Warhammer Online - the next big thing?

In a previous post on this blog, made over a year ago, I dismissed Warhammer Online as a serious contender to World of Warcraft, instead putting my money on Age of Conan being the closest challenger. Despite the comparatively smaller coverage of Warhammer Online, though, I’ve changed my mind. Age of Conan was the perfect example of style over substance, a game that looked stunning but was strangely uncompelling for it. Warhammer looks like a game that might actually take the genre a step forwards (though you can see my previous post on 'why MMORPGs are dying as a game model' for a discussion on whether it truly is forwards or not) by producing a more compelling endgame based more on PvP than the nearest crop do.

Now, the NDA on WAR has just been lifted, so I’ve been able to find some stuff out about it. Bear in mind that I’ve never played the game, so this is just what I’ve picked up from forum lurking and so on. You’ll also have to pardon the lack of pictures in this post, because I’m on a 56k dialup modem tonight and I’m tired and in the middle of moving house – I’ll probably add some next week.

Anyway, why do I think PvP will make for a more compelling endgame? Because PvP always is more exciting than PvE, when it gets down to it. I happily played CS for many hours when I was younger on a selection of my favourite five or six maps (aztec, dust, militia, siege and assault), and remaining equally interested the whole time despite the identical surroundings and mission. Why was it fun? Because the other people playing made the experience slightly different each time. Thus, I think the PvE raiding endgame offered by WoW is probably the wrong avenue to go down these days, though of course it was logical enough at the time. Instead, we’ll see PvP raiding, likely guild-based at the real high end of play. And this is important, because guilds competing to be the first to down a boss is one thing, but actually fighting against each other is another.

So, the basics then. Warhammer Online is based on the popular Warhammer universe, the big daddy of tabletop gaming. It’s a world I’m pretty familiar with, though not to the point of fanboyism – I was an avid Warhammer 40,000 player when I was in my early teens, but I never played its fantasy equivalent. The game features six of the wargame’s most popular armies, around half of them, paired into antagonistic Good and Evil sides. The goodies include the Dwarves, the High Elves and the Empire, the latter being the main human presence in the game, very heavily influenced (read: lifted entirely) from the Germanic early-modern Holy Roman Empire. Their less altruistic adversaries are the Greenskins (combined race of orcs and goblins), the Dark Elves and the forces of Chaos.

The gameworld itself is quite large. Each level range will feature multiple zones in the lands of each antagonistic pair, of which there are obviously three. Some of these zones will be PvE and some will be PvP, allowing players to mix between the two as please. Of course, if you’re playing on a PvP server then all the zones will be PvP-able, so I know which type of server I’ll be playing on.

Ganking, thankfully, seems to have been addressed in some of its forms. If you’re too high a level for the particular PvP area you are entering, you will be warned of this and presented with a countdown. If you fail to leave the area before this countdown expires, you’ll be turned into a chicken and consequently become easy pickings for any of the correctly-levelled players in that zone. This doesn’t eliminate ganking in all of its forms (hunting in large groups, attacking players busy fighting mobs etc), but it eliminates the most annoying strain of it and this can only be good.

Speaking of which, the game’s Battlegrounds-equivalent comes in the form of PvP scenarios, and they’ve introduced a measure I’ve been telling people should have been introduced ages ago – low-level players are temporarily boosted up to near the top end of the level range to allow them to compete on a relatively even footing. I think they’re boosted to the 8th level in that level range, so level 18 or 28 etc – meaning you can still have a slight advantage if you’re at the very top of the level range, but it’s generally pretty fair. These instanced scenarios seem like a pretty good idea, as I always liked the Battlegrounds in WoW, and I think they offer a fairly large number of variants to keep you amused.

The main non-instanced PvP-areas, however, are part of a larger war. The Good and Evil sides perpetually fight over the zones between them, and players are able to capture various outposts and strategic locations along the way via sieges (high level guilds can ‘own’ these forts after capture, but they can be seized from them by other guilds via similar methods). Once sufficient zones have been captured, a faction’s racial city in that area becomes capturable, and turns into a massive battle as both factions fight in the streets to relieve the siege or torch the city and its inhabitants. If the city falls and wasn’t that faction’s capital city (the racial cities of the Empire and Chaos forces), then the capital city becomes siegeable at that point. Sounds like quite an interesting mechanism with a lot of potential, and I’ll be interested to see how effective it in practice.

The other major innovation of the game is the public quests, which are mostly on the PvE front. These are like casual raids that anyone in the zone can participate in and leave at any time, and serve to replace much of the strict entrance requirements of endgame raiding in games like WoW. These public quests have three stages. Firstly, someone kicks them off with a task that’s easily completable with one player, like collecting ten puppy ears. He can complete this on his own, or anyone else in the area of the public quest can help him. Once it has been completed, the harder second stage of the quest begins, which requires the efforts of more players to complete, such as getting a hundred puppy ears. At this point, the final raid stage of the quest commences, such as when the epic mommy dog returns and finds out that all her puppies no longer have any ears. People can join the quest at any stage, and leave at any stage too.

This means you don’t have to worry about being committed to a raid until it ends, but it also has the problems that pick-up raids have in World of Warcraft – the majority of players are idiots with either no playing ability or no spelling ability, and thus you’re unlikely to get anywhere. Hopefully the public quests will be suitably casual-friendly and thus minimise the requirement for actual teamwork, because otherwise they may be very difficult. I think the ease of getting involved for casual players probably outweighs the disadvantages of not being able to weed the retards out of your team as in the more formalised raids of World of Warcraft, but as always it’s a bit of a trade-off. I imagine the elite guilds will find it slightly irritating to have other players hanging on, to say the least.

The loot system won’t pacify them either, as when the loot is dropped every player involved in the public quest is eligible to win it. The game records your contribution to the quest, you see, and it gives you a bonus to your roll accordingly. If you contributed the most to the quest, you might get a +400 bonus to your roll out of 1000, while someone who joined in at the end of the last bossfight might only get +10. This means that people can still join in the late stages of the quest and have a chance to win something, but the people who have contributed the most are more likely to come out of it with a shiny new epic item. The system is somewhat exploitable, perhaps, but its an innovative new idea that certainly deserves a chance.

Finally, onto the combat itself. From what I’ve read, the game’s combat is somewhat slower than in other MMOs, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I’d have to play it myself become I commented more on it, but don’t expect to be see casters being killed in two seconds flat like they can be in other MMOs I might mention.

The other main innovation in combat is the fact that there is collision detection, so you can’t just walk through other players (friend or foe). This is very interesting, particularly in siege warfare, as placement thus becomes far more important – particularly for tanks.

Speaking of classes, from what I’ve heard there are about twenty in the game. Each race has all or most of the four class archetypes in the game, Tanks, Melee DPS, Range DPS and Healers. However, unlike in other games, the classes play slightly differently depending on what race you are. A dwarf Ironbreaker and an Empire Swordsmaster are both tank classes, but they won’t play exactly the same. It remains to be seen how large the differences are, but the potential is certainly there for a bit of a breath of fresh air and some much-needed differentiation between the races.

Onto my one concern about the game, though – the graphics. Frankly, it looks quite seriously sub-par. Most of the existing promotional shots were from before the beta NDA was lifted, and thus don’t show the game’s new lighting engine or the improved draw distance, and even the most recent shots presently don’t show the highest texture quality (nor shadows), but they still don’t look great. Nor is there grass or bushes, or anything to liven up the flat open space between the buildings/scenery items in the zone. Currently, they’re worse then World of Warcraft, and that’s really not acceptable for a game that’s being released in 2008. I’m not expecting Age of Conan (I don’t actually want Age of Conan right now, because my graphics card can’t handle it), but I expect something of at least Everquest 2 standard. And really, it should be MUCH better than that, given how much things have advanced in the last five years.

I’ll be watching the game’s progress with interest, at least, and I’ll consider buying it at launch too. It just depends how much free time I have with this new job I’m starting…