Warhammer Online!

[General Leitmann]

So I was surfing today, and came across this (http://www.warhammeronline.com/english/home/index.php), the trailer and site for Warhammer Online, a new MMORPG regarding the Warhammer World.

Now, as a fan of Warhammer and a longtime player, I was quite pleased to see this, but gravely disapointed when I found that there will not be a Mac version. This depresses me slightly, because my Mac is more than capabe to run this game (the official req's have NOT been released yet), save for the fact that it's not a PC.

Why oh why doesn't any software developer make Mac versions?!

[blackout]

...MAC GAMER! YOU DISGRACE THE GAMING COMMUNITY!*hates macs*

[Poison_Fish]

So much hate and it has no direction, oh woe is the world.

Still, I've got enough games on my plate, though this does look interesting. The problem is Mythic got bought out by EA.

[Murongo]

Looks like a WoW clone. Safe zones, instanced PvP, no loot, dry dry and more dry. Booooring. The video is badass though.

[General Leitmann]

...MAC GAMER! YOU DISGRACE THE GAMING COMMUNITY!*hates macs*

*sigh* I always thought the same thing until I used one. Macs run far better than any PC I've ever seen.


Looks like a WoW clone. Safe zones, instanced PvP, no loot, dry dry and more dry. Booooring. The video is badass though.

Well, I'd agree with you, only I won't because WoW sucks and Warhammer pwns.

[Erloas]

Looks like a WoW clone. Safe zones, instanced PvP, no loot, dry dry and more dry. Booooring. The video is badass though.

Sounds like someone that really just doesn't know what they are talking about. Not trying to flame, but it really just shows a lack of information. The look of WAR is very very similar to Warhammer, straight from the models and pictures and descriptions of the lore and onto the PC. From the Warhammer lore that has been around for almost 25 years. WoW just happens to have also taken a lot of the look of warhammer since the first Warcraft 1. The similarities have also changed a lot as WAR has refined their art further from the first alpha build shots.

There is also supposed to be a lot of world PvP, there is instanced PvP in some form but the exact form is unclear, the main drive though is the PvP. There is also the fact that you can level up entirely through PvP if you want to, you get loot (though not that players loot), exp and everything else you need to level up from killing players as well as killing NPCs. It isn't FFA PvP for sure but that is because the majority of players sometimes want a break from PvP. Its also designed to encourage people to PvP, you aren't going to loose your nice new armor or all your gold because someone ganks you and you aren't going to get introuble for killing the enemy.
Given for some people anything but FFA PvP is "boooring" and thats great for them, but not for most people.

And yes, I have been following WAR for too long already. But the similiarities between WAR and WoW end at the fact that warcraft borrowed IP ideas from Warhammer years ago and that they are both MMORPGs with the similarities that the genre necessitate.




*sigh* I always thought the same thing until I used one. Macs run far better than any PC I've ever seen.
I will admit that I haven't used a lot of Macs but the times I have have not impressed me at all. My brother and roommate use them at work and school at times and they said they are ok but their reliability is usually on-par or slightly less then the PCs they use in the same places. I will accept that though if the last PCs you used where run by big companies or still running something other then XP or 2000 or they aren't being updated reasonably often. Most of the complaints I hear anymore about PCs all come from people who never take the time to do any reasonable maintance, it would be like buying a car and complaining that it died after 30k miles because you never bothered to change the oil.

I don't have anything against Macs, but I don't see them as the perfect machines some people make them out to be. And while it would be nice to see more games for more systems, it usually isn't practical at this point in time. Yes OpenGL runs on multiple systems but since it is done differently in some types of games its more effecient and in others it is less and it would mean most companies would have to completely retrain all their programmers on OpenGL instead of DirectX and completely re-write their engines. Someday it might happen but it won't happen in the short term.

[Zeb The Troll]

Why oh why doesn't any software developer make Mac versions?!The simple answer is population density. Macs have a very small portion of the home computer market share and writing a game twice is usually an unacceptable expenditure. When games are converted for play on Macs, it's often outsourced to a handful of companies. Out of curiosity, is there any MMO that runs on a Mac? Blizzard has long been one of the companies that actively supports making their software run on Mac platforms but I don't think even WoW is Mac compatible.


I will admit that I haven't used a lot of Macs but the times I have have not impressed me at all. My brother and roommate use them at work and school at times and they said they are ok but their reliability is usually on-par or slightly less then the PCs they use in the same places. I will accept that though if the last PCs you used where run by big companies or still running something other then XP or 2000 or they aren't being updated reasonably often. Most of the complaints I hear anymore about PCs all come from people who never take the time to do any reasonable maintance, it would be like buying a car and complaining that it died after 30k miles because you never bothered to change the oil.As someone who has supported Macs and PC's in the same large enterprise environment I can say with relative authority that they are not any more or less problematic than PC's. Their problems are just different. The reason many people seem to think that Macs have fewer problems is because, in my experience, most Mac users know how to troubleshoot and resolve problems that are common on their systems and they don't know how to do it on a PC. So to them their issues aren't as serious on the Mac. On the flip side, the number of PC users who know how to do more than turn it on and use the software they use on a regular basis is proportionally much smaller so the general populace hears about an order of magnitude more issues that people have had and couldn't correct on their own.

For the sake of discussion we'll say there are 10 million computers in use. Two million of those are Macs. One million people have more than user level knowledge on each system. That means that the average joe walking down the street will encounter 7 out of 10 people that had an issue they couldn't correct on a PC but only 1 out of 10 people will have the same experience with a Mac. It's not because the Macs fail less, it's just because there are fewer people talking about them.

If Apple had 50% of the market share I think you'd see a pretty even spread of problems. Of course, if they had that you'd also see companies being able to justify the expenditure for tandem development of their products on both platforms.

[Poison_Fish]

The simple answer is population density. Macs have a very small portion of the home computer market share and writing a game twice is usually an unacceptable expenditure. When games are converted for play on Macs, it's often outsourced to a handful of companies. Out of curiosity, is there any MMO that runs on a Mac? Blizzard has long been one of the companies that actively supports making their software run on Mac platforms but I don't think even WoW is Mac compatible.

*looks at his laptop, looks at WoW running in a minimized screen*

Nope, works fine here. They even added in Itunes key bindings to control music if your full screen.

What Blizzard has been doing, at least since Starcraft, has been releasing hybrid products that would run on both PC and Mac. I actually got a few odd looks from my friends when I picked up the expansion in the PC section, as they all know I am a mac user. It runs fine for me.

But it's true, I can't think of any other mainstream or even small scale MMO that runs on a mac (I think there was an attempt at Ultima many years ago). I guess Blizzard with it's huge girth figured that they basically would have control of the Mac MMO market, as you really only have one choice (once again, as far as I know).

[Zeb The Troll]

*looks at his laptop, looks at WoW running in a minimized screen*

Nope, works fine here. They even added in Itunes key bindings to control music if your full screen.Well, if I were to have guessed I would have had to guess the Blizzard MMO as the only one that does.

Like I said, Blizzard is the only game company I can think of that develops for the Mac inhouse.

[NEO|Phyte]

Like I said, Blizzard is the only game company I can think of that develops for the Mac inhouse.
There's Introversion, if you count 4 guys that make some damn good games a company.

[J_Muller]

*sigh* I always thought the same thing until I used one. Macs run far better than any PC I've ever seen.

Interestingly enough, I've had the opposite experience. Though I do admit that they're easier to learn to use. However, once you're actually computer-literate, the cheaper and more versatile PCs are more worth your time.

[The Orange Zergling]

If it's a pay-to-play, I'm not getting it.
If it's not... different story. Dwarves an' Greenskins FTW.

[Destro_Yersul]

It's probably going to be PtP, at least as far as I can tell. For all of you who think it is a WoW Clone though, I direct you to Penny Arcade (http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/04/10), the guys who got it pretty much exactly right. To put it bluntly, Warcraft borrowed from warhammer first. I'm going to get this game though. As a warhammer geek, it is mandatory.

[The Orange Zergling]

Damnit, then I have to choose if I wanna keep playing WoW or switch to this... WAR looks awesome.

:smallannoyed:

[Murongo]

Sounds like someone that really just doesn't know what they are talking about. Not trying to flame, but it really just shows a lack of information. The look of WAR is very very similar to Warhammer, straight from the models and pictures and descriptions of the lore and onto the PC. From the Warhammer lore that has been around for almost 25 years. WoW just happens to have also taken a lot of the look of warhammer since the first Warcraft 1. The similarities have also changed a lot as WAR has refined their art further from the first alpha build shots.

There is also supposed to be a lot of world PvP, there is instanced PvP in some form but the exact form is unclear, the main drive though is the PvP. There is also the fact that you can level up entirely through PvP if you want to, you get loot (though not that players loot), exp and everything else you need to level up from killing players as well as killing NPCs. It isn't FFA PvP for sure but that is because the majority of players sometimes want a break from PvP. Its also designed to encourage people to PvP, you aren't going to loose your nice new armor or all your gold because someone ganks you and you aren't going to get introuble for killing the enemy.
Given for some people anything but FFA PvP is "boooring" and thats great for them, but not for most people.

I said nothing about how it looks. I prefer the warhammer universe to the warcraft universe and I have a two pretty little dark elf and skaven armies.

It's a clone because the system of combat, loot gain, and the PvP system are more or less the same. Lootless PvP is consequenceless PvP, and thus not fun. Killing someone isn't worth anything, they just respawn somewhere else. Leveling is irrelevant, there will be tier 4 guys on the first day (they estimated 12 hours of playtime until you max out your character.)

You don't have to PvP if you don't want to. You can spend your entire game time leveling in safe zones getting phat lewts until you're so geared up that you can take on people who spent their time PvPing. Theres no risk of death in the safe zones where players can't attack you. Its essentially a very simplistic single player game that way. And yet you can become just as, if not more powerful than people who actually challenge themselves.

And even if you DO decide to PvP and take the more challenging route, the PvP is a rinse-and-repeat battleground system with no real reward for killing someone beyond a tiny touch of pride which will probably be erased when the person pops back up in front of you, wearing the same gear, completely unweakened by their death and kills you.

I really couldn't care less about looks. It's the weak semi-PvP based but not really wishy-washy sorta PvE formless mass that they call their gameplay. At least WoW admits total carebearness and dosen't let you get any exp or decent loot from PvP, warhammer is trying to apply a PvE system to a PvP game and it looks horrible.

[Erloas]

to Murongo (since it seems silly to quote an entire posting)
Ok, it really is clear you don't know much about what the game has planned.

The reason you can't loot another player in PvP is because it actively discourages PvP. How many people would go out and fight when the chances of dieing are huge, at least compared to the chances in PvE. In PvP every death is the death of a player. So if players are punished and punished harsily, by loosing some or all of their stuff, for participating in PvP it will greatly reduce the people that take part. That will actively push people away from the game and away from PvP.
You will gain loot and experience through PvP though, its just that the loot and experience will be generated rather then taken from another player. You can level up and get the equipement you will need by killing other players in PvP. There is also not going to be the huge powercurve of equipement like you see in WoW. It will probably be more like DAOC in that equipment reaches a point that it is all very close to equal and if you do spend hundreds of hours getting loot it will give you a very minor boost at most, definately not enough to decide a fight. Someone farming PvE to get items and to max level will have no advantages in fighting someone that went with a mix of PvE and PvP or just went straight PvP.

As for the estimated play time to max level, there has been absolutely no word on what sort of time frame that will be. Anyone who claims to know is blatently lieing. Right now no one outside of Mythic has played the game more then an hour or so at some of the trade shows. The forums have had a lot of speculation on how long it might take and how long they think it should take, but nothing has ever been confirmed. 12 hours is way shorter then even the short estimates I've heard.

There is no information yet on rewards for PvP, but again one would assume it will be similar in some ways to DAOC (being Mythic's other big game). Meaning there are many tangible but not overpowered rewards to taking part in PvP. The details of this have not been released yet so anyone who claims to know what they will be for sure is just making things up.
There is also 4 types of PvP that have been outlined so far, only 1 of which is instanced, all the rest are open world. The instances also haven't been clearly defined yet to the playerbase. They might end up like in WoW but there is a very good chance they will not. WoW's versions of instances aren't the only way to use the technology, it is just the only one most people know.
The reward for PvP isn't forcing other players to quit or never come back, its not to steal all their items. The PvP will lead directly to the overarcing battle between the race pairs so if you take part in PvP and win you can eventually seige and then loot and pillage the enemies capital city.

As for the safe zones, they are needed. I really like to PvP, I RvRed in DAOC the majority of the time, but there are just some times when you don't want to worry about it. And while it is possible to only do PvE the game highly encourages you to do both and is designed with about 80% of the high end content with PvP in mind. By just doing PvE and never doing anything else you aren't hurting those that did both leveling up you will only be hurting yourself. The idea as Mythic has presented it is that either PvP or PvE are equally viable options, but you will usually end up doing both, and one way will not be overally more effective or give better loot then the other. Again exact details and comparisions are not yet available.

It sounds like you haven't played DAOC, or at least not enough to count, so don't know the RvR system on which they are building on. WAR is not DAOC 2 by any means but much of the PvP concepts are of similar ideas.
And according to many people (hard to qualify that, but its the general feel I get) DAOC has had the best PvP of any game to date. EVE probably has the best PvP of the games still going strong though, but IMO at least it is severily hampered by the large death penalty which actively encourages people to either stay in empire areas or to farm PvE for hours so you can afford to PvP for a little while.

[Murongo]

to Murongo (since it seems silly to quote an entire posting)
Ok, it really is clear you don't know much about what the game has planned.

The reason you can't loot another player in PvP is because it actively discourages PvP. How many people would go out and fight when the chances of dieing are huge, at least compared to the chances in PvE. In PvP every death is the death of a player. So if players are punished and punished harsily, by loosing some or all of their stuff, for participating in PvP it will greatly reduce the people that take part. That will actively push people away from the game and away from PvP.
You will gain loot and experience through PvP though, its just that the loot and experience will be generated rather then taken from another player. You can level up and get the equipement you will need by killing other players in PvP. There is also not going to be the huge powercurve of equipement like you see in WoW. It will probably be more like DAOC in that equipment reaches a point that it is all very close to equal and if you do spend hundreds of hours getting loot it will give you a very minor boost at most, definately not enough to decide a fight. Someone farming PvE to get items and to max level will have no advantages in fighting someone that went with a mix of PvE and PvP or just went straight PvP.

As for the estimated play time to max level, there has been absolutely no word on what sort of time frame that will be. Anyone who claims to know is blatently lieing. Right now no one outside of Mythic has played the game more then an hour or so at some of the trade shows. The forums have had a lot of speculation on how long it might take and how long they think it should take, but nothing has ever been confirmed. 12 hours is way shorter then even the short estimates I've heard.

There is no information yet on rewards for PvP, but again one would assume it will be similar in some ways to DAOC (being Mythic's other big game). Meaning there are many tangible but not overpowered rewards to taking part in PvP. The details of this have not been released yet so anyone who claims to know what they will be for sure is just making things up.
There is also 4 types of PvP that have been outlined so far, only 1 of which is instanced, all the rest are open world. The instances also haven't been clearly defined yet to the playerbase. They might end up like in WoW but there is a very good chance they will not. WoW's versions of instances aren't the only way to use the technology, it is just the only one most people know.
The reward for PvP isn't forcing other players to quit or never come back, its not to steal all their items. The PvP will lead directly to the overarcing battle between the race pairs so if you take part in PvP and win you can eventually seige and then loot and pillage the enemies capital city.

As for the safe zones, they are needed. I really like to PvP, I RvRed in DAOC the majority of the time, but there are just some times when you don't want to worry about it. And while it is possible to only do PvE the game highly encourages you to do both and is designed with about 80% of the high end content with PvP in mind. By just doing PvE and never doing anything else you aren't hurting those that did both leveling up you will only be hurting yourself. The idea as Mythic has presented it is that either PvP or PvE are equally viable options, but you will usually end up doing both, and one way will not be overally more effective or give better loot then the other. Again exact details and comparisions are not yet available.

It sounds like you haven't played DAOC, or at least not enough to count, so don't know the RvR system on which they are building on. WAR is not DAOC 2 by any means but much of the PvP concepts are of similar ideas.
And according to many people (hard to qualify that, but its the general feel I get) DAOC has had the best PvP of any game to date. EVE probably has the best PvP of the games still going strong though, but IMO at least it is severily hampered by the large death penalty which actively encourages people to either stay in empire areas or to farm PvE for hours so you can afford to PvP for a little while.

Wether or not you like the game is an irrelevant opinion, but to tell me I know nothing about it is ridiculous. I attended a seminar for this game where I met and talked to a spokesperson as well as a developer, thats where I learned the amount of time taken to get to the final of the four tiers. I followed the game for quite a while and watched it slip from intense PvP game to WoWesque carebear. Your assumed superiority is both annoying and incorrect. Yes that last bit was ad hominem, sue me.

PvP without penalties is pointless, and having witnessed the combat system, gear will decide everything. Much like WoW where any idiot can play their class to its maximum potential (many still can't because a huge amount of the playerbase never PvPs), but only the idiot who invests the most time wins because he gets the best gear.

The ability to cop out and be completely safe at any time isn't "needed" its "wanted" by people who can't fight. Also, you can't attack your own faction members. This is ridiculous in a warhammer world, where chaos and orks fight each other more than they fight anyone else. World of WARcraft and WARhammer have taken the war out of it. Now its World of TEAMCOOPERATIONcraft and ADVENTUREhammer. There may as well be no PvP.

Even if you win enough instanced fights to "seige the enemy capital" as you put it, after you succeed, whats your reward? Oh right, you get teleported back to start to do it all over again. Tedious. Boring, dry, rinse-and-repeat tediousness.

[Crazy Owl]

So your saying you would be perfectly happy to spend months getting parts to a set of armour and that you want and then some idiot attacks you when your in the middle of a fight and you lose everything?

[DarkCorax]

It's a clone because the system of combat, loot gain, and the PvP system are more or less the same. Lootless PvP is consequenceless PvP, and thus not fun. Killing someone isn't worth anything, they just respawn somewhere else.

You do get PvP rewards and loot, just there is no Player looting, it is a PvP (RvR technically) game.



You don't have to PvP if you don't want to. You can spend your entire game time leveling in safe zones getting phat lewts until you're so geared up that you can take on people who spent their time PvPing. Theres no risk of death in the safe zones where players can't attack you. Its essentially a very simplistic single player game that way. And yet you can become just as, if not more powerful than people who actually challenge themselves.Yes, you don't have to PvP if you don't want to, but PvPers will get loot too, and I believe that the best loot will come from PvP, also they are trying to avoid "Uber" or "phat" loot, like in WoW.



And even if you DO decide to PvP and take the more challenging route, the PvP is a rinse-and-repeat battleground system with no real reward for killing someone beyond a tiny touch of pride which will probably be erased when the person pops back up in front of you, wearing the same gear, completely unweakened by their death and kills you.
Again, you get loot from PvP, and yes, some battle grounds will be instanced (which I admit I don't like), but there wil also be non instanced battle grounds, there has not been much infomation released on Respawns and death penalties, so I can't comment on that...


The ability to cop out and be completely safe at any time isn't "needed" its "wanted" by people who can't fight. Also, you can't attack your own faction members. This is ridiculous in a warhammer world, where chaos and orks fight each other more than they fight anyone else. World of WARcraft and WARhammer have taken the war out of it.. There may as well be no PvP.What is the point of factions if you can attack them, they need a way to split up the teams, this is pretty much the sides they have for the GW worldwide campaigns, so I don't really see what the problem is...


Even if you win enough instanced fights to "seige the enemy capital" as you put it, after you succeed, whats your reward? Oh right, you get teleported back to start to do it all over again. Tedious. Boring, dry, rinse-and-repeat tediousness.The reward is you get to loot their Capital, is it speculated that the best rewards will come from looting the capital...

I may add a more stuctured argument, with infomation from the W:AR sites later, I need to get to bed...

[General Leitmann]

I will admit that I haven't used a lot of Macs but the times I have have not impressed me at all. My brother and roommate use them at work and school at times and they said they are ok but their reliability is usually on-par or slightly less then the PCs they use in the same places. I will accept that though if the last PCs you used where run by big companies or still running something other then XP or 2000 or they aren't being updated reasonably often. Most of the complaints I hear anymore about PCs all come from people who never take the time to do any reasonable maintance, it would be like buying a car and complaining that it died after 30k miles because you never bothered to change the oil.

Okay, first things first. I've never had any real problems with any PC that I've owned, in fact, my old PC was a gaming machine all in all. Running XP home and all that shiny Microsoft nonsense. The thing isn't that I had problems with my PC, it's that my iMac has everything my PC had and then some, minus the games of course, but the fact that everything runs seamlessly on my mac is one of the main reasons that I chose the mac over the pc. Another reason, everything runs efficiently, you want to uninstall something, drag-drop to the trash and it's gone. For good, there's none of this long winded uninstall processes and system issues that might occur.

But I DO agree with you on your first point about WoW and the whole Warcraft series being nothing more than an offshoot of the Warhammer world with a few side additions to keep the lawyers off their backs.

[Erloas]

Wether or not you like the game is an irrelevant opinion, but to tell me I know nothing about it is ridiculous. I attended a seminar for this game where I met and talked to a spokesperson as well as a developer, thats where I learned the amount of time taken to get to the final of the four tiers. I followed the game for quite a while and watched it slip from intense PvP game to WoWesque carebear. Your assumed superiority is both annoying and incorrect. Yes that last bit was ad hominem, sue me.

PvP without penalties is pointless, and having witnessed the combat system, gear will decide everything. Much like WoW where any idiot can play their class to its maximum potential (many still can't because a huge amount of the playerbase never PvPs), but only the idiot who invests the most time wins because he gets the best gear.

Most of what you have said is just not supported by anything that has been released. How much of an impact gear will have on the game is entirely unknown until more information about the gear has been given. We don't know if one piece of gear will have 10 utility points worth of stats and another one that is farmed for 20 hrs in a dungeon is going to have 100 utility points worth of bonuses. It is simply not possible to know how much of an impact it will have on the game at end levels. The only playable demos have all been lower level and not including most of the abilities that each class is going to have added, you can't possibly "know" the combat system at this point.
Any information about how long it would take to get to tier 4 would have also been given to the many media people that have talked with them, no a single word about it has been released that I've seen. Also considering the point in development that they are in it is likely still being discussed. What it sounds like, as often happens is that a question is mis-heard or mis-intrepreted, we (as in follower of the game) have seen it happen many times not just by average people talking to the devs like you but also from the media people talking to them. Where the question asked is not the question answered.

As far as if it is going to be boring or not, well that is all just opinion and you are free to think that, but most of your claims to how the game is going to work just don't match with anything I've heard having followed the game every day for a year or more.
Of course if you can find any links that might confirm what you have said I would love to see them.

http://www.warhammeralliance.com/
This is a good site for finding what information is available about WAR to this point. Its not offical, Mythic doesn't have offical forums, but it does have fairly regular visits by the devs and links to every piece of information anyone can find on WAR.

[Zeb The Troll]

http://www.warhammeralliance.com/
This is a good site for finding what information is available about WAR to this point. Its not offical, Mythic doesn't have offical forums, but it does have fairly regular visits by the devs and links to every piece of information anyone can find on WAR. Here's a link to the official WAR website (http://www.warhammeronline.com/english/community/forumsFansites/) which lists which forums they support. I wouldn't plan on Mythic hosting any forums of their own because DAoC doesn't even have Mythic forums.

What Mythic does have, however, is the WAR Herald (http://www.warherald.com/news/) where Sanya Thomas posts regular updates and answers questions from the community interested in the specifics of the game (which are few since the "exclusive invite only Beta phase" doesn't even start until this spring and nothing is set in stone yet).