With the NDA down (it is down, right?), lets finally start talking WAR details.

The one feature that I wrote off as a gimmick when I heard about it was the Tome of Knowledge. To me it sounded like a fancy name for a quest log, and while having a decent layout for a quest log is always nice, it’s not exactly a make or break feature. Oh how wrong I was. Many have described the ToK as a ‘game within the game’, no doubt due to it’s depth and level of interaction. To me that’s a bit misleading, as you never really ‘play’ the ToK, but rather it’s always in the background enhancing everything you do. It never gets in the way, but often times will inspire you to head off the beaten path for a bit.

The feature list for the ToK is huge, and a quick Google search will no doubt provide you a nice one. What that list won’t show you is how well the ToK fits into WAR, how it pulls off being amazingly deep and amazingly simple at the same time. Want to change your title? It takes but a few clicks in the ToK. Want to read up on a new monster type you just encountered? ToK. Curious to see how many wolves you’ve killed on your way to rank 40? ToK. And just how long did it take you to get to 40? ToK.

But that’s just the surface, the stuff that other MMOs have done with /played commands or simple character profiles. Almost everything in the ToK is a link to something else. Mouse over a title, and the ToK will tell you exactly how you achieved it. Go to a beastiery entry, and the ToK will list things you have already unlocked, as well as the next set of goals. Go to the story page of a certain tier, and the ToK will tell you your influence level in each area, provide a map, and other links. Each piece fits perfectly with everything associated with it, and you can go seamlessly from lore to side bonuses to major events with only a few clicks.

It’s also clearly built for the long haul, the type of design unique to MMOs that keeps us logging in again and again. Some of the goals in the ToK are very clearly long term stuff. Kill 10,000 (and perhaps more after that) orcs? Yea that’s not going to happen in one sitting. The beauty is that Mythic allows all of the ToK stuff to continue accruing while you are out questing or doing some RvR. The kill 10,000 orcs is a general goal, not zone specific. If you kill an orc player in RvR, that counts. Kill some orc NPCs during a quest, those count too. Level 1 orc, level 40 orc, they both count.

The ToK is far more than a quest log, or a deeds log, or a character profile. It’s all those things things, plus a bunch of other stuff, all formatted and linked for convenience, and presented in perfect style. Once you have had a chance to play an MMO with something like the ToK working it’s magic in the background, I makes other quest logs and lore sections look very lackluster in comparison. Mythic did not reinventing the wheel, they just gave you a car along with that wheel, and tuned it perfectly.

NDA drops, finally. I won’t do a whole big review, as I’m sure those will be everywhere and lets face it, as amazing as WAR is, it’s a mass-market MMO. You still do quests, get items, level, all that. Like Tobold, I’ll just pick at what I find very cool, and explain why certain little features will actually mean a great deal to WAR. Plus I’m planning on writing a sort of ‘play by play’ of certain classes, mainly to explain why the WAR world feels a whole lot different than any other MMO setting. Having played the beta, I no longer view the statement ‘War is everywhere’ as marketing hype, but rather the most accurate description of how each zone is laid out. Again, more tomorrow!

In yet another example of ‘no one thought of this before?’, the mechanic of having to engage in melee combat to effectively heal works amazingly well to keep a support class from falling into a healbot roll. The fact that as a melee healer you are able to take down tougher mobs than any other class is just icing on the cake.

Does that break NDA? And has that come down yet so I can actually put out complete thoughts…?

How have all the people who have been in the WAR beta been able to think about anything else? I was sitting today trying to think of something to write about, that won’t be NDA breaking, and I just can’t. I can’t talk about how I think a certain class is awesome, why this little UI feature is gamechanging, or just how amazingly incorrect all that ‘its WoW’ talk is.

Mythic needs to drop the NDA, and quick…

:logs out quickly:

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PQ = Godlike

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WoW-like about as much as EQ was UO-like

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I now fully understand why Paul is always excited, he gets to play WAR

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:logs back in:

What if Warhammer PvP is something PvE players do end up liking? I mean, if EQ PvP is your only example of PvP, I don’t blame you for hating PvP. Same goes for WoW PvP. Two PvE games that tried to add PvP as an extra, and in turn made a lot of people really hate PvP.

What if a lot of those ‘PvE only’ players see what decent PvP is like in WAR, and actually enjoy it? Word spreads to their PvE only buddies, and down the snowball rolls.

The major problem with the perception of PvP in MMO’s is that the biggest games had really, really awful PvP, and in turn PvP-focused MMOs were themselves bad games. EQ1 and WoW are the two big PvE games, and both had horrid PvP systems tacked on to PvE games. Shadowbane and Fury were both ‘PvP focused’, yet both were crippled by numerous issues not at all related to PvP. A bad MMO is a bad MMO, regardless if its a PvP or PvE game. Same goes for a good MMO. Even PvP diehards have likely played WoW simply because it’s a good MMO.

What is possibly unique about Warhammer Online is that, from all accounts so far, it’s a good MMO and it’s PvP focused. That’s never happened in MMO land on a mass market scale. The good news is WAR is looking very solid, the bad news is it has the ‘PvP’ stigma to overcome. The difference between 500k subscribers and 5 million might come down to convincing those PvE-only ‘carebears’ that PvP done correctly is a great way to game.

Tobold started it, and since my comment was running long, I figured I would post my response here.

AoC sold around 750k units, and most attribute that to general MMO boredom. Since AoC really did not deliver all that it promised, many MMO gamers are still in boredom mode. Add those in with the large number of people who outright avoided AoC, all those burned out on WoW and looking at WotLK as more of the same, and I think a ’safe’ bet is 1.5 million copies sold before 2009, with perhaps the upper limit being 3 million. 3 million however would make WAR a huge success, but I certainly think the market is capable of such numbers.

The big question of course is what happens after. If WAR delivers on the promises of RvR goodness, that number should continue to increase as word-of-mouth spreads. If that’s the case, I can see WAR reaching the 3-5 million mark in 2009. If RvR and WAR in general has some glaring flaws, expect the numbers to drop to around 500k subscribers.

After the first year, WAR’s success depends on how well Mythic continues to add and balance content, and just how much pull RvR has in keeping players interested. If DAoC is any indication, RvR done right certainly is more than capable of keeping people paying and playing.

Server is down, waiting…

:the pain:

Also currently debating what server type to plan on. Leaning towards open, but CoW (the blogger and friends guild) are going standard. Guess knowing a bit more about how the tiers are layed out should help with that decision. The thought that I might be playing a PvP game on a ‘carebear’ server does not sit well with me, but again, I’ll have to see how it all works in beta.

I lost another ship (Sigil) and my first ever Pod today. The Sigil is no big deal, as it was crap fitted and is itself very cheap. The Pod however is another matter, as the Pilot, our little market mogul, had two +4 implants and three +3. That loss hurts. Luckily his hardwires were a bunch of super cheap crap. So how did it all happen?

0.0

In a brave (read: stupid) move, I decided to check out the closest 0.0 area, Providence, to see what kind of prices they had going. I figured it being 0.0, I could list a bunch of common stuff like ammo and make a good bit of ISK.  Sounded like a good plan anyway. Why I flew out in a slow ass hauler, instead of something with a chance to escape, well I’m not quite sure.

So I hit the final gate out of Empire, load up the grid in 0.0 slowly (uTorrent of the WAR beta was still running…) and see just one ship near the gate, a Drake. My first thought was cool, no gate camp. Stealth broke earlier than I had expected thanks to the lag, and right away the Drake targets me. At this point I of course panic, and instead of warping to the closest align point, I instead try in vein to reach the gate I’m at. Epic fail later, and my pod is floating in space. The Drake ate the Sigil for breakfast, and it was a wreck after just fire volleys. Still in a panic, dumbass me tries to get my pod over to the gate. Drake locks me, two volleys later, I’m in a station back in Empire.

As with most things in EVE, it sends you a cute email when you die. Actually, you send yourself the email, and it reads:

So you died? Well you have a Clone Grade Nu at Emrayur III - Moon 1 - Royal Amarr Institute School station. Enjoy your afterlife.

Afterlife indeed… While I’m not 100% sure I would have been able to align and warp away from the Drake, it would have been a better effort than trying to reach a gate that was some 15km away. As far as I could tell, the Drake did not warp scramble me. I did not catch his name or alliance, and nothing in any email told me who killed me (fairly sure I should have gotten something though…)

It was not the most costly lesson I could have learned, but it certainly stings, and reminds me to stay away from 0.0 for now. Perhaps with a cheap jump clone and a better getaway ship, I’ll once again venture out to that area and try once more to make some ISK. What’s life without risks, right?

The good news keeps on rolling, and I’m finally in the WAR beta.

The download is through a torrent, and as I’m not too familiar with that (don’t ask) I don’t really know if I have it set up correctly. I hooked the modem directly into the computer to bypass the router, but I’m averaging a download speed of around 50kb/s, which is way below what I should be getting. As recommended, I’m using uTorrent 1.8. Anyone have some quick tips on how to boost the speed?