Woah! Mythic's schedule works for me ;)

First off; leading up to their big announcement, I have to say I've really liked the way Mythic did the teasers with the parcels they sent out. A bit of creativity in marketing is always good. Anyway...

So basically we're getting everything I hoped for in my post: Bring on the 29th ! Well except the Cities, but then I was expecting Darkness Falls to be in a paid expansion. Result IMHO ;)

If you've not seen it already, go check out: A call to arms!
And then a post by Mark Jacobs with a bit of extra confirmations here.
I'll post about the new classes, live events and Tomb Kings later, but here's my thoughts on the numbered topics in Mark's post:

1) Bug fixing AND 4) Career balancing
Obviously we were going to get bug fixes and character balancing (why some people assumed there wasnt going to be I don't know...), but I was pleasantly surprised to read there'sa whopping 15 pages worth of "bug fixes/balance changes patch notes" coming our way. There's a range of things I'd like to see addressed, but in particular I hope the CC/disorientating effects get sorted.
I'm sure every player has been effected by bugs, but then that's MMO launches for you. Up to now, Mythics patching has been pretty good. Lets hope it continues.

2) RvR code fixes
I totally understand that they need to get the stability of Fortresses sorted out first, but I really hope they then go on improve the layout and general meh of the fortress design. They currently feel just like bigger versions of the other keeps, this is not good. They need to feel more epic, be more interesting and not just a 3 frames per second zerg headbutting session.

3) RvR changes/improvements
I have high hopes for Zone domination, it should break up the zerg. Great for guilds like mine where we like to work as a unit away from the zerg.
Keep upgrades I presume will be like DAoC where if a guild owns a keep it can upgrade the NPC guards, the strength of doors, etc. Good start, but let's get some destructable walls ASAP please. Though of course I'll be interested to see on this "rather lengthy list ".

5) Changes to "quality of WAR" such as new armor and mount color diversity for high-level guilds.
I am VERY pleased to read this. The way a player's character look is so key to getting the player to feel attached to it. More diversity in appearance can onlybe good. And mount colours, yay ;)


On a side note, there's been some really unpleasant shite spouted in reaction to Mythic's news on this. Usual doom calling, naysaying stuff, but bloody hell some folks take it too far. It's like people are trying to stop Mythic communicating on forums. If you're looking to see what WAR's like, don't let those forum ranters drag you down. WAR's certainly not perfect, but it's also not anything like the overly vocal Mr Angry minority make out.

I'm feeling pretty damn positive about WAR at the moment and I'm still enjoying playing it right now. The new content and improvements coming our way should only make things even better.

Are playable Undead even an option?

Undead... recently it seems everytime I've had a discussion about future expansions or new patch content, someone says they want playable undead. But in WAR is it actually possible to add Undead as playable race?

I'm not so sure you can, because the warhammer lore just doesn't support it. Undead in Warhammer are not like Warcraft's "we're not really evil, undead have feelings too" horde thing.

With only a few exceptions, Undead in Warhammer are mindless creatures with no free will. They are animated by a Necromancer or Vampire magic. A skeleton in Warhammer is not something that goes to Inevitable City to socialise.

So what about those Vampires and Necromancers then?

Necromancers? They summon whole armies of undead, clearly that's no good, you can't have 1 player soloing Altdorf :P So it would have to be a fairly weak Necromancer.. Hmm obviously a pet class, but summoning multiple pets? Bad, bad idea, we've got enough lag problems as is. Summoning 1 pet? Based on warhammer lore, woah that's a reaaally lame Necromancer, you'd be laughed at, well if the other undead were sentient enough to laugh.

Vampires... Absolutely no sodding way without ruining the background. Vampires in Warhammer are rare and ridiculously powerfull. You do not get armies of Vampires, if you did it would be game over for EVERYONE. As much as it's always cool to play vampires in games, to make a warhammer vampire playable, you'd have to water them down soooo much, it'd suck. Plus there's a big, bright, warm problem. Sunlight... Imagine the chat spam ;)

Welcome to Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning

Sunlight crits you for 100,000,000

You have been killed

WTF?

Sunlight crits you for 100,000,000
You have been killed
WTF????

Sunlight crits you for 100,000,000
You have been killed
AGHHH!

So what's left?

Ghouls? If you like grave robbing feral cannibals with no opportunity for character development. Level 1 for ever!

Banshee? They're ghosts, nuff said.

Wraiths? Basically ghosts of necromancers tied to mortal world.

Wights? Not sentient, has no free will.

Skeletons? Again, not sentient, has no free will.

Zombies? Guess what? Yup...

And that's the problem, none of those could make a playable class in this game. You've not got equipment to upgrade, you can't talk to each other and you cant even control your own character for most of them. Which all boils down to the only vaguely viable option is Necromancers, albeit shite ones. No thanks... I'd rather keep the quality warhammer background intact and have something that actually could work. Like Skaven...

Trapped Magus

Got a better screenshot of yesterday's amusement from a guildie. Poor Arch's comment sums it up ;)

Wrong place, wrong time :D

Classic moment earlier tonight. We'd just won a scrap with Order over the Defensive Boon battle objective in Dragonwake, we capped the flag and then one of our guildies says he's got a bit of a problem...

When you cap the flag on this BO some graphics appear, including a cage. Which is a right bugger if you're stood exactly where it spawns :D

To make it more amusing, it turned out he was actually stuck in there and couldn't move. Which was unfortunate when the Order turned up again shortly afterwards :P

Classic ;)

Bring on the 29th!

Not long until the big announcement from Mythic... lets hope its not being built up too much eh ;)

Bug fixes are always great (and probably top priority for a lot of people), but I'm particularly interested in what oRvR improvements and new content is added. Here's the things I'm expecting/hoping to see:

oRvR

• Zone Domination, well we already know this is coming. It sounds great to me, having to do PQs for a zone lock is dull, dull, dull! I'm not a big fan of scenarios either, so anything promoting oRvR is all good.
• On top of Zone Domination, I'd like to see further importance placed on holding objectives. Certainly more incentive to hold them. Keep and BO swapping needs to go.
• Emphasis on the hope here, but Darkness Falls please :D I think most people that played Dark Age of Camelot will be with me here. Darkness Falls was awesome. An epic sized oRvR dungeon with access to it controlled by what you own in the outside world... Which means you can lose access whilst you're inside. That can get pretty crazy :D

New Content

• Slayer and Choppa. This is as good as confirmed it seems. I can't wait to start my Choppa :) I've been putting off properly starting a melee DPS alt to wait for this.
• The missing Cities. I'm expecting to see some kind of release schedule for these, probably one pairing at a time. I'm hoping these also bring more dungeons with them and make the tier 4 greater wards less of a pain to get.

All in all I don't think I've said anything different here, lots of people having been saying the same and with those missing bit's it would seem fairly obvious what new content is to come. You never know though.

The Darkness Falls bit I'm actually expecting to come in an expansion, a few of us have talked about how we'd make an expansion for WAR and something of that scale could make sense there. I'll be posting over the next couple of weeks about our idea for an expansion. Obviously there's a lot of work to be done first, but there's no harm in a bit of speculation ;)

More mythic mailings

It seems Mythic have been at it again... with more clues sent out to a selection of bloggers. Check out the link below to walloftext to see the latest.

http://www.walloftext.info/2009/01/mythic-was-right-no-official-forums.html

I have to agree with the post there too. I've certainly not missed official forums, Mythic are far more active on non-official forums than Blizzard are with their official ones. And with teasers like this, it's all just a bit more interesting.

Hidden behind a monitor

Watching Obama's inauguration today got me thinking about a lot of things, most of which had nothing to do with gaming, but it did lead me to think about racism in MMOs.

It's something I've seen in every MMO I've played and alas WAR has not proved to be the exception. It's strange that when you have someone hidden behind a monitor they consider it acceptable to be try and insult other people online with racial slurs. And nearly always in region chat to make sure they get as wide an audience as possible.. You can bet your arse they wouldn't shout it out on the street in real life. But thanks to the protection of their monitor, its all safe and well, worst they get is a ban from a game. If people said some of the crap I've seen online on the street here you would most likely get nicked and/or or a slap.

So far in WAR I've only seen this sort of crap once and thankfully the GM's responded quickly and got rid of them. I'm hoping that will be my only experience of this in WAR, because in WoW I saw racist nonsense far, far too often. Particularly against Jews, which considering the events that happened in Europe not that long ago, I find particularly disappointing to see on our servers. I used to think sometimes WoW needed footage of Belsen included in it's manual.

Is it a sad fact that racist twats are inescapable or is it just ignorant kids trying to show off? I dunno... but I just wish that part of the real world didn't make it into our online ones.