Written by Brian Beck, 6/25/2007
I'll just start this off by saying that GamesDay Baltimore was a huge success. An event normally dedicated primarily to the pursuit of tabletop gaming was seemingly invaded by many fans seeking information on EA Mythic's new MMO, Warhammer Online. At one point, the wait to try the game was at a reported three hours long with each 20 person PVP match taking around 15 minutes, not to mention people waiting for PvE demos of the game, there must have been hundreds in line. Personally, I was able to get in half an hour or so with the game.
Shortly after an interview I had with Jeff Hickman and Paul Barnett, I was able to get my first taste of the Warhammer Online world. My first chance to jump in the game was on the PvE side. Now, since I first heard about the game and looked up the classes, I've wanted to give the Black Orc a shot. So...I jumped in as a Black Orc, with Matt Kurz, Senior IT Administrator, at my side to help me with any aspect of the game I needed help with. Fun fact Kurz also does the voices for the Orc Choppa.
So I, as Presswhatever the Black Orc... what? That name isn't creative enough? Well, see, I was told to name myself Press then whatever else I wanted. Seeing as I wanted to get in and play, Presswhatever the Black Orc was born. After I got in world, the first thing I noticed was the flavor in the world around me. Having seen and read up on Warhammer Orc lore, I was happy to note that the area around me made it feel as if I was where I belonged orc land. So, anyways, I ran up to this goblin who sent me on a quest to kill some stunties (aka Dwarfs). This was where I noticed another nice touch the quest title, the text for the quest and all that stuff felt like an appropriate dialog for the character it was coming from.
See, if you've done any reading on the Warhammer universe, you'll notice that the orcs don't necessarily come off as the sharpest knives in the drawer. Goblins, while smarter than the orcs (as if that's saying much) aren't that much better. So, I expected their quest text to reflect this, and it did. While I regretfully didn't copy any of this text down in my handy notebook (I was too eager to smash stunties), I can assure you that you'll feel at home as a member of the Orcish race. Anyways, after getting that quest, I noticed a circled area on my map. Near instantly, I asked if this was where the monsters for my quest were my idea was then confirmed. Now, I do know that this may be a cause for some of the more hardcore players to say the game is holding your hand. However, I'm very happy to see this it keeps the game progressing and, as I'll talk about in a little bit, works with another feature to keep you in the game world having fun instead of outside of the world looking at spoiler sites. So, anyways, after finding out where the stunties were that I needed to crush, I headed off to do battle as any good orc would.
I died. Horribly.
I was too into the mindset of the orc, cries of WAAAAAAGH ringing through my brain. I actually laughed at my death, though, because the respawn menu told me You have died! But don't worry, it is part of the game! before I promptly respawned. That was when I found my ranged ability that would be appropriate for pulling a single dwarf towards me. This was a nice touch, as every class that I played during the day had some sort of ranged ability that could do noticeable damage. No class is going to be absolutely gimped if you have to deal with someone at range.
After killing the Dwarf, I was taught about this neat little feature called the Tome of Knowledge. While I obviously didn't get to experience much of it and don't know what it will be fully capable of when the game releases, I did get a nice sort of introduction. I was able to open the Tome (which also had an area for quests that I was on, complete with all the quest text and relevant information I needed) and read some lore about the Dwarf race. I was told that there would be many more entries as I played through the game and that this would be a great way to keep players in the game and finding out about lore from within the world instead of being forced to places like Wikipedia to find out more about their race or the other races they may be fighting.
After that, I moved on to a Dwarf Runepriest. Upon logging into the character, I instantly noticed that the Dwarf area, much like the Orc one, felt full of character. The architecture looked like huge areas of expertly carved stone, with all sorts of Dwarf flavor. Anyways, this character had already been played some, so I didn't get to go off and find new quests. However, I did get to rank up and got a chance to mess around with that system a bit. At this point, I forget what I gained a level in, but it gave me a chance to choose from multiple different abilities or stat boosts for my character. While many of these things are still in development, I was able to get an idea for how a character may develop. Eventually, you'll be able to get all the abilities in all of the different areas this is nice since it means you won't have to worry about levelling up, say, a weapon skill as you may have in previous games. Your ability to do well in combat will come from your ability to use what you do have wisely.
Another system I got to check out while playing the Runepriest (but wasn't able to fight enough to actually use) was the Morale system. As you fight, your character's morale will raise. At every 20%, you'll unlock the chance to use a special ability. These abilities are chosen in a menu and are customizable. You can have abilities that do massive area damage, make multiple swings on an enemy or potentially even perform a massive heal on your party. The kicker with all these abilities is that they increase in power as you reach the next level of morale. If you have, say, the massive damage ability set to your 100% morale slot, it'll do huge damage but consume all your morale on using it. You can instead choose to set it lower in the morale ability bar and, while it may do less damage, it will be able to be used earlier. There is a huge balancing act here, and it is obvious that morale abilities will have the potential to change the tide of a battle. These Morale abilities will be limited in how you level them and may skew your character down a more offensive or defensive road. You'll be able to change them if need be, though it is undecided as to if it will cost money or not.
Anyways, I ended up jumping off the Runepriest to give one more class a try the Squig Herder. Now, there had been initial rumors of being able to have multiple squigs. That isn't true, at least not at this point. You instead have a single squig at any given time but can summon different kinds to complement you or your group. You'll eventually even be able to take direct control of one of the little guys, which is a neat touch. But the actual herder isn't useless or anything he is skilled in the use of a bow. His ability names were awesome stuff like Poison Arrer just made my day. I didn't get much time with the herder, though, since the PvP match was about to start. Needless to say, I jumped on the side of Destruction along with my little brother, my fearless companion for this trip. I played an Orc Choppa and he played a Goblin Shaman.
I really can't look and make any judgements at this point on the balance of the game these kinds of things are all still being worked on, so it is useless to say that one class feels more powerful than the other since the team still has months upon months to work on all of these kinds of things. What I do want to talk about is the overall feel of the game. The mode that I got a chance to play in involved capturing and attempting to hold three points on the map. At first, it was just a mad dash to run up and capture different areas, without much fighting. Not too long into the battle, however, there were massive amounts of Order and Destruction forces facing off with each other for control of the key points on the map. The fights weren't super fast, which actually gives healers a chance to do what they do best and lets people have fun during a battle instead of getting smeared in a couple of seconds.
Game performance, overall, was actually pretty good for this point in the beta. However, it really isn't possible to set any sort of system specs yet since many parts of the game aren't optimized. Rest assured, though if you have a current system, you should have no problems playing this on release.
I really had fun with my limited playtime of Warhammer Online, though, and thank the team at EA Mythic for giving me the chance to experience it. Stay tuned, too tomorrow, I'll have the results of an interview with Jeff Hickman and Paul Barnett. Also, I'll have some information on the various classes that was gathered from the presentation that was put on.
