PvE. It’s something that I have almost neglected completely in my discussions surrounding Warhammer Online. Why? I suppose there are several reasons. The first is that I love RvR and how the entire game is centered around the concept of taking territory from the other realm and killing enemy players. The second reason could be that the marketing team for WAR has not really focused on PvE much at all. Perhaps Mythic is not entirely confident that they should market the game for PvE since there are several highly successful PvE games out there or perhaps it’s simply because RvR IS the best thing that WAR has to offer.
After reading about and watching the introduction video for Bastion Stair I’m left with several thoughts. First off, let’s look at their initial introduction to the dungeons in WAR.
“Dungeons come in three varieties: Realm-instanced, group-instanced and warband-instanced. Survive the challenges and epic boss fights found inside to earn the most coveted of weapons, armors and loot.”
I assume Realm-instanced means that it’s a dungeon where anyone in your realm can enter and play together; somewhat like an open dungeon I guess. Group-instanced sounds like a World of Warcraft style instance like Stratholme or Dire Maul. The last style has me somewhat worried. Warband-instanced dungeons… Warband is just another name for a Raid group and having Raid Group instances means that there are essentially raids in the game. I’m beginning to wonder if what Jeff Hickman said was correct. Will WAR be without PvE Raids? Hopefully the only “Warband” PvE raids in the game will be King encounters.
Putting my paranoia aside, I’m actually looking forward to PvE in Warhammer Online. The Bastion Stair looks amazing. The dungeon has a decent story and looks like it will provide a very rich and meaningful experience. Yep, I can tell that just by looking at the pictures and videos. I’m yearning for lots of GROUP content. I really enjoy adventuring with my friends or small guild into a dungeon and killing bosses for treasure. Running dungeons a few times can be fun, but I find myself easily bored when an instance looks dull or lacks interesting encounters. A perfect example of atmosphere in a dungeon is the old Unrest from EQ1. A perfect example of a boring dungeon is Runnyeye from EQ2. Bastion Stair looks like it has the environment all taken care of; now Mythic just needs to ensure they have solid gameplay.
I’m hoping that PvE will be developed fully and marketed more than it is now. There will be times when RvR gets boring or slow and there is absolutely the chance that I might burn out on RvRing if I’m not given alternatives and choices. I’m hoping that Mythic recognizes there is a market for a certain type of PvE in their game and that it can’t hurt, only help, WAR if done correctly.  Although I want a game completely focused and developed for RvR, I still want to dungeon crawl. Yep, I want to have my cake and eat it too!
Yeah the PVE is looking good!
PvE looks like it might be ok as a supplement to RvR. I am of the mind that if I want PvE, I will go to WoW.
PVE in War is boring if you want to PVE play WoW done so much better there
maybe in time War will get it right blizzard as had 4 years
Dungeons work like this. There is one instance for Order and one for Destruction. Both instances house the same content, but players don’t mix sides (though rumors of a RvR dungeons are widespread).
The dungeon instance operates on a series of Public Quests. If you are in a dungeon, you are participating whether grouped or not. However, most encounters in dungeons are reminiscent of World of Warcraft’s dungeon encounters. That is to say, they are not very solo friendly. But that is why PQs are so great. Players can show up and instantly contribute without having to formally LFG, invite, and then travel.
Then, ON TOP OF THE SHARED DUNGEON, there are privately instanced boss wings for groups and potentially warbands. These wings are meant for the BOSS encounters and should hopefully not take much time to complete, especially if the dungeon is already cleared.
The only part I worry about, as rumor has it, is that boss wings are locked until you gain a certain amount of reputation from completing the dungeon PQs a few times. Not horrible, but I do not like gated/flagged/keyed content ala WoW and EQ.
PS. Nothing is NDA breaking in my post, all gathered from recent interviews.
Realm-instanced, group-instanced and warband-instanced
realm-instanced = dungeon open to all of the same realm (it’s like a group oriented PvE zone, there could be 100+ people in a realm-instanced dungeon) with lots of PQs. By doing the PQs with your realm comrades you gain access to the ‘group-instanced’ bosses within the realm-instanced dungeons.
group-instanced = just like WoW. AFAIK the dungeons in the captial cities are group instanced – ‘ragefire’ style!
warband-instanced = up to now, only the ‘king encounters’ are known to be ‘warband-instanced’. It’s the icing on the layers and layers of the RVR cake.
I want dungeons too. You can’t RVR all day, every day. This looks like a really nice beginning. I hope we get more.
Fully rounded RVR and PVP, what I say.
Without decent PvE content this game is dead, one or two token dungeons isn’t going to cut it. Once people get to end game and realize there is nothing to do but PVP, they’re just going to bounce back to WoW, and this will end up in obscurity along side DoaC.
That being said, I am looking forward to this game (had high hopes for Conan…), but I just warn that you ignore PvE content at your own peril. I would really like to see a game that provides a satisfying experience for both types of play.
PvE is nice, but RvR is the main course to me.
I’m playing WAR for the PvP/RvR, I haven’t really checked up on it lately but last I understood I could level just by killing other players, which is a main draw for me… I’m all PvE’d out after WoW.
Surprise, Surprise it has raids…of course its going to have raids thats the only end game that companies making MMOs think works perfectly. They see WoWs success of raids and want that in their game. But yeah you say your excited about PVE, yet it is looking the same as WOW and you said before you don’t really like that PVE. I think WAR fanboyism, as totally screwed with your head.
Keen; RvR != PvP, RvR = PvP+PvE.. What’s with all these wishy washy articles? Beside attention/hit seeking.. Please bring back some real meat, this is little better than fear mongering
If there wont be any raids in the game, there wont be too many subscribers either. I doubt Warhammer can afford to make a niche game..
I totally agree.
I don’t like the whole conceding of the PvE market to WoW. I want to play a Warhammer RPG. I don’t think there has been one before. I want to explore that universe.
Why can’t a game have the PvE depth of EQ2 with a better-than-DaoC RvR system?
I misread the title at first: “I want to pee in Warhammer…”
I’m like, dude, they already have a bunch of emotes!
The only reason I even PVE in WoW is to level to the point I want to be so I can go PVP. I don’t have the time or patience to invest in raiding to level a 70 character to PVP well so I twink instead. 🙂
[…] Keen wants his PvE, and he wants it NOW, or ELSE! […]
I agree that the PvE content looks enjoyable from the little bit they’ve showed us. Public Quests (both inside and outside dungeons) have the potential to offer a nice change of pace for players who want to take a break from Scenarios and Open-world PvP.
I think the main reason that the marketing of the game isn’t focusing much on PvE in general (and dungeons in particular) is because at release it’s going to be really hard to pull players away from other games by telling them “we have cool dungeons”.
The fact of the matter is, WoW also has cool dungeons. Lot’s of people love dungeons like Black Morass, Shadow Labyrinth and the Shattered Halls (I know many of us have played these dungeons WAY too many times, but I remember them being incredibly fun the first couple times). Therefore, convincing people that Warhammer has better dungeons than the competition is hard. However, WoW has really crummy PvP (unless you’re into hard-core arena play), and so it’s much easier to convince PvP’ers that Warhammer is better than the competition.
Once the game has been out for a month or two and people are playing and enjoying Warhammer’s dungeons, then word of mouth will bring in people who love interesting dungeons with rich lore.
Final note: [sorry for the length of the post] I wouldn’t be too paranoid about the warband-instancing. No MMO (to the best of my knowledge) has ever had both strong PvP and significant raiding (more than a few scattered boss encounters). I think that after Trials of Atlantis, Mythic understands this. Maybe I’m being foolishly optimistic, but I really don’t think the developers are going to throw in a raiding treadmill and ruin the PvP environment.
I’m not expecting WoW’s level of PvE here at all nor am I being wishy-washy whatsoever. I’m not sure where that came from. I was simply saying that the pve LOOKS really interesting and it would be ideal if WAR offered alternatives. I have, for as long as I can remember, been a fan of group pve content. Even in a RvR game it has a place.
This is a refreshing topic to see. I’ve heard so little about WAR’s PvE and when I do it seems to always get mashed together into RvR and the general WAR formula of intermixing PvE & PvP with the focus and achievements towards the later.
That’s been my impression of WAR thus far, that quests will inevitably mix PvE with PvP and while I think remixing that way is innovative and interesting, I’m not so convinced I’d like it.
BTW, for me, on PvE dungeons, nothing tops good old Stratholme and Scholomance in the 10-man days before the ‘casual’ nerf and before everything was theorycrafted to death. I may rag on WoW these days, but I had one hell of a grin on my face back then, especially with the challenge of doing it 5-8 man (or pre-nerf Blackrock Depths as 3-man, woot!)
I’d been waiting decades for that experience. It was not uncommon for me to run both of those multiple times per night and it certainly wasn’t for the loot. I think it’ll be a long time before that comes again unfortunately, the playerbase just wants the rewards (loot, rank, whatever).
I don’t dislike PvP per se, I find tons of entertainment in TF2, etc.. I just enjoy a non-competitive Co-op experience so much more. Too bad it’s too rare. WoW these days has players more competitive in PvE than PvP even. D’oh.
They haven’t said how many ‘warband-instanced’ dungeons there are. Technically the king encounter in the capital cities is a warband instance, so that may be all there is. With 6 capital cities that’s 6 warband instances, so there’s really no evidence that they’re going to have PvE raid dungeons beyond this.
It just sounds like marketing-speak to me “look, we have three kinds of instances!” when really, the bulk of stuff falls into the first two categories.
You don’t really hype the PvE aspects of the game unless you are solely PvE. And most likely I would find such a game boring. Also from a PvE standpoint only Public Quests are new.
That said, a game needs a good solid PvE base in order to have a chance of succeeding. PvE is like the dough of the pizza. You don’t really talk about it unless it is really bad. But once it meets expectations, you move on to the rest of the pizza.
A good PvE base means there is always something to do regardless of who else is on. You can’t really do RvR without an opponent, and it also helps to have a few allies as well.
I look forward to brief excursions into the realm of PvE even if only to give my bleeding knuckles time to heal from overexertion in RvR!
I want both. I liked the mix that DAOC had. If for no other reason the PvE gives people something to do when you just need a break from PvP or if you happen to be playing at a slow/low population time. No way do they want people losing interest because they can’t find a group or anyone interested in PvP.
No way do I want WoW hardcore raiding guild only dungeons but believe it or not there are better ways to do PvE.
Sound like it’s gonna rock by heartless’ description, would like to see sources though. Optional pve content. Do pq’s. Zone in to the boss kill him and leave. Go pk ftw. Real question is can Mythic design bosses as well as Blizzard?
Definitely some ignorant and misinformed folks commenting here. WAR is offering plenty of PvE dungeons to begin, however they are not single-group isntances. The boss encounters are instanced only, which means they can be done quickly if a dungeon is cleared first by the realm.
On top of this, the RvR campaign leads directly to warband-size “kill the King” encounters for the best loot in the game. Sorry, that means it can’t be put on a weekly raid schedule.
The entire game that is WoW will be found in WAR, only lacking “e-sport” arenas. The ignorant people that want to believe that the WoW experience can not be copied, will stick with WoW and that is fine. Blizzard does a great job with PvE, but that is all they will continue to do with WoW.
WAR will be a far more social game, with the entire WoW experience as a starting point. WAR is a full-featured MMO that has more than just a bunch of good PvE content.
WAR will by no means be a WoW-killer. WoW has grown too large for that to occur now.
However, WAR will grab a large audience of players that loved WoW, but have been looking for something that isn’t as rigid as WoW and that CAN NOT be put on a weekly schedule. WAR will offer the best of the PvE world along with the best of the RvR world (which is a PvE/PvP mix). Then, four years down the line, we can argue about how much content is available compared to the current WoW.
As I recall, Barnett said once that he generally plays more PvE in games. When a game’s Creative Director loves PvE, it’s a good bet that PvE content will get a fair amount of attention in that game.
I’ll probably spend as much or more time with the PvE content in WAR, and I’ve been impressed so far with how it’s looking.
Well personally I am really hoping for a lot of well thought out PvE in WAR. I like PvE I will probably spend as much time playing PvE as I will RvR. I am well aware that the main focus of WAR is RvR. But personally I’m more interested in the Warhammer world, and for me at least being able to explore and work my way into some far off corner of the world and earn that feeling of accomplishment after myself and a few friends have worked our way though a tough dungeon for the first time.
I dont know if this is going to be a good idea but at least graphics look killer. I would like some dungeons mixed into this, that would in fact rock!