Hasselhoff with laser eye beams
|
|
Mon Jan 28, 2008 1:28 pm :: silex
Posts: 873 • Guild: Pirate Ghost Cows • Class: Zealot • Joined: 17 Feb 2006
|
 |
|
|
|
I like the bit at the end, hah. Thanks for posting this.
The time has come to take off the training wheels. Massively multiplayer roleplaying games, from EverQuest to World of Warcraft, from Guild Wars to Lord of the Rings Online and everything in between, have become the definitive PC genre.
Yet most of the new ones feel like clones; merely the next incremental step. We've yet to see a truly next-generation massively multiplayer game - a game that binds epic quests, amazing landscapes, deep and rich character development - and really funny hats - with the potential for huge battles between opposing factions.
Until now.
Here comes a game with an incredible licence: a game that looks set to explore the richest, silliest and most entertaining fantasy world that exists. It's going to remain absolutely faithful to the tabletop games, books and comics it descends from, but let players run around their favourite places, meet their favourite characters, and kill and crush their most hated enemies. It sounds like an almost certain success.
But the developers of Warhammer Online are taking an extraordinary risk: one that could draw players to their game in droves, or scare them away. Warhammer Online is all about the War at the front of its name - an unremitting clash between two factions that impacts absolutely every facet of your time inside its world.
The risk: will players brought up on a diet of soft cuddly progress and happy fun dungeoneering parties adapt to unremitting warfare? The draw: if and when they do, they'll never stop playing, never stop competing against each other, never resting. And do you know what? This could be the best thing to happen to MMO gaming since orcs.
To understand what Warhammer Online is bringing to MMO games, you need to understand the history of its developers, Mythic. This storied company has masses of experience in developing MMOs: from text-based games on early Bulletin Board Systems (a slightly crap precursor to the web), through to Dark of Age of Camelot, a well-regarded 3D MMO that emphasised castle sieges, massed armies and giant scraps over and above single players punching kobolds in the face.
Warhammer Online is Mythic's attempt to match, and better, World of Warcraft. It's going to do everything WoW does. Such as quests, for single or group play. Instanced dungeons for up to five players. Big, 40-man raids. Tradeskills and experience points, levels and equipment upgrades. It's not going to mess with a formula that has proven wildly successful.
It has, however, a very big hammer to wield: it builds on Mythic's battlefield experience, bringing a sense of meaning and purpose to the endless grind of monkey fingernails, honour badges and equipment upgrades that MMO gaming is so cursed by - via a system dubbed realm versus realm.
Warhammer Online's six races - Empire (humans), Dwarves (short), High Elves (sexeh!), Greenskins (orcs and goblins), Chaos (madmen), and Dark Elves (dark) - fall into two factions: Order and Destruction. Every quest you complete, every battle you win, every dungeon, every enemy player you stamp on, contributes to your faction's current 'victory points' - an overarching persistent battle that ends with the winning side sacking their opponents' capital city.
Josh Drescher is an Associate Producer at Mythic, responsible for day-to-day WO development. As he explained to us, this realm vs realm system isn't just a case of pandering to the twitch-addled, aggressive teenagers of online gaming. It's more a way of providing incentive.
"One of the things we wanted to make sure when we started work was that we built a complete player-vs-environment (the typical questing and looting of most MMO games). You can level all the way through the game without engaging in realm vs realm, or if you never want to group on a quest, if all you want to do is kill other players, you can go all the way to level 40 (the opening level cap) doing nothing but fighting."
So how do Mythic plan to entice the carebears who don't want to enter into open warfare to compete? It's all to do with quests. As with WoW, levelling up in WO means completing tasks for NPCs.
But some quests are public, group quests that cycle little story vignettes through the area you're playing. One lets you get a giant drunk: he wanders into the orc village looking for trouble. If nearby players can bring him 20 barrels of booze, he'll join your side instead.
Part two of the quest asks you to defend him from squigs (little pink bogeys on legs). Finally, the giant can be asked to carry a bomb into dwarven lands, blowing open a fortress.
Meanwhile, in those dwarven lands, a competing quest chain sees the dwarves trying to build a giant howitzer (named Helga, after a dead dwarf wife) to bomb the village with the giant in it. As the orcs run around looking for booze, dwarven players are searching for ammunition.
Why go to all this trouble? "We want to make sure that the game is accessible to casual players," says Josh, "so they can show up, take part, and interact with other players in large groups without committing huge amounts of time. If I only have half an hour to play the game each night, I don't want to spend 20 minutes putting together a group before I can go do something cool."
Even more than that, it's the first step in getting players to dip their toes into the wider conflict. "In a realm vs realm game, we really need those players to become acclimatised to the place - you're going to have to learn to play with everyone else.
By starting with public quests from the very beginning, and giving them a little carrot to help them along, they can become more comfortable with working together. Hopefully, by the time they're involved in realm vs realm they've developed some social bonds."
Other quest chains enable players to dip their toes into hostile territory. 'Yellow quests' require a short hop into enemy lands, while 'red quests' put a bounty on an enemy player's head, and ask you to go claim it.
As he explains this, Josh laughs: "It's not like your typical MMO experience where for some reason you're able to safely walk around as long as you're, y'know, 50 feet away from an enemy. There's just an amazing sense of risk and reward. Will there be other players there who are waiting to kill you, or will the zone be controlled by your allies? Our hope is that as players experience some of that they'll be organically drawn to the realm vs realm experience."
Which highlights a bigger question: realm vs realm. It sounds exciting. But what does it actually mean?
Dwarves don't like Orcs. Humans hate Chaos. Dark Elves despise High Elves. Every zone, from the simplest, early newbie towns to the spiralling and vast capital cities, is twinned with an area from their competing faction. Progress, in the form of quest completion, bosses killed, or towers and flags raided, converts to victory points - which, eventually lead to one side 'winning' the zone.
The ultimate expression of that comes in the level 40 player-vs-player endgame, where factions get to raid each other's capital city. "For instance," explains Josh, "you'll have the capital city of the Empire, Altdorf, on one side. On the other, you'll have the Inevitable City of Chaos - and the battlefront moving back and forth between these cities, based not just on the local combat, but on everything in the game.
"Capital cities become more ornate, more interesting, and more valuable depending on how long it was since they were last conquered. High-end dungeons, important vendors, treasures and items only appear if your side has been persistently successful in all areas of the game."
It's clear that the team has the mechanics down pat: they're building on designs that have worked in their MMOs for half a decade. But they're also building on something more: a fictional world idolised by its fans, and heavily protected by its owners. Is Josh enjoying the pressure?
"At the very beginning, there was a lot of collective bargaining going on between the fans. You look at the armies available in the Warhammer IP and unless we were going to take 15 years developing the game, it was going to be impossible to do everything right away.
"So, there was excitement... and then soulcrushing disappointment. But that's part and parcel of trying to adapt something that's had 25 years of history - you're not going to get everything in at once. It's exciting though. There are millions of people with a vested interest in what we're doing, and we have to make sure that we don't let them down."
So is the game aimed purely at those Warhammer fans? Or do the team expect the same breakout success as, say, WoW?
"We really are putting a lot of care into building a world that the Warhammer fans can get excited about... But in the modern gaming world the sheer number of people who play MMOs is several orders of magnitude higher [than the Warhammer fanbase]. We want a substantial chunk of the millions of guys worldwide who play MMOs."
And yes, the screenshots resemble WoW. But you know what: Warcraft wasn't exactly original. Josh makes a thinly veiled jibe at how influential the Warhammer tabletop games and fiction have been: "The look is one of those places where we were able to shamelessly steal from our friends at Games Workshop, a proud tradition in this industry. But we're allowed to do it."
The look is still cartoonish, but with a slightly more realistic tint. "Anyone who's familiar with Warhammer will know it's a grim fantasy world," explains Josh, "but there's humour in it. When we started making the greenskin territory, it felt relentlessly dark: you'd have dwarves hanging from crucifixes. One night, the artist looks at a wall of dwarf bodies, some of which were just desiccated skeletal remains, and put beards on the skeletons."
The big question: when can we play? At the time of writing, a closed, invite-only beta is taking place, accessible via www.war-europe.com. A testbed for new features, it comes and goes as the developers receive feedback. It's also massively over-subscribed: over half a million players have signed up.
So it may be better to wait for the full game, although Mythic won't pin themselves to a release date. They're aiming for March but there's still huge amounts of work to do. No MMO survives first contact with the public, and WO was no exception.
Since the beta, a rewrite of the career and skill system has taken place, as well as the addition of capturable keeps and siege towers, adding a certain amount of persistence to the realm vs realm endgame. The earliest the game could be released is probably summer, but autumn seems more likely.
It's an exciting time. The breakout success of WoW hasn't deterred the WO team - it's only encouraged them. "The market that was available to MMO developers prior to the advent of World of Warcraft was relatively small," Josh points out. "When Dark Age of Camelot first launched, the audience you could expect from the western market topped out at around half a million players.
"Then WoW came along and threw open the doors to a much broader audience. We're actually really grateful for what they've done for the industry - they've established the MMO as the pre-eminent marquee PC genre."
Josh firmly believes that Warhammer, thanks to it's ultra-competitive focus, can take online gaming further into the mainstream. "I think we're going to see a shift away from online gaming being this underground weird thing that people do, and it'll become a lot more like what sports are in the western world. Realm vs realm can give people that factional rallying point, something that's bigger than their individual experience."
He doesn't stop there. "What we're hoping will happen is that we'll see the market shift away from the isolated niche experience into being an overarching hobby; having online gaming become part of the overall fabric of western culture. Our game has the opportunity to be one of the avant garde that moves the industry away from being a repetitive rehash of the same grind-based player versus environment worlds, into something that's a cultural event."
You can tell Josh is excited - as you talk to him, you can feel his passion for the game, and for the future of MMOs. Because the release of an MMO is just the start of a project: the game will run and run. "I would love, ten years from now, for people to say 'when it came time for the industry to transform into something bigger, Warhammer was there'."
ASK SID THE SQUIG
MMO advice with bite from our resident agony brute
"My matching set matches my mate's matching set"
Dear Sid,
I've been playing my favourite MMO for near three years, and I've got all the best armour, equipment and weapons. But so does everyone else - I'm wearing exactly the same as all the other hardbitten warriors. It's so embarrasing to turn up to a raid in the same outfit as someone else. Is this a common problem?
Individual Fashionista, Norwich
Dear IF,
I understand your problem. Squig society suffers from a similar issue - once you've seen, or been bitten by, one part-animal part-fungi fleshball, you've seen them all. Warhammer Online offers a solution - every player can adorn their armour sets with trophies: the dessicated skulls of their opponents, the still-pulsing heart of a vanquished foe, flowers, that kind of thing. Even better, you'll be able to dye your armour. Raiding Orc lands? Blend in with a green tabard. Sacking a Chaos city? Avoid clashes with a simple black cloak.
Yours,
Sid
"People walk right through me"
Dear Sid,
For years, I've enjoyed the thrill of standing at the back of a group as a mage and hurling insults and fireballs at angry young men in orc suits. I've always reasoned that the warriors at the front of the party should be able to protect me. However, in every MMO game I've played, those angry young men I've insulted have been able to walk straight through the forward defensive line as if they didn't exist, and punch me in the face repeatedly. What should I do?
Transparent Liar, Cardiff
Dear TL,
What you're suffering from is a case of 'lack of collision detection', a common problem introduced by MMO developers who don't want players to be able to block each other into tight corners. That lack of substance has been fixed in Warhammer Online. Enemies are obstacles to be avoided, rather than gaily lept through. That should fix your ethereal issues. Unfortunately, I have no cure for your need to hide behind stronger friends and snipe from afar. You coward.
Yours,
Sid
"I'm a racialist"
Dear Sid,
I believe in diversity. I believe that men and orcs are not created equal, that high elves and dark elves are not that same, that Chaos and dwarves should not be forced into similar templates. And yet, in the MMO game I'm playing, my dwarf priest is identical to an undead priest, and my human rogue is identical to an orc rogue. Can you help?
White Magic Supremacist, Crewe
Dear WMS,
You're speaking to the right species: from Buzzer Squigs to Hair Squigs, from tiny Oil Squigs to Mammoth Squiggoths, the Squig brood celebrates diversity. Our differences are what makes us equals, etc, etc.
Warhammer Online offers a solution: every race can produce characters from four broad template classes: a tank, healer, close combat, and ranged specialists. However, the actual role and abilities differ. Human tanks are Knights of the Blazing Sun, wielding slim swords and giant shields, able to buff nearby friends, and command NPC characters. A Chaos tank is a Chosen, carrying a giant axe,
but also able to cast magic. A Greenskin's ranged character is a Squig herder - hurling bait and arrows at a target to encourage their herd to attack. The Empire rely on their Bright Wizards to shoot vicious immolation spells that will burn on past his death.
Yours,
Sid
"I've destroyed an ecosystem"
Dear Sid,
I spent the last three hours killing bears outside my favourite cave. When I got home, I noticed that the local hero administrator was handing out rewards to players who would kill those same bears. I tried to tell him that I'd already killed more than enough furries to qualify, but he didn't think so. Now I have to go out and kill 30 further bears, thus contributing to a crashing ecosystem and the destruction of a pristine habitat.
Concerned eco-Warrior Priest, Sedgely
Dear CeWP,
Like you, I love bears. But I couldn't eat a whole one. In the future, maybe in 40,000 years, we'll grow bears in jars for you to hunt at will. In the meantime, your fears and worries are entirely founded. That's why Warhammer Online constantly tracks your progress and kills - and any incidental violence toward a marked beast will automatically count toward quest completion, whether or not you've already taken the quest.
Yours,
Sid |
| |
| |
|
