illusions and dreams

now that i have finally a rank 40 character in Warhammer Online (WAR) it might be a good idea to comment on the so-called “endgame” that is an important part of a mmorpg. leveling and getting to the max level (rank) is actually quite fun in WAR and does not feel like an excessive grindfest compared to other games. i found that the most effective way to get xp is to do everything the game has to offer: quests, scenarios, PQs (public quests) and open RvR. i never found myself in the situation that i was out of quests and didn’t gain enough xp from scenarios or open RvR so that i had to go and grind some mobs. additionally i did not rush to max level but tried to enjoy the ride and explore the game world. however, eventually you will get to rank 40 and then “endgame” begins.

so what is in fact endgame in WAR, a game that focuses on RvR (PvP)? the ultimate goal is to invade the other realm’s capital city, toss the righteous owners out and kill their king for glory and phantastic loot. sounds fun in theory, doesn’t it? something different than the usual endgame PvE dungeon crawls! that raises the question on how do you invade the other realm’s capital city? by “locking” zones (no time limit) and capturing two fortresses within 12 hours. let me elaborate: imagine a map from north to south with The Inevitable City (Chaos capital) in the north and Altdorf (Empire capital) in the south. in between to have the zones (areas) Chaos Wastes (by default Destruction controlled), Praag (by default contested) and Reikland (by default Order controlled). the first step towards Altdorf would be to lock down Praag. you do that by capturing all keeps and battle objectives (BOs) in Praag, killing enemy players, winning Praag scenarios and doing PQs until you have accumulated 100 victory points (VPs). once Praag is locked the war moves on to Reikland where you repeat the process. after that its fortress siege time: you have an hour to invade the fortress Reikwald and kill the lord there. if successful, you need to repeat the zone lock and fortress siege procedure in another pairing (either Greenskins vs. Dwarves or Dark Elves vs. High Elves) within 12 hours and then you get a shot at Altdorf.

unfortunately, i can’t comment on how invading Altdorf (or The Inevitable City) works since i have never experienced it so far. the reason is that fortress sieges are currently impossible to complete successfully because of bad design (forcing 200 players up a small ramp) and server instability (the server usually crashes several times). i do play on the most populated server in EU (Karak Eight Peaks) and if a fortress is under attack you have like 300-400 player crammed into a very small space. the server lag is terrible, my insta casts take up to 5 seconds and spells with cast time up to 20 seconds before they fire. sooner or later the server crashes and while it does reset the fortress (both doors are back up) the timer does not reset and hence make killing the fortress lord impossible. in the current state i seriously doubt i will see the enemy’s capital city anytime soon. so much for the proclaimed “different” endgame in WAR.

however, there are other “endgame” parts in WAR. one being getting to renown rank (RvR rank) 80. this is nothing but an endless grind! with diminished returns for player kills in place, the only way to get decent renown is to take BOs (1000 renown) or keeps (around 1100 renown). this results in “renown trains” that do not bother to fight players but just take BOs and keeps and then leave for another pairing to do the same there. usually nobody really bothers to defend keeps or BOs since there is no reward for it but rather prefers “keep trading”: leaving an attacked keep behind to attack an enemy controlled keep at the same time. this is boring because taking an undefended keep is nothing else than PvE in the form of breaking two doors and killing the keep lord NPC.

speaking of PvE there are three endgame dungeons (instances) in WAR where you can get good gear that is on the same level than gear from fortress sieges and city invasions. since fort sieges and invasions are currently impossible quite a lot of players focus on doing the City Dungeons and Lost Vale at the moment. here’s another problem: all endgame instances are for 6 players only. however, there are 11 classes per realm and the bosses in those instances drop random loot. so your chance to get items for the classes in your group are rather slim. this is just downright silly and annoying. why not have the bosses drop tokens that can be exchanged for armor items of the respective classes? what makes matters worse is the 3 day lockout (6 days for Lost Vale) once you have killed bosses in those instances. the city dungeons can be cleared in 1 to 1.5 hours each which makes the 3 day lockout even more ridiculous.

last but not least there are still scenarios to keep you entertained if you are sick of keep trading and actually want to fight some players. however, scenarios at endgame level are not really fun. there is too much crowd control and too high resistances involved. as a caster i often see on my screen: “You are silenced. You are disabled. You are dead.” before i can even cast a single spell. for whatever ludicrous reason there are no diminished returns for crowd control effects (silence, knockdown) in place. the same goes for resistance caps. players can easily farm resistance gear and boost their resistances (spiritual, corporeal, elemental) to mitigate up to 90% of the incoming magical damage. a simple example: one of my spells can crit for around 2700 on rank 40 mobs. the very same spell crits for around 250 on a rank 40 tank. the base damage of the spell is around 550. while i do agree that resistance should mitigate magical damage to some degree i don’t agree with the amount of mitigation. there should be a cap on resistances like in every other mmorpg. no wonder a lot of people roll low level alts because there is little or no crowd control and no resistances in lower tiers.

i love the warhammer universe and the lore, i like the concept of RvR being the center of the game and i still believe the game has a huge potential but there are quite a few flaws and issues that need to be addressed as soon as possible. when people say that WoW wasn’t perfect in the first few months they usually forget that WoW did not have any serious competition back then and in fact could afford to mature over time. newer mmorpgs cannot afford that luxury because players do not put up with messed up things anymore.

Tags: mmorpg, WAR

it’s been three months since i first entered the world of warhammer online and although the game keeps getting better with each patch there are still things that feel rough or are downright annoying. this is going to be a review of some sort, of things that come to my mind and that need to be addressed to make the game more enjoyable.

let’s start with something positive. the latest patch 1.1a finally introduced a little icon next to the character portrait of an enemy player so that you can identify the class immediately. this “feature” is pretty standard in each other MMO yet it took the developers of WAR (Mythic) almost 3 months to incorporate it. granted it wasn’t a big issue in scenarios (instanced RvR battles, comparable to the battlegrounds in WoW) since you could always look on the score board and see who the healers are and hence hunt for them specifically. however in open RvR (non instanced PvP) its a pain in to indentify the class of the player you are currently targeting and with usually 50+ enemies around this can get messy. so the little icon (and listing the class name in the tooltip when you hover over a player) is definitely a step in the right direction to make RvR more enjoyable.

however, there are still several broken things in WAR and one of them is the completely messed up contribution/random roll system that is used for loot distribtion when you retake a keep in open RvR. quite similar to Public Quests (PQs) each player who takes part in a keep take gets a score called contribution which in turn is added to a random 1000 roll. the higher your contribution, the higher is your chance to get one of the three goldbags (which contain parts of set items) that are up for grabs in keep takes. theoretically the contribution should be based on how active you are during the battle for the keep: your taken damage, your dps, your healing… those factors should all be considered for contribution. as it stands now, contribution seems to be completely random. i saw people getting the highest contribtion of all who joined into the keep take like 30 seconds before the keep lord was defeated and hit the lord maybe once. rumors have it that contribution is a random number assigned to each player when they enter an area. the observation that the same people won goldbags at both keeps in one area seems to confirm this assumption. this needs to be addressed and fixed so that actually the effort of the player is rewarded.

this brings up the issue of fortress sieges that are considered a part of “endgame RvR” in WAR and apart from rewarding goldbags are a prerequisite to siege the enemies city and capture their king. currently, fortress sieges are a lag fest. with around 200 people at a fortress the server lag is insane: people popping out of thin air and disappearing the same way, instant spells and attacks taking up to 20 seconds to fire, and server crashes basically make fortress sieges unplayable right now. additionally, there is a time limit for the siege and if the server crashes or too many people lag your attempt to take the fortress will inevitably fail. right now i cant see myself invading the enemies city anytime soon since you need to capture two fortresses (out of three) before you can make an assault on Altdorf or The Inevitable City.

last but not least the most annoying problem are still the random CTDs (crash to desktop). out of the blue the game just closes, no error message, no warning, nothing. its annoying to say the least and especially annoying when you are about to kill a keep lord and CTD. you will find yourself back at the “nearest” warcamp once you log back in and will miss out on renown points and potential gold bags.

Tags: mmorpg, WAR

after two days of delay, the open beta of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (WAR) is finally in full swing. here are my first impressions:

my very first impression was: this looks _exactly_ like WoW. the server selection screen, the character selection screens… the login screens… it is WoW all over. after you have picked a server (english, german, french, italian or spanish!) you have to choose a side: good (order) or evil (destruction). you can only have characters of one side on a given server. (this is again like in WoW where you have to choose between alliance or horde.)

unsurprisingly, the majority of the players go destruction. why? because destruction offers way more interesting “races” to play: dark elf, chaos or greenskin. dark elf is pretty self explanatory, chaos is very interesting, especially if you opt for following the career path (“class”) of a Magus for example. that’s one kick ass character, some sort of an evil mage and floating around on a disc. looks very funny and cool. greenskins are either orcs or goblins. the orcs are naturally ugly as hell but supposedly good tanks and the goblins are hilarious in any regard, i just looked at the names of the skills of a goblin Shaman and it made me laugh.

i haven’t explored the order side of the game yet but the available races are pretty generic for a high fantasy setting: high elf (the good elves), the empire (basically humans) and dwarf.

character creation is pretty standard mmo with the usual lack of customisation, i.e. once you’re done and find yourself in the newbie area almost everyone looks the same. the first character i have created was a dark elf “Witch Elf” since that was the career that is closest to assassin/burglar/rogue and i prefer playing DPS melee classes.

once ingame, everything looks pretty familiar if you are not new to mmo’s. standard GUI, standard controls, action bar, minimap, quest tracker… quest givers are marked on the minimap with a green dot and have a green book icon over their head. the starting area was insanely crowded but i believe WAR uses dynamic respawns because i never had to wait for a mob to respawn or found particular quest mobs to be camped.

speaking of the quests, they are mostly the standard mmo like type: go kill x mobs, bring me y items, find that npc and do something with him or to him, destroy siege engines, etc. however, the area where each quest objective can be found is marked on your minimap: it is a reddish filled patch on the map with a red border. so no more roaming all over the place in search for a quest objective. furthermore, if you need to collect quest items from mobs, they are a 100% drop. so no annoying killing of 20 mobs just for your last quest item. and if that wasn’t enough, quest items are stored in a special part of you inventory that is reserved for those items so they won’t take any of you precious normal inventory space.

in each area you run into public quests: those count towards the overall control of the area (either order or destruction) and the side that has a certain amout of those points you get by doing those quests controls the area. or so. public quests are a blast: they are timed, you can join any time or leave any time and you get infamy/renown points that you can trade for potions/armour/weapons. most public quests have 3 stages: first it is to kill x mobs in that particular area, next you usually have to either kill some special mobs or destroy braziers/traps and last but not least some elite master (called hero) appears and you have to defeat him. and the end of a public quests there’s a scoreboard and depending on your participation and luck of draw you roll for loot out of a chest. if you killed enough and are lucky with your rolls, you can take a dip into the chest and grab a loot bag. once you open the loot bag, you can select an item out of a list of various items. naturally, you can repeat public quests and get very nice gear (and xp and infamy).

the leveling pace is rather slow compared to lotro, my witch elf is merely level 8 after over 5 hours of playtime. but i guess that’s ok in the end, since the current level cap is 40.

the gameplay itself is a 1:1 copy from WoW. my witch elf plays just like a rogue in WoW. energy bar, combo points… straight out of WoW. and yeah, there are 3 talent trees (career mastery) as well, just like.. yes you guessed it… the only deviation and pleasant surprise is that you do not have to repair your gear and if you die your gear does not take damage. you have, however, 15 minutes decreased health but you can have that removed by a healer for a small fee.

the world seems to be large but i haven’t seen anything outside of the starting areas yet and i couldn’t figure out if there is a form of swift travel. loading times are non-existant so far, there is one loading screen when you enter one area and thats about it. the game itself seems to be pretty stable and lag free, i had only one crash so far.

i didn’t get around trying PvP yet, that’s something i’d like to do tonight.

now the things that aren’t so great about WAR:

the graphics. although they tried and really did a fine job with the warhammer universe (it was awesome to spot a war hydra marching down a ramp for example), the graphics are sub-par in my book. this is 2008 and the water, shadow effects, landscape… it looks sometimes like WoW or worse. maybe im spoiled by DX10 Lotro awesomeness, maybe i have too high expectations but in all honesty and personal opinion, the graphics look like most computer games did in 2005 or earlier.

character animations. they are just downright horrible. most characters walk funny or look like they need to take a leak or something.

attack bugs. that happens mostly with ranged mobs. they bug out too often (just like when a mob is confused in Lotro) but with the downside that although you can’t attack it, it can attack and kill you. that is very annoying and needs to be fixed as soon as possible.

crafting. i have no clue what to do, i learned salvaging and talisman making as my professions and managed to salvage some ingredients off a broken item but it is still beyond me how am i supposed to craft a talisman. (that is like a rune or gem that you can slot into empty slots of armour and weapons in order to improve its stats.) there seem to be plenty of professions to choose from, but you can only have two: one gathering one and one crafting one. there’s weird stuff like cultivation (similar to farming i guess, but no idea how to do it and if you need a crafting station like a field or something) or butcher (haven’t tried how that one works but my guess would be kill animals and use their meat for cooking).

well, that are my first impressions. the game has potential for sure, but it still feels too much like beta for my taste and since the beta is capped at lvl 20, nobody knows what endgame will be like. it’s too early to tell really.

Tags: mmorpg, WAR