 fights and see how I got on. There’s the option of duelling in Etaine on our server, but I’m not quite sure what I think about that. It seems a bit close to renown trading, but then perhaps anytime we fight another player that’s what we’re doing. Renown trading, just with more of a hostile takeover….

It’s been interesting and I’ve done pretty well I think, at least in the fights where I wasn’t ganked by 3+ players. That happens a lot (no shock there) and it’s proven difficult to get many fights where it doesn’t turn into Bootae vs the world. I’m not complaining, this is WAR after all and not some Queensberry rules boxing match. You have to accept the enemy has as much right to gank you, as you do to solo them, but I’m starting to see why duelling is proving popular. If for whatever reason you do want to go mano-a-mano, you’re reliant on the enemy’s goodwill and accepting your challenge, which outside of the duelling scene is not overly likely.

What do you lot think?

Is the risk of renown/gear farming too much?

Are people too bloody sensitive about a bunch of sodding pixels and they should just do whatever is fun?

Or is duelling abhorrent care-bear crap, best left to WoW’s flower power land?

Altdorf Stage 2 - PvE vs RvR

Had my first look at Altdorf stage 2 last night. It was a strange experience. Basically it's a 48 man instanced PQ with raid style PvE boss events and no Order players to fight. And you know what? In theory that's not so bad, but in reality it needs some thought.

We only got to do the Bright Wizard College because the instance I was in had too many lowbies or twats agroing everything at random and refusing to listen to the poor souls trying to organise everyone. I have to admit it was all new to me, so of course I didn't instantly do the right thing, but I sure as hell made certain I didn't do the things we were being told not to. Eventually we got the boss down, but it took ages and there was no way we could do anything else in the instance. Time was up. And therein lies the first issue.

You're in an instance with fairly high gear requirements, a boss fight that has to be done exactly right, with mobs that hit like trains and you've got a time limit. But you also have a load of random players in there that are not anywhere near geared for it, are too low level and have no intention of paying attention to those people who actually know what they're doing. Had the instance been full of alliance or guild members, then we'd have done it no problem at all, but finding 48 guild/alliance members at 1am after a Saturday night in the pub is not so easy... Not that getting to Altdorf stage 2 earlier is often an option either. It takes time to get the zone locks, forts and then Altdorf past stage 1, so there's always a good chance it will be a late one before you get near stage 2.

Which means we're often going to be stuck with twats screwing up the instance. Lets not forget that's what this is, a PvE raid instance. From past MMOs we're used to doing PvE raids with full guilds warbands, which means you get a certain level of professionalism, focus and communication. In the past this results in a (mostly) fun experience and the challenge being to beat the mobs. And that's what WAR needs to do. Make Altdorf/IC a consistently fun experience, not the random clusterfuck it so often is where your problem to resolve is the players on your side. If this is a PvE event, it needs to be more controlled.

That was the first problem. The second one I didn't experience, but I know hundreds of people did last night and I'm sure it must be annoying... Question! What do Order do when we're on Altdorf stage 2? Answer! Bugger all.

There's nothing for them to do, there is no RvR left. All us destro are busy PvEing in closed instances, closed instances that are the end of the RvR campaign. Odd eh?


I think perhaps Mythic need to either accept that the city sieges are PvE events or have a serious re-think on how cities work. If they remain as PvE raids, then it only furthers the Warcraft comparisons, which is not a good thing. When it comes to PvP, WAR humbles WoW's lame excuse for player combat, but when it comes to PvE whilst WAR has the potential to match WoW, it instead falls way short due to quality control. On a patch day WoW's PvE instances are more polished than WARs are months after being released, just look at Lost Vale for crying out loud.

If WAR's end game is going to have prominent PvE raiding, then those PvE raids should be treated with the polish, features and care that they deserve. I honestly don't mind if WAR mixes in PvE raiding to its campaign, it could be a refreshing change of pace, but and it's a BIG but, it needs to be bloody good PvE raiding, or why would I not just go do Crusaders' Coliseum instead?

Classic vid doing the rounds again

This was made (not by me, I'm pony at making videos) after a well respected Chosen from the Tainted guild in our alliance was accused of aura exploiting. Made for a classic vid, some of the humour is a bit specific to Karak-Norn, but amusing none the less I'd say ;)

WCPI with a difference

I'm linking not only a fellow blogger at War of Alts, but he is also a good old boy from our alliance who's been busy making a video about playing a Magus. Bit more to this vid than the usual killing with generic metal #17. ;)



I'd recommend watching it in high quality, to do so just follow this link and click HQ.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDGsXKgHF8U