Massively goes to WAR: What worries us about Warhammer
All week we've brought you coverage of the design concepts and ideas that make up Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. The components that make the back of Warhammer's box look mighty interesting – RvR, Scenarios, Public Quests, the Tome of Knowledge – are all generally very solid. We've reported on exactly what we saw and were told last week, with an attempt at an objective stance.
Though this week's coverage is now at an end, there are still some questions left unanswered. Some will be addressed in future articles on the site, but some are higher-level than that. The game's seen two major pushbacks at this point, and players have to be concerned about whether EA Mythic will make their current Fall deadline. I'm concerned too, about a number of things. Here, then, is the stuff I'm unsure about when it comes to Warhammer Online; the unanswered questions, the balls in the air, the shadows under the bed. Read on for my attempt to frame these questions as best I can.
From top to bottom, here are the issues I personally feel players should be concerned about ramping up to this Fall:
Time Keeps Ticking: Ultimately, time is not on EA Mythic's side this year. They've now pushed the game back twice, changing player expectations. Though an upswell of information handed down in the last few months has helped to refocus attention on the game, once players get the term 'vaporware' inside their heads it's hard to get it out. Where players were once anticipating the game, the two pushbacks have raised expectations a great deal; for some dyed-in-the-wool Warhammer fans, the personal expectation of game perfection may no longer be attainable by a corporeal game developer.
City Spectacular:
Altdorf is far and away the most complete of the six Capital Cities. It was my impression that the Inevitable City is the second-most complete of these zones. The other four are in various stages of less-completeness. Given the sheer ambition of these areas, that may be cause for some concern. Make no mistake: Altdorf may be the most impressive NPC city in an MMO to date. Performing bards, dungeons, drunks, bar fights, etc ... the sheer variety of background life and 'stuff to do' puts it heads and shoulders above even World of Warcraft's expertly crafted capitals. That said, they aren't done with Altdorf yet and they still have five more to finish. Here's hoping their eyes aren't bigger than their stomachs.
PvE Endgame: We asked and had answered the question about the PvE endgame, and it's my opinion that there is some "there" there. For max-level players not only will there be dungeons but Capital City-based PvE content as well. That said, it's interesting that the details on those dungeons are still being nailed down at this stage in the game. Add that to the still-in-motion City development and it's another difficult question to nail down.
The Perception Game: I asked Jeff Hickman directly about the endless comparisons to World of Warcraft. Personally, I agree with his assessment: Warhammer is simply not World of Warcraft reskinned; it's a fundamentally different game with a completely different character and sensibility. That said, the prevailing opinion in MMO circles seems to be that WAR is just a WoW knock-off. Will that help or hurt the company when launch rolls around? Will that prompt Warcraft players to try the game? Will it make them drop their subscriptions after a month because of out-of-sync expectations? More distressingly, will it prompt WoW players to ignore the game entirely?
The Graphics Question: Let's be frank for a moment. Some of the early Warhammer screenshots, even ones released as recently as last spring, were a bit dodgey. Washed out, extremely samey. The reason, we discovered during our visit, is that detailed lighting models were only added to the game fairly recently. The final lighting schema isn't even in the game yet, and each light source has to be placed into the game by hand. EA Mythic workstations all have a distributed computing program loaded onto them that assists that part of the team with running brute-force computations at night. The result is that almost no-one has seen what the game will really truly look like at launch ... but players have been forming opinions on everything released so far.
The Tome's Uniqueness:
One final, and comparatively minor, question is about the Tome of Knowledge's true uniqueness. LOTRO fans claim that the Tome isn't offering anything that their game doesn't have; having now played both games, I'm of the opinion that the Tome is a more complex and detailed system. In my experience, it's very much unlike what LOTRO's quest/lore book offers. That said, it may still be a sticking point, a possible hotspot.
Ultimately all of this is moot. As Mike Schramm put it so eloquently on our last podcast, the players who log in on launch day are going to be the ones that decide whether Warhammer's been worth the effort or not. The initial buzz from early adopters has made or broken numerous games in the past, and if that first batch of players is happy it'll go a long way towards shifting and changing attitudes. Assuming the Fall deadline holds, we'll know soon enough which way the winds are blowing.
 | Did you enjoy this? Make sure to check out all of our previous Warhammer Online coverage, and don't miss any of the rest of the articles in this series as Massively goes to WAR! |
Credits: Massively.com would like to thank the following people for making this event coverage possible: Juli Cummins, Chris Heintz, Eddiemae Jukes, Paul Barnett, Jeff Hickman, Josh Drescher, Adam Gershowitz, Mike Stone, Brian Wheeler, Jeff Skalski, James Nichols, Daniel Enright, Justin Webb, Carrie Gouskos, Christian Bales, Mark Jacobs, Jordan and all the folks from the RvR sessions, and (of course) yourself for reading along.
