Week 1 - Checking in with the Warhammer Online beta
When it comes to the Warhammer: Age of Reckoning beta silence is never golden. Instead of leaving everyone in the dark to fend for speculative scraps and gossiping guffaws, the development teams working will report to the masses every week on the progress they are making in different areas of the game to keep our salivating tongues dripping. Check out the full script for yourself or stick around for a recap.
Public Quests were reportedly a little on the iffy side before the developers stalled the beta, currently influence and experience rewards are being adjusted for perfection. There are still a lot of UI enhancements in the sketch phase and it may not be until January, a whole month after the beta kick-starts into high gear, before beta testers see those easy-on-the-eyes UI improvements. The biggest undertaking by the Public Quest team is dealing with the teeter-totter that is balancing loot and fine-tuning it so the pig-hats stats aren't pig-crap, make it worthy!
When it comes to RvR players can now flag themselves for some PvP action, although, the same regular rules apply for removing the flag. Guards in the Chapter hubs will flag any player if they are disrupting the peace and commence a beat-down to punish their wily ways. A very slight acknowledgement but unfortunately no juicy information this week on battleground objectives but the RvR team does promise to divulge some information in the near future.
When it comes to trading the item team didn't reinvent the wheel as player trade now works like it normally does in other MMOGS. Now that the basic functionality works as it should the item team has been busy tagging all the items BoE, BoP, or no restriction at all -- twink away. Quest items, Influence rewards, Renown store items have all been made BoP according to the team. While these changes don't sound like much work on paper, it's obviously a huge undertaking when there are thousands of items that need to be tagged and the developers can't just go around sticking twink-item tags on every item.
The Inevitable City and Altdorf would be no fun if there was nothing to smash, crush, pillage and burn to the ground. The city team reports that they are hard at work on the Temple of Sigmar, the Altdorf docks, and the Inevitable City arena has paid off as these are intended to be the more exciting areas. City-capture is in the works and the team is keeping busy making sure the design is solid and that this experience is enjoyable.
Last, the class team worked on Marauders, frenetic warriors who take charge dual wielding a standard weapon in their main hand and a mutated organic weapon as their offhand. The Marauder receives three different mutations available and each mutation represents a different play style, the way it's described it really sounds like battle stances. The mutations offer different buffs, and abilities based on the active mutation. The Marauder is a DPS class that is about pumping lots of damage based on their offhand mutation. During battle they are able to change the mutation of their offhand, which will dictate what abilities or effects are used on certain attacks, much like a stance would. Hey, I just said that. That's all until next week.
