Tons of Warhammer Online info from the Indiana GenCon

There has been loads of information pouring out from those who were in attendance at the Indiana GenCon. I found one writeup in particular to be so full of information that I couldn’t resist the urge to share it with you all. There were a few notes in particular worth mentioning.

• You can’t sit and they don’t plan to change it
• End-game can be achieved quickly but at the cost of missing content
• Death Penalty is very forgiving
• PVE dungeons are done like LOTRO – Stages

Read more to view the entire writeup! It’s a long one. General

-Weather effects are in. Expect rain, snow, and fog, at the least. There will be NO in-game penalties during poor weather conditions. It is possible that we’ll see weather ala DAoC– fog might obscure our own vision of distant foes and terrain.

-Botting and gold-farming are hated by the team, and game mechanics are being crafted to prevent and discourage the practices.

-There is already full collision detection in PvP. It’s possible we’ll see that added to PvE, in the future, depending on some factors.

-WAR’s system specs will try to be reasonable, and playable at that level.

-You cannot sit down in-game. There are no plans to change this.

-Morale/tactic respecs are unconfirmed, but hoped for.

-Each class has 22 unique armor sets available.

-Gear rewards earned from PvP will be more useful in PvP, and vice versa.

-We’re going for an end-game that is available relatively quickly, but at the cost that you’ll be skipping plenty of content to get there if you’re just speeding through.

-There’s a pretty good chance that patches will be available through means other than the patcher, ala WoW. They don’t want to see one million people all trying to download the same file from the same source at the same time anymore than we do.

-Your Tome of Knowledge can function similarly to badges in SWG. I.E., if you clear the leet new dungeon no one else has, you can prove (and brag about) it to other players via your Tome.

-Healing will probably be incremental, smaller amounts per heal, except for morale abilities, which can be expected to mostly or fully heal the target(s).

-Elf models are in-game! From the quick glances I got, they look relatively human. Pretty sexy.

-The buff and debuff window is absolutely TINY, right under your character portrait. I forgot to ask, but I’d guess it’s temporary. It’s a pain to try and tell which buff is which.

-Guild-names can currently have up to 49 characters in them. I only noticed this because the default Create-a-Guild button is G, which is my target-nearest button in all my other MMOs. Very Happy

-Spell interrupt system is currently a soft-interrupt system. Being hit moves your casting bar back a small bit. Don’t know if your spell can be canceled in this manner.

-Relatively few bugs considering how early it still is in Beta; game already has a surprising amount of polish in various noticable areas.

-You can move a few steps during casting a spell. Mostly, it’s just to let you lose momentum after moving to start casting without being interrupted.

-Death system seems perfectly fine to me. You lose enough time and edge in a fight by dying that more of a penalty seems unnecessary. Respawn timers vary from 5 to 45 (as high as I went) in PvP, and about 10 seconds in PvE.

-The UI is pretty pleasing in its current form. There are relatively few noticable bugs, and it’s responsive enough that I’m content with it.

-Overall, I’d say the game feels like it’s in Beta, still. However, there’s certainly enough work, pride and craftsmanship poured into it that it feels more loved and produced than some games that are already out.

-Mini-map took a bit of getting used to, for me. It was rather ornate and fancy looking, and the waypoints took me a few minutes to see regularly.

-Traveling on-foot is pretty quick. I never felt bored running somewhere.

-I loved the animations! My particular favorite was when the Squig Herder drew back his bow, you could see him trembling from the effort.

~~~

I got to the booth at 9 AM, and introduced myself to the various people there, and watched a bit of gameplay. They had 8 computers set up, each with 6 premade rank 1 characters, and 4 rank 21 characters for the RvR scenarios.

Available classes were the Black Orc, Choppa, Squig Herder, Shaman, Engineer, Ironbreaker, Hammerer, Rune Priest, Magus, Zealot, Bright Mage, and Battle Priest.
I got to play all but the Hammerer (who I simply forgot about) in their noob-zones, and I played the Shaman, Engineer x2, Ironbreaker, Magus, and Bright Wizard in the rank 21 scenarios.

The setup was comfortable and enjoyable (especially since all the tables and chairs were about 10 feet away from the EA Mythic booth), and it was an easy place to hang out for the day.

There was a fairly steady stream of people, with all PCs being in use most of the time.
There were 4 people from Mythic there (3 devs, and a lady from marketing). I cannot remember their names, sorry, but I know that one was the Lead Animator, another was World Populator (might not be exactly the right term), and I never caught the third. All were super-helpful and friendly, and eager to answer questions and show off their baby.

About every hour, we’d play a 4v4 RvR scenario with the 21s. We played Nordenwatch 4 times, and Mourkain Temple twice. Otherwise, we were free to roam the noob zones to our hearts’ content, and make things go squish. More on all that in the other sections.

There was a raffle for Beta keys at 3:30, where 25 were given away. Grats to all the people who are now in, but I did not recieve one. Overall, great place to be, much fun to be had, plenty of answers to be obtained.

PvE

-End-game dungeons will be divided into several wings, each of which is estimated to take about 2 hours to complete. You can complete each wing on seperate nights, if you so wish. I am pretty sure I heard one of them say that they’re aiming for 3 end-game dungeons per racial matching.

-Public Quests were described as, “Something like an overland dungeon. The content all comes to you, and happens in the world around you.”

-There will be plenty of soloable content throughout the game. Of course, you’ll be able to do plenty more with your group.

-Weaponry and armor from standard merchants might be found to be more viable than in other MMOs. Since gear isn’t as big of a consideration, anyway, vendor-gear might be used as your basic upgrade for pure-grinders who don’t want to go any farther out of the way to get new gear. It remains to be seen how this turns out.

-We might be able to identify the various Kill-Collectors throughout the world based on their apparel (for example, our friend the Bear Hater would be covered in bear-skins).

-It’s perfectly fine for high-rank characters to help out their lowbie friends in PvE. There are currently no penalties to doing so. You only turn into a chicken when you enter a PvP-enabled area of the map; and, even then, you have an 8 second warning timer to get out of there.

-The respawn timer on quest mobs is very, very short. However, they’ll likely have 8 to 10 different spawn locations apiece, to prevent extreme camping.

-In the low levels, it’s possible to chain pull 3 or 4 mobs relatively easily, without a rest.

-It takes about 8 to 10 seconds to fully regen your HP and AP from about 20%, out of combat. In-combat AP regeneration is pleasantly speedy, without allowing complete spamming.

-There are extremely cheap HP and AP potions available from basic vendors in the starting towns. They were unavailable at this time, however. Also some available from the local Influence turn-in gobbo.

-There were a helluva lot of quests, and place-holders scattered about where there were more quests being created.

-Item names remain, happily, evocative of their race and class. Gotta love the Choppa’s starting shirt, ‘Me No Like Shirts’, which leaves him bare-chested.

-Item rarity levels I saw: grey, white, green, blue, purple.

-Money denominations on the UI: gold, silver, brass.

-The starting areas were quite cunningly developed to provide lots of possible points of conflict.

-I found the towns somewhat confusing to navigate. Possibly just from it being all new and shiny.

-The terrain was very tightly packed with excitement and features– a fact that I LOVED. There was little to no dead space. It was all being used for one purpose or another. The world felt very alive for it.

-The level-spread of mobs in the newbie zones seemed to be a little on the ‘low’ side. After I hit rank 5, most mobs I saw weren’t higher than 3. Probably just the current build.

-Quest dialogues are all great, and felt wonderfully in-character. Loved reading some of the lore stuck in, and the various dialects of the NPCs. Should prove to be enjoyable in an environment more peaceful than a Con.

-The zones are also pretty well preportioned, I thought. Towns feel actually TOWN-sized, as opposed to toy-sets in many other MMOs I’ve seen, and the wilderness was small enough that it was easily navigable, but big and varied enough that it was interesting to explore. Again, ought to prove interesting in a more peaceful setting.

I played all of the available classes but Hammerer. Just forgot about that one, for some reason. Apologies, stuntie fans.

The Greenskins

I think Mount Bloodhorn had the best atmosphere of the newbie zones so far, probably because it’s been their most recent focus.

All of the mini-areas inside the zone had richly Orcish names, which were easy enough to remember. Starting quests abounded, some of which included slaughtering stunties stuck in barrels, collecting and throwing mud at dwarven statues, and salvaging choppas from fallen orcs, to name a few.

There was also, of course, the first Public Quest we all know and love, involving the giant and its annoying squigs, getting it drunk, and having it blow down the door to the stuntie stronghold. That was fun. It’s easy enough to solo the first two steps, so I can see them speeding by if there are even 3 or 4 people in the area.

On the 3rd step, though, things got a little more interesting. The giant took the giant mine, walked onto the bridge, and killed itself in an explosion at the door. That, of course, got the stunties all pissy at us, and they marched out in bloody WAVES. There looked to be about 16 stuntie NPCs that came marching down the bridge. When they come rolling out, you will think, “Oh, dear. I really shouldn’t be here, should I?”.

A shaman and I managed to kill the first two waves, but we had to retreat after that, and the Public Quest eventually reset. There appeared to be a 15 minute time-limit on each of the steps before it reverted. One touch of fluff I really liked was during the first step, where you have to kill annoying squigs for the giant. The giant would be raging around his little area, and he’d actually step on some squigs, which killed them.

Another awesome feature of the area were functioning Orc-a-paults, which launched you to the ramparts of the stuntie stronghold. The greenskins have a tiny foothold on the edge, but, beyond that, it’s all stuntie, all the time. Lots of slaying to be had, with a named or two lurking about. I really liked this place for running around and leveling, and was disappointed when I started to out-level it. If there’s PvP in that area, I am going to adore it.

Careers, careers.

I didn’t get to play the shaman much, so I’ll only comment on the other ones I saw running around. Seems like a pretty complex class to play, and one that will require plenty of practice to use effectively. They can hit pretty hard, for being the healing-archetype. Though, as we were often reminded at the Con, WAR has no healers. It has characters who can heal.

My choppa was spiffy. He could rip some nice, choppa-shaped holes into mobs pretty quickly, without being quite as fragile as I imagined. He was the one I mostly used for running around Mount Stuntie, as the greenskins called the dwarven stronghold.

The Black Orc was ok. I’m not big into tanks, so I imagine he’d appeal more to those who are more fond of them than I. Still, he kicked things in the nadgers (with Right in Da Jibblies) in the first few levels, so I reserved a place in my heart for him.

Squig Herders are one of my most anticipated classes come release. I’m still deciding what I think about them after playing, but I do see a good slab of potential. I could auto-shoot my bow, even in melee, which was a nice feature. My squig was sturdy, but didn’t hit very hard, and looked the same as most of the other local squigs. Again, I loved the animation of the goblin drawing back his bow, where you could see him quivering with the effort of getting the bleedin’ thing all the way back and holding it. Also, gobbos have one of the sexiest jumps in MMO history, if you like wild flailing, and near-hovering.

It’s a fun place. I look forward to it with its share of smashin’ and bashin’ going on. One of those places I recommend you see for yourself, it’s so vibrant.

The Dwarves

As a dwarf, you start in part of a quarry, with some of your dwarven buddies engaged in combat with the local squig population. Some of your first quests are going into the nearby mine and killing squigs, recovering sacks of gold ore, and blowing up a mine shaft.
One other thing of note is that one of the first dwarves you meet here is a Kill-Collector for the local squig population. That confused me at first, until I remember what they were supposed to do, at which point I picked up my reward whenever I ran by her.

I didn’t play here too much, so I can’t comment on its finer points, but it seemed, to me, a bit more linear than the greenskins’ area.

The Ironbreaker didn’t hold my interest very long, since, as I said, I’m not a big tank-guy. I did like his grudge-work, and loved him in RvR, as I’ll explain in the next section.
Rune priests were pretty fun. Flashy spell effects that didn’t get old for me while I played. The concept of being able to store runes to later use is an extremely intriguing one. They can hold their own quite well, and take a few mobs at a time with few problems, assuming they have a good reserve of AP. I ran around with this one the most, in the newbie zone.
Engineers were pretty basic at the low levels. You get a shoot-gun ability, a whack-with-wrench ability, and not much else for starters. I’ll explain why they’re probably the single biggest reason I’d roll Order, though, in the next section. High point of their lowbie career was hitting things over the head with a big-%^* wrench. Very pleasing to the ego.

As I mentioned, I forgot about the Hammerer. Sorry!

While I’m more interested in the greenskin part of this, I am curious to see how it plays out in the future. It looks like it could be a fun place to run through as a newb, as it feels a lot like a dungeon, to me.

The Army of Chaos

My second-favorite starting zone. You start in a really, really twisted looking place, that, again, you need to see and soak in to get a much fuller feel than I can describe in text. On the cliff below your initial area, you see the burned-out husk of a village, occupied by Chaos, and the still-whole remnants on the other side of a large bridge, occupied by the Empire.

I missed most of the quests in here, preferring to run around and explore here, but the only one I remember involves splatting undead for their bones in a nearby graveyard. I grouped up with a Magus for that, and was pleasantly surprised to find that all group-members gain credit for each kill, even on quests that require the looting of quest items. Makes questing a breeze!

The Magus was my first choice, since he was my other most-anticipated class for the future. I actually found him pretty bland at first; being able to hit hard and zip about on his disc, but not much early variety. He was more interesting in the later RvR, definetely.
Zealots were more fun to play than I had supposed. They started as primarily spellcasters, but still being able to hold themselves toe-to-toe. Their Harbinger system was an interesting one. I liked how the demo-model scurried around, skull and knife in hand.

Of all the starting zones, this was my favorite to explore. Lots of evil looking places and things, and much Imperial blood to be spilled. Also a pretty cool camp of demonic Gar right near your starting area. The whole place captures a feeling of chaos and destruction, but, at the same time, it’s your chaos.

The Empire

I wish I had spent more time exploring this one. Your early haunts are a Chaos-wrecked village (a different one), and the surrounding area. Some of your early questing material is to slaughter marauders in the burnt town, rally local farmers to the fighting cause, and several more I didn’t do. The region, on the whole, is lighter and more natural than the Chaos area. I thought that the burning village conveyed a nice sense of, “This is War.”, too.
I liked Battle Priests. They didn’t feel quite as flashy as some of the other classes, and also seemed like they might be one of the slower PvE levelers. Didn’t get past rank 3 with this one, so I didn’t see too many of her abilities. Looked like she got some nice initial healing going on rather quickly, from what I did see.

The Bright Wizard was ok. I certainly liked their style more than the Magus, and the idea of setting my enemy on fire, then exploiting it, was a most pleasing concept. I think they’re going to have one of the more distinctive looks of all the careers, as things progress.

As you might’ve guessed, I could’ve explored the Empire area quite a lot more.
One particular area that stuck in mind very well, though, was a war-front I stumbled onto completely by accident. Imperial cannons were set up a ridge, and matching the fire of several lines of Chaos invaders down below, also with their own siege weaponry. I didn’t see any quests nearby, but I bet there’s going to be a lot done with this place.

I’d say they’ve captured a good spirit for all the various starter zones. I didn’t believe quite all of the hype about “It feels like bloody WAR right from the get-go!” of the people who had played it, but I admit I felt that when I finally got to play. It really ought to reel the right crowd well in at the start.

PvP

-Some grasses in High Pass (amongst other zones, theoretically) are tall enough for a goblin to be up to his ears in! “If you want to be stealthy, then hide behind a tree or something. If I don’t see you, it’s my own fault. Not, ‘boom’, oh, hell, where did he come from? I got stabbed.”

Here’s a big one. Player corpses who are slain in PvP (in scenarios) drop good loot, pretty close to what some of the premade character was wearing. It’s not 100% of the time, but it is often enough to be pretty spiffin’. The corpses dropped from 1 to 3 pieces. It is possible it will be this way in World PvP, too.

-There are hopes for epic, AV-like battles, with optional PvE content involving your troops, etc. No promises, though.

-I saw a vendor outside of the Scenario-queue-guy who sells armor which requires a certain Renown Rank in order to wear, so that is in.

-The exp from PvP seems to be pretty damn good. I don’t know about the coin drops, since there’s no established economy.

-Characters who have been killed recently in RvR combat are worth reduced Renown, and no exp or money.

-Target nearest enemy seems to have a really long range, in PvP. I think I targeted someone with it at nearly clip range, in a Nordenwatch game. Unsure about PvE range.

-Morale drains quite slowly out of combat. I didn’t think to count it, but I’d guess about 1% every 2 seconds.

-Nordenwatch is bloody loads of fun.

-The melee fights I was engaged in lasted about 30-40 seconds, and the ranged fights were closer to 20-30.

-It doesn’t take very long to engage ranged classes from a distance. Once engaged, the ranged class still has a pretty good chance at survival, though.

-I think root abilities are going to be quite powerful, as they are one of the longest available forms of CC that we saw, with relatively short cooldowns.

-Scenarios are plenty fun, but the world of WAR is definetely set up with encouraging world PvP in mind.

For our RvR dose, we played 4 games of Nordenwatch, and 2 of Mourkain Temple, 4v4, with rank 21 premade characters in pretty good gear.

PvP feels fast, fun, pretty balanced, with a touch of hectic. I am almost positive that strategy is still going to play quite a large part in the middle of combat, even as fast and furious as the action can be.

Dying isn’t that big of a deal, currently, and it’s very nice that way. You die, you run back, you get back to smashing and conquering. You die a lot, you get a longer respawn timer. Feels perfectly effective to me. From respawn point to other end of the map, in Nordenwatch, is around 1 minute of running, if you have a pretty good idea of where you’re going. Mourkain feels smaller, though I’m not sure it actually is.

There’s a 1 second global cooldown, and a 5 second cooldown whenever you use one of your normal abilitites before you can use a morale ability. Ranges feel about the same as any other MMO, and casting times are in the 2 to 3 second range.

Whatever the scenario, you get points for killing members of the opposing team, so you could probably win some scenarios exclusively by killing. Spawn-camping was only a minor issue once, and became too hard for Destruction to keep up when NPC Order guards (Only a few levels higher than us, too), started attacking us, and forced us to fall back. No insta-kill guards, no pure spawn-camping, it feels like a good balance.

Mourkain Temple

A sinister swamp, with billowing greenish fog, oozing marsh, and wildly twisty roots and things sticking out all over. The centerpiece of the map is the ruins of an ancient temple, in which there is a large relic. You pick up the artifact, get points, run around killing other people, you get more points when you have the relic. You also gain points for holding the relic. You die, you drop, someone picks up, bloody melee continues.

Despite the fact that the point-gain from merely holding the ball is close to trivial, it seems (from what the devs said of past GameDays and the Con today) that a lot of people like to just run off and try to hide with the relic.

To alleviate this, whoever holds the relic has a huge beacon of light shining down from the sky to them. Still, the devs are considering perhaps doubling the relic-holder’s speed and HP, but also doubling how much damage he takes. You have the relic, you want to fight with the damn thing, is their perspective.

Despite the big glowing beacon, the lighting and fogginess of the place make it hard to see very far in front of you, so you have to run around a lot to find other people and the relic-holder. The map is roughly circular, and divided into an upper and lower level. Fun place, I wouldn’t have minded seeing a bit more of it. Perhaps it could’ve been a bit faster pace, but that’s only in comparison to Nordenwatch.

Nordenwatch

A damn fun place. It reminded several people in various games of AB in WoW, but in a good way. Your objective is to capture and hold three landmarks on the map: the lighthouse, the keep, and the barracks.

Teams start on opposite ends of the map, and are near one landmark, which they quickly claim. The keep is in the middle, and where a lot of fun, hectic stuff takes place. There are plenty of side-routes and twisty roads you can take to run all over, and hop in and steal the landmarks. It’s really fun like that.

To capture the landmarks, you stand next to a flag in the main area of the landmark. A bar fills up slowly, and, when it’s at the halfway mark, your team captures it. The more people standing nearby, the faster it fills. Enemies standing nearby drain it, and start it moving towards their side.

This is where I fell in love with the Engineer. It was great fun to run around, drop a turret on a rock, lay a land mine at the flag, and shoot down anyone who came near. Engineers seem to be able to really tear through casters, and not do too badly against melee. I see snipe, one of their ranged abilities, being particuarly powerful, because there is currently no secondary line-of-sight check attached to it. Meaning, as long as your target is in view when it fires, then it’ll hit even if they hide. I know I got quite a few kills sniping down fleeing casters that way.

Other classes in PvP.

The Ironbreaker was rather enjoyable, for a tank. I found that I moved way too often, and interrupted my morale melee ability (which was a 3 second channel), so I think I lost a good bit of potential doing that. Let me tell you, as a tank, you can take a damn lot of hits. A few casters plinking at you can take you down pretty quickly, but anything less basically means you can get up in their face and still be pretty high on health.

Shaman. Definetely going to be a tricksy one to play. You need to manage all your abilities, a blend of instants and 3ish second casts, and keep up the healing and damage at the same time. Since you’re fairly recognizable, expect to be focused on rather fast. Which, nicely enough, brings into a play a really cool ability of theirs, entitled Eek!.

Basically, it flings you and everyone else near you to hell, in random directions, which can really spice up fights. There’s a pretty long cooldown on it, fairly enough. Pretty fun class, but I can see it being discouraging at first.

Bright Wizards are good at setting things on fire, and they have some amazingly flashy stuff to throw around. One morale ability in particular, Wall of Fire, I think, basically makes this huge wall of flame horizontal to your position, causing damage to anyone who gets near it. Fun stuff. I see them being more of a DoT’er than a DD’er, but that might just be me.

I didn’t get that into my Magus, oddly enough, so my description is kinda short. One of their abilities flings their disc about, and it bites all the nearby enemies. I like the effects for that one. I didn’t get much of a feel for the class yet, so no real comment.

So what do I think WAR has going for it, after finally getting to play?

I think it has a damn nice core for a lovely game going on. I also think, after hanging out with some of the Mythic folks, that they really know what they’re doing this time around. Videos and pictures don’t really do justice to WAR, in my mind. I don’t mean it’s better-better-better, IRL, it’s just different, and it feels good. Graphics are entertaining, realisitic in a sorta cartoony way, dark enough that it can’t really be accused of being truly cartoony, and pretty good for the mid-end systems they had playing them.

If Mythic keeps with it, which I think they will, then I believe that they could pretty easily corner the PvP and RvR crowd for a good, long time.