random average

Well, I have the game and I've checked it out. I haven't had a chance to play that much (several trips home and some LotRO gaming have got in the way), nor have I read up on some of the nuances of the game... I understand what's going on, but in some places I'm not 100% sure WHY it's going on.

But still, I'm going to talk about it a bit.

How's it feel?
In terms of it as an MMO, it's a good solid game. I haven't run into any major bugs of any kind, and the gameplay is pretty intuitive. Basically it's going to feel very familiar to WoW or LotRO players, although there are a few more screens available in WAR, so there's more keybinds. I don't know why they mapped so many things to the same keys, and then chose to map just a few things to wrong different keys (I'm looking at you, mister "P for the Character Pane"), but that's easily fixed stuff.

In terms of the game as an expression of the Warhammer Intellectual Property (IP), it's also pretty darn good. The game feels a little more like Warhammer Fantasy Battles than it does the Warhammer Fantasy RPG (or at least the Warhammer FRPG in my head), but that's fine -- the Fantasy Battles game has contributed a lot more to the IP than the RPG has over the years. The forces of Chaos feel appropriately alien and nasty... the Greenskins are nasty, brutish, and (mostly) short... and the Empire is note-perfect. (Can't talk about the dwarves or elves yet, as I mostly haven't played them.)

The graphics are somewhere between WoW and LotRO in terms of tone, and not-quite LotRO in terms of quality. Everything LOOKS very Warhammer, though.

You can dye your armor and equipment right off the bat, and... get this... all the dye colors are the color names from the Official Games Workshop lines of miniature paints.

Speaking of custom looks, let's talk about...

Character Creation

Okay, so each of the two factions in the game (Order and Destruction) have three representative races. Order has Dwarves, High Elves, and Humans. Destruction has Greenskins (orcs and goblins), Dark Elves, and Chaos (basically humans in service to otherworldly gods of corruption and decay).

You pick a server, then a faction and race within that faction first. Know that you can't have characters from both factions on the same server, but you can make other-faction character on some other server.

So you've picked your race, and now you pick your career. Each race has either three or four careers to choose from. Don't worry too much about balance here, because what it boils down to is that each faction has a total of 10 classes, and each class has a almost-direct counterpart in the other Faction.

Let's see if I can remember the classes:

I think that's most of them.

The main thing to note here is that the basic Faction vs. Faction are:

• Chaos vs. the Empire (humans)
  
• Dark Elves vs. High Elves
  
• Greenskins vs. Dwarves
  

... and that none of the racial careers have their direct counterpart in the faction they will fight the MOST. For instance, if you play a Chosen (chaos tank), your direct counterpart in Order is a dwarven Ironguard. Now, maybe you'll run into one because a dwarf has run over to this Empire allies to help them out, but TYPICALLY, you won't see an enemy who has mostly all the same tricks that you do.

Also notably, each class pairing has some kind of special mechanic that doesn't work like any other class pairing. That really makes each class in your faction unique and cool -- you might really like playing one kind of career, but not like another, and that really makes sense here -- they do NOT play the same way, and it's a MUCH more profound difference than say, a Scrapper and Tank in CoH, or a Hunter and Guardian in LotRO. (Yes, a guardian and hunter do very different jobs in the game, but their MECHANICS are basically the same... that is not the case in WAR.)

Finally, you figure out how your character is going to look. The level of character customization is right around the same as Lord of the Rings and WELL past the customization in WoW. (Obviously it's far below CoH and CoV -- that's just the nature of the game -- that level of customization would be totally pointless in any genre in which 'found loot' is relevant.)

One thing I think is interesting here is that each of the CLASSES actually has its own set of looks to combine and play with -- you and your buddy might both make humans of the Empire, but if you make a Warrior Priest and he makes a Bright Mage, it is completely impossible to make those two characters look the same. Forget the default clothing: what I mean is that the hairstyle options, facial forms, tattoos, scars, accessories, and even in the body shape is going to be different between those two classes, despite being the same race. You can pick out a fire Bright Wizard from 100 yards away, even if he's just standing there.

Put another way, in LotRO or WoW, if you make a dwarf warrior and a dwarf spell caster, and you pick all the same "look" settings for both, they will look identical to each other if they're standing there in their skivvies. In WAR, they won't even be close.

What you're doing
There's about four different activities you can do for leveling in WAR.

PvE Quests
These are your basic solo missions and quest chains that lead to the rare team-required quests with nice rewards. The stories here are pretty good, and the the way they show you where to go on the map to perform the quest is GENIUS, but the basics of the questing is nothing new here. (One nice thing? You never kill a boar and find out it doesn't have a tusk that you need.)

Public Quests
Let's see if I can explain this in terms of City of Heroes.

You know those Rikti Invasion fights? Or really any of the CoH special events, like snow men or the hoodlums burning down buildings?

Okay, let's say those things could happen at any time -- that they were keyed to certain locations and tended to happen both randomly and/or when a lot of people were around. Sounds pretty much like the events in CoH.

Now, let's say that when you walked into an area where one was happening, you saw a message like "The Rikti Are Attacking!" and you got a Public Quest temporarily assigned to you, like "Stage One: Stop the Scouts!" You could ignore it if you wanted to, and keep doing your thing, or just leave, or you could jump in and help.

If you help, and the people 'in' the Public Quest successfully did whatever it was they needed to do, everyone got quest completion XP, divided by total participants (with a bonus for being part of a group instead of solo). Repeat for several "Stages", and then there's an End Boss who shows up.

After you beat the end boss, a chest drops, and everyone gets a turn at picking one thing out of the chest... first pick goes to the person who contributed most to the entire Public Quest, and on down from there. Some of the loot is really quite good.

That's a public quest, and they're ALL OVER THE PLACE in Warhammer. War is, indeed, everywhere.

PvP Scenarios
Every zone in the game as a PvP scenario associated for it. You can 'queue' up to participate in these things -- tactically important areas in the region -- and continue to work on whatever it is you're doing. When there are enough people on BOTH sides queued up to do the thing, a big battle horn sounds and off you all 'muster' to the battle area (or not: you can chose to just not go when it's time, if you're busy). You can get xp from this, and in addition your character actually has a 'PvP level' that can advance, as well as a 'normal' character level, and those two don't have to be kept even. They're fun, they're short, and the rewards are, again, pretty nice.

When you're done, the game pops you right back to wherever you were before the Scenario, and you can keep doing what you were doing (even queueing back up for the next one).

Oh, and the Scenario System auto-levels you to a 'competetive' level for the Scenario, if you're a little level 2 guy trying to play in a "levels 1 to 11" scenario; so in that way, WAR even uses a genre-useful kind of CoH's Sidekicking.

Dungeons
You're basic closed-instance adventures, with maximum group sizes ranging from six to 24. Again, these are nasty, brutish, short, and filled with some nice gear.

How you're keeping track of it
Every character has a Tome of Knowledge. Think of the Tome as a combination of CoH Badge-tracker, Quest log, collection of game fiction on all the important people you've seen, monsters you've faced, pictures of places you've been, and a source of new quests.

What's that? Accomplishment-borne quests? Yeah, it is pretty cool: say you've been fighting chaos beastmen for awhile. While fighting them, you end up killing, like, your fiftieth one

- In WoW, nothing notable happens.
- In CoH, you'd get a Badge. ("Bane of Beastmen")
- In LotRO, you probably get a title ("Bane of Beastmen"), plus it opens up a similar 'advanced' challenge to work on ("Kill 150 MORE and you'll get a bonus to your Determination Trait.")
- In WAR, you get a title ("Bane of Beastmen"), plus it opens up a similar 'advanced' challenge to work on, and there's a chance that (a) you'll immediately get a quest to go talk to Someone Important (b) you earn a new minor ability ("Bonus to killing Beastmen!") (c) you get some special piece of gear.

Basically, the Tome is a combination of every kind of Character Accomplishment Tracker in every MMO I've ever seen, with whipped cream and sprinkles on top. Take Note: Regardless of how well WAR does, this is going to be a game aspect that players will expect in all their MMO play from now on.

Is it the end-all-be-all of MMO gaming? Nope. But it's a good game that takes the current state-of-play from a lot of good or successful games, and improves or adapts it to make their game better.

Is it my next 2-year game? I don't know, but I'm definitely going to play it for more than the first free month. (I'm looking at you, Tabula Rasa & Age of Conan.)

Posted by Doyce at 2:12 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over on Waaaaagh, they're talking about "The Race."

The Race is my pet term for the phenomena that happens at the beginning of any MMO launch, where players rush in the gates, then feel the compulsive need to flat-out sprint toward the end game out of fear of getting left behind. Left behind what? This isn’t the rapture, it’s a video game. Some yahoo is going to hit rank 40 in about 110 hours of non-stop, red-eyed gaming and be a minor game celebrity for six seconds. I’m not quite sure what Mr. Yahoo thinks, but I can assure him that women are not going to be throwing ovulated girlie parts at his feet because they want his awesome genetic legacy to live on. He’s just the first of several folk who think that the game “hasn’t really started” until they hit the highest peak.

So obviously nobody’s going to keep up with that, apart from a few insane hardcore guilds and their incredibly angry spouses. But there is this unsaid, palpable fear of getting left behind the main pack in those first few weeks, especially your guildies and friends who you want to team with.

(Emphasis mine.)

Like the original poster, I confess that I do have a certain amount of drive to get to the 'top' of the game, if for no other reason than the fact that I hate like hell to be the guy who can't come along and play with my friends when they all want to run a new event and I'm not tall enough to ride the ride. I've experienced that to a small degree on WoW (not a lot, actually, since I wasn't really IN a guild until after Grezzk hit 70), and a lot more on LotRO (where it seemed that someone was always organizing a group-event centered around a zone I wasn't high enough level to survive).

((Dutiful props, here, to CoX and it's Sidekick mechanism.))

With that said, I'm not really sweating this for the release of WAR. As much as I'd like to get into the game and go a little crazy, there are reasons I'm not (even though I did qualify for the early-bird week of play):

1. Technical difficulties. It took ages to download the 9 gig client, and once I had it, the .zip was corrupt. Consequently, I need to wait for the actual install disks to arrive, and they didn't ship til Wednesday. No head-start for me.
2. AFK. The head start was last weekend. I was out of town. The "real" start is tomorrow. I'm going to be out of town (for the same depressing reason). :P
3. Other gaming stuff to do. Yes, I want to play WAR, but I also have stuff I want to accomplish in WoW and LotRO before THEIR next releases hit the shelves. I maintain that one of the best ways to balance one's time in a game is to play more than one game. "Drugs are my antidrug"? Maybe, but it works. Tabletop games would work well here as well, but they simply aren't as reliable for me at this point.
4. Other stuff to do in general. Home improvements. TV and movies to watch with Kate. Kaylee-things. Writing. Reading. Just stuff.
5. One must wait for the giants to grow up before one stands on their shoulders. Frankly, I'm lazy -- I don't like paying fifteen bucks a month to wander around fucking LOST for two hours while I try to find the little widget-thing that I need for a quest. If I wanted to get turned around and travel back and forth over the same area for an hour looking for something I KNOW should be RIGHT THERE, I'd drive downtown. Waiting a few weeks to get started and taking my time once I get in means that when I DO get into the game, there will be a number of lovely guides to tell me how-to and what-to and when-to and why.

So am I looking forward to WAR?

Absolutely. I want to play EVERYTHING.

But it will all still be there in a few days.

((And frankly, I'm going to kick ass no matter when I start. :) ))

Posted by Doyce at 4:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

So, the Wrath of the Lich King expansion for World of Warcraft is coming out November 13th - a bit less than 2 months. With it comes another 10 levels added to the level cap, and something like 10 new zones and stuff to do. Siege warfare, with big weapons. Et cetera.

Hot on its heels, Lord of the Rings Online is releasing it's first expansion, The Mines of Moria, on november 18th. That expansion also adds 10 levels to the level-cap, a ton of new areas to explore, and a metric ton of new content for the 'other' heroes of Middle-Earth -- things that, per usual, surround the events of the second 'book' of the Fellowship of the Ring, without directly focusing that.

So. Two Months left before the current content in both games becomes... well, not obsolete, but merely a bump in the road that leads to the new end-game.

Two months to tie up some loose ends. What loose ends? Well, let's look at a list or two:

WoW

• Titles for your character in WoW (unlike most games) are INCREDIBLY rare and hard to come by. Grezzk needs to run two more "hardcore-difficulty" dungeons and defeat one of the easier 25-man raid bosses to become a "Champion of the Naruu". I would dearly, dearly like to do that.
  
• Grezzk is also capable of improving his reputation with the "Netherwing Dragons" faction to the point where one of the Dragons actually volunteers to be his mount. This is an entirely soloable effort, and simply requires that I put in the time necessary to do the daily Netherwing quests for a couple weeks... and then I'd have a FLYING DRAGON to ride around on.
  
• I'd really like to get enough gold together to get the maxed-out riding skill for Syncerus, which would then let me start/finish the questline that would give him the 'epic' druid flight-form. This requires more than a little grinding of daily quests -- about the same amount as what I need to do on Grezzk to get the dragon. With that said, there's no reason I can't do this particular goal AFTER Wrath comes out.
  
• There's no gear or anything I really need for either of my main characters -- Grezzk is pretty much geared to the nines until he's close to level 80, and Syn's stuff will be replaced relatively quickly by questing in the new zones.
  

LotRO

• Finish the Books. There are epic questlines in LotRO called 'books.' Basically, these are the story arcs in the game that specifically hover around the storyline of the actually Fellowship of the Ring story, either directly or obliquely... regardless, they bring you in contact with the main characters of the books a lot. There were eight "Book" story arcs in the basic LotRO release (with books 7 and 8 pretty much aimed at level 50 characters), and since then they have released... six more Books, all designed for level 50 characters. Kate and I have finished books 1 to 8 on our main characters, and we want to finish the other six books before the expansion comes out. If we I don't manage to do anything else before Mines of Moria comes out, I'll be quite happy.
  
• Kill that Balrog. I've written about him before. We're close to figuring out how to beat him, and I'd like to do that before the level cap rises and he's not as much of a challenge.
  
• Again, I don't really have any gear I feel I must have before the expansion comes out. What I have now is working for me really well, and will no doubt be replaced as we venture ever closer to Mordor.
  
• Just for Kate, I'll add that we need to get her character's reputation with one of the factions up high enough for her to actually make use of a very nice item that she accidentally bought LONG before she has high enough rep to USE it.
  
• I'd like to get one more character to 50 before MoM comes out. I don't know if that will happen, but I think it will for Kate, especially if she works on Tirathien while I'm doing my dailies in WoW.
  

Finally, I'll note that I really only have about a month and a half to do this, not two months, because NaNoWriMo starts November 1st, and MIGHT cut into my play time a bit...

Posted by Doyce at 12:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Once again, while I was out of town, the WoW guild my main character was a part of disbanded.

Said guild was the one true Horde 'end game' raiding guild on Farstriders - a 'low-pop' server that I transferred to a year ago when it was first brought online. It was a very successful guild for the player base -- in the time I've been with them we've fought and defeated some stuff in the game that I NEVER thought I would see before the next expansion came out. I can't say I was really friends with any of the guys in the guild, but I respected the leadership -- they were good guys.

And now, just before the expansion comes out and everyone starts their big push to the new level cap and into the new content... I'm at loose ends again. This makes GoH the third guild that's disbanded while I was afk.

I moved my second-alt to another server about a month ago -- due to other stuff going on in my life, I haven't spent a ton of time with those guys, but they seem pretty cool, and Cenarion Circle is a pretty high-population server with a robust player base... maybe I'll go there.

Then again, they just made it possible to transfer your characters from PvE to PvP realms, so I *could* move Grezzk to the PvP server that I know people on... or the one that Lee has some active characters on...

I'm definitely going to move servers, I think. I know that much. I just dunno where. I'd really like to get into a group that will have a good time leveling up and 'learning' the new expansion.

I'll try to leave my guild-killing-karma on Farstriders. :P

Posted by Doyce at 12:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tanking classes (if they're build to be good tanks in NON-pvp) suck in PvP situations. They don't do enough damage to take guys down, and all their cool tanking abilities don't do squat.

In PvE: You can taunt a bad guy, forcing it to attack you, so that other people in your group can do their job while you soak all the big nasty hits.

In PvP: Your taunts have zero effect, and any opponent with half a brain will attack the wimpy little mage that does BIG damage first, then come back and whittle through your health at their leisure.

((Note: you can reconfigure a tanking class to do very good damage... at which point their ability to tank starts to suffer.))

Warhammer has come up with an elegant solution that's vaguely like DnD 4th edition: in PvP, if you taunt an opponent, they can still attack whoever they want, but *if* they attack someone else, they do less damage and their chance of missing is higher. This gives your opponent a choice: take out the tank to get rid of the penalty, or try to take out the squishy mage anyway... even with the penalty, knowing you'll miss more and won't hit as hard?

Either way, you as the tank are still doing your job -- protecting the group.

I think it's a genius way of handling it, and I really hope that this kind of idea finds its way into games like LotRO, WoW, and CoH.

Posted by Doyce at 1:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I played CoH for a couple years. I think it's fair to say I played the game a stunningly unhealthy amount quite a bit, but I did hit a point with every character when I became less interested in logging them in and more interested in playing some other character. It is perhaps not a coincidence that that point of disinterest came not-so-long after the character hit the level cap.

That's not a fault of the characters -- they were (and no doubt are, if I ever renewed the subscription) still a lot of fun to play, but there was nothing new or interesting to do -- no real sense of "okay, you are now among Earth's Mightiest Heroes (tm), now you're ready for the important stuff." It was much more like "well, you've beat everything the villains of this world can throw at you. Time to retire."

Which is basically what I did. Honestly? The only characters from CoH that I wish I could go back and play some more are Pummelcite and Mister Brightside... because I didn't "finish" them. More than any other MMO I've played, CoH has an end-state more than it has an end-game.

((And please don't get me wrong - I think it's a great game, but it is possible to be 'done' with it, or at least with a character. As evidence, I present the Consortium; they still play the game regularly, but their exploits are (near as I can tell) entirely involved in leveling up new guys; there's simply no reason for them to log in Amorpha or Psi-clone or even their more recent 50s.))

Anyway. Moving on.

When I started playing World of Warcraft, I was in a different mental place than I had been when I started CoH, and I was a lot more careful of how much time I spent playing (though perhaps no more careful about how much time I spent thinking about it); although leveling is much easier in WoW than CoH, it was about 9 months before I hit the level cap with my first character (Grezzk). My total /played time on him was a whopping 23 days worth of online time, when the average amount of time to hit the level cap now is closer to half that time.

The difference between WoW and CoH is that, since then, I've more than doubled my /played time on Grezzk. That is to say that I've spent more time playing Grez AT 70 than I spent getting Grezzk TO 70. And it's fair to say that I'm nowhere near 'done' with everything I could do with him in the end-game of WoW as it exists today (though perhaps I'm done with everything I can do on the server I'm on). I'm getting close, but I'm not done. (And an expansion is coming out in a few months to give me even more to do.)

I had thought that maybe WoW had the corner on this end-game thing. I enjoyed playing Lord of the Rings Online with Kate, but I was struggling with the leveling grind in the mid-40s.

Then we hit 50.

I've been on LotRO for a least a couple minutes (almost) every day since then, I think. There are 7 "epic" storylines to get through, and a bunch of dungeons to explore...

And then there's the Rift (a 12-player dungeon -- a mine in Angmar where they accidentally (or not) unearthed a Balrog that was supposed to stay chained up til the end of days). And this "Rift" thing? If I wanted to do that, there was some gear I needed*, and some old quests to finish up...

In short, there was an End-game. We could finally play with the Big Kids. We were, indeed, among (middle-)earth's mightiest heroes, and ready for the Greatest Challenges, and we've really been enjoying how the game has changed; an already rich and rewarding world opened up and said "You thought raiding Fornost was cool? You thought fighting one of the Nine in the Misty Mountains was epic? Take. A. Look. At. This."

And look, we have. By my calculations, it took us about 12 days worth of /played time (spread out over more than a year) to get to level 50. That was two weeks ago, and in only that time, we've already spent about a sixth as much time just playing the end-game... advancing the Epic Storyline... figuring out how we're going to Beat that Balrog. **

Frankly (and in stark contrast to CoH), I don't have TIME to level an alt.

And in a few months, an expansion comes out to coincide with the Fellowship traveling out of Rivendell and heading (unknowingly) into the Mines of Moria.

I can't wait.

(* - actually, it turns out my gear was just fine.)

(** - Funny story about the Rift. Our Kinship has been working on defeating the Rift for awhile now -- they schedule a run every couple weekends. Kate and I signed up the first weekend after we turned 50, since it looked like they were short on players and, since they were short on players, we were brought along... expectations for our performance were not, I think, very high. Since then, we've gone back a second time. We've gotten farther as a Kinship than we ever have, and faster than we ever have. Our vets attribute a lot of this to us (me and Kate). Kate and I informed the Kin that we couldn't be online this weekend or the next... and they called off the Rift runs until we get back. It's gratifying to feel wanted.)

Posted by Doyce at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)