Category Archives: Warhammer

I swear to god, I got 5 IMs from people last night all saying variations of “Now I REALLY want to see the next part.” You people and your rancid negativity! (I include myself in that statement, of course.)

Ironically, there isn’t that much. Warhammer dodged a lot of possible pitfalls simply because it takes the road heavily travelled. Paul Barnett’s averrals to the contrary, Warhammer takes a lot of cues from its immediate ancestors World of Warcraft and (especially) Dark Age of Camelot. Much of the nuts and bolts of the game design is iterative, not revolutionary. So the parts where it falls down are mostly details of implementation. Like:

Grindgrindgrindgrindgrind. Yeah, this is the big one, and what is going to kill retention for Warhammer if anything not with the initials “WotLK” does. Anecdotal evidence from beta testers all claim that the levelling curve was radically “adjusted” immediately before the game shipped. This was a mistake. If there’s any game that shouldn’t be afraid of their users reaching max level, it’s Warhammer. Yet the last minute holy-crap-we-don’t-have-enough-to-keep-people-busy reaction from a development team seems to be a time-honored tradition of late. One could make a case that with many games, levelling is artifically accelerated in beta, then tuned to the release version just before shipping. That pretty clearly isn’t the case with Warhammer, since after the 2nd “tier” of content… you run out. Note: this is when you make levelling faster, not slower. It’s probably no coincidence that one of the first rewards granted to underpopulated realms has been faster levelling speed. That shouldn’t be a reward – it should be the default.

The Hibernian Protest lives again. It’s painfully obvious the High Elf and Dark Elf content pairings were… well… they’re kind of rushed. Of course the answer here is simple, just take your elf character somewhere else at level 1. But still, Mythic has a history of doing Elves at the last minute for some reason. And given history, I fully expect the first expansion to have the most lavishly rendered goddamn Elf areas this side of Rivendell.

Dude, Where’s My Balance. The game has some pretty clear balancing issues which PvP brings into sharp, immediate focus durning PvP levelling. Ranged DPS is generally king. This is somewhat mitigated by the two primary tanking classes, Black Orc and Ironbreaker, being Concentrated Awesome. Which probably means they’re overpowered. But melee DPS classes fare poorly, because they do about the same damage as ranged DPS (sometimes less) with the drawback of having to close to the target. This does seem to get better as classes gain levels (oh, sorry, RANKS) and gain access to more alpha-strike dump skills, but it makes levelling them pretty painful.  It’s hard to tell what balance will be like at the top end since, well, thanks to the grindgrindgrindgrindgrind hardly anyone knows what that’s like.  But I suspect Squig Herders will still be at the bottom of the food chain!

What do you know, PvE isn’t all that. I hesitate to ding Warhammer on this too much, because I suspect a lot of my fatigue with their PvE is simply my Being. Really. Tired. Of. Being. Told. To. Go. Kill. Six. Things. By. A. Generic. Fantasy. Character. I knew I was in trouble when my character turned a corner, encountered a vista of 5 or 6 NPCs all with the quest available icon over their head, and my first, immediate, unbidden reaction was “Oh God, no.” Generally, when you dread the arrival of more content, this is not a good thing. Of course, you can ditch PvE entirely and just play scenarios until your eyes bleed, but then that becomes yet another grind.

Community Shammunity. You know what Warhammer SHOULD have copied from World of Warcraft? The forums. Yes, I’m going to disagree pretty strongly with my homegirl here, because as a ordinary everyday average player, I don’t feel as though there’s a central zone of news and rumor dissemination. The “War Herald” is workable, but the news isn’t very detailed, and there seem to be a balkanization of forums – the primary forums SEEM to be Warhammer Alliance, but there isn’t a lot of traffic there, at least what you’d expect from 3/4 of a million subscribers. If anything, Warhammer’s convinced me that MMOs need officially sanctioned/operated forums just due to the perception that in the 21st century EVERY company does. (And yes, I am aware that Mythic operates or used to operate private forums, and I HOPE YOU SPECIAL PEOPLE ENJOY THEM VERY MUCH.)

So, yeah, not a whole lot of negativity there. I’m sure you’re all very disappointed! Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m told we have magic cookie bars here at the office. Which is somewhat frightening.

People might get the cursory impression, from reading my blog, that I like making fun of Mark Jacobs. This is, in fact, true! Duh. I mean, come on, I used to work for the guy. Tell me you wouldn’t mind poking fun of your ex-boss on the Internet when he wears goofy glasses during an interview. There are some temptations man was not meant to pass up. And of course, before that I wrote a lot of pointy things about Paul Barnett. This was mainly because, at a certain point, 87% of my Google Reader headlines were various permutations of “OMG I WANT TO HAVE THE BABIES OF THIS BLOKE THAT TALKS ABOUT SETTING HERETICS ON FIRE WITH A FUNNY ACCENT” and I like to be different.

That being said, people might also think I was turning into some sort of bitter detractor on the Internet of all things Mythic in general and Warhammer in specific who does nothing but posting bitchy notes about how your online game of choice turns you stabby and full of hatred. You could call such a collection of vitriol a… hm… maybe a “rant site”? That could work. And I’m sure they are out there! But I don’t really have experience with writing one of those, so in the meantime, I’m going to point out things I actually like about Warhammer and why.

And yes, there is another, darker, harsher list – but ironically, it’s shorter. Today we are THIMKIN POSITIVELY.

So: my list, of all things great and small, what other MMOs should take away from Warhammer.

Instant PVP. You can do the PvP thing immediately following character creation, and what’s more, not completely suck.  Thanks to upranking you can sort-of kind-of contribute from level 1. Which is appropriate – the game still gives you a reason to level upward. The same applies to equipment – you gain access to a baseline of equipment through “renown gear” unlocked through PvP, but you’ll want to supplement it.  And entering a “scenario” (instanced PvP battle) is as easy as clicking a big helpful logo button. No fuss, no muss, no running somewhere, you get teleported to a battle, then teleported back. Makes no sense from a fantasy immersion standpoint, but then again, neither do instanced battles, so whatever!

And most importantly, you can advance your character this way as well. You gain experience and money through simply competing in scenarios, and level-appropriate gear can drop from other players as well.

So in short, you’re not waiting on the “endgame” for the fun. The fun’s right there. This is HUGE. This is your takeaway. Get players into the fun bits quickly and they can see whether or not it’s for them. And if it is, they’ll stay. This is Warhammer’s greatest triumph – in a class/level/combat-centric MMO, the “you must be this high to enjoy yourself” signs have been removed from the amusement park.

Open groups. A lot of people (including at Mythic) talk about Public Quests as Warhammer’s big innovation. I’m going to disagree – as implemented, from what I can see, they aren’t that different from other quests, and have issues of scale when no one else is around to help in completing them.

However, it does leverage Warhammer’s grouping paradigm — where most games default to “closed groups” where you invite other people to your party, in Warhammer the default is for all groups to be open admittance, and you can just decide which party to crash. The game’s interface shows open parties in your area, and critically, how far away they are and what they are doing (be it public quest or open-world PvP). Click a group, and you’re in it.  That simple.

Other games have had open groups, but critically, I think, Warhammer’s had them from day 1, built into the interface, so the game’s community has adopted them. The hit most designers make against open groups is that you are just a faceless mob, and this is for the most part true of groups that I’ve joined, but it isn’t always the case. I spent the better part of an evening on an RP server as an irritated Black Orc in an open group looking to kill as many people as I needed to to get a new choppa. (Because, hey, what else do Orcs look for in life?) This worked, partially because I was on an RP server where everyone believes themselves an actor, and it’s on the Greenskin side where all you have to do to be in character is talk like a British soccer hooligan.

Open groups encourage socialization, and in the long term draw people into guilds. And being part of the core game from the start instead of the result of various reactionary patches (such as WoW has seen) ensures community adoption.

I’m busy, and also, I’m dumb. No, really, I am. I don’t want to spend hours to figure out where something is. Warhammer understands this. I can pop open my map and it’ll tell me where I need to go to finish a quest. There are addons for WoW that do this – in Warhammer it’s inherently part of the game. It saves me the step of looking up online where I need to go to do something, which everyone does anyway, so acknowledging this is a good thing. No really, we can’t do everything. Have at it. Speaking of addons, Warhammer also has opened up their client scripting interface, and quite a few useful things have already been crafted up. This really needs to be a requirement from every game going forward – the client is how we interface with the game, and everyone tends to have different preferences with how all that information flows from server to eyeballs and fingertips.

Tome of Knowledge = Concentrated Awesome. What happens when you keep a quest journal in the basement, feed it the blood of pixies and write in it with the ink drawn from the tears of Nobel laureates? You get something much like the ToK, which effortlessly unlocks tons of backstory for wherever you are at any given moment, but in a very passive behind the scenes way so it isn’t just WALL OF TEXT IN YOUR FACE when you’re trying to play. It also steals very smartly from Xbox Achievements, giving you the Pavlovian ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED dialogues whenever you do… well, anything.

And yes, I spent half an hour on a character doing swan dives off a cliff, just so I could have AAAAAAHHHHH show up as a title under my name. Because it’s always key to get things exactly right.