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IGN.com has updated their Warhammer Online gallery with about 25 or so new pictures.  The female Dwarven Engineer looks nifty, with a wrench in her hand and a rifle on her back.  The concept art for the Chaos Spawn and the Chaos Warrior look good to.  There is a nurgle banner shown, though whether that means you can play as a Nurgle PC is unknown.

http://media.pc.ign.com/media/748/748723/imgs_1.html

Dun think I'm playing WHO due to VSoH, but we'll see.

I think people go by Warhammer Age of Reckoning (WAR) rather than Warhammer Online (WHO).

The World Health Organization can go suck a vitamin.

still cant find any pics of the squigs since augest 

It's funny, originally I thought this game was going to be garbage given the popularity of World of Warcraft. Yet now, having seen how many people have burned out of WoW and having heard that the expansion is more or less the same thing, just slightly altered, I'm beginning to think Warhammer AOR might be good.
The visuals certainly look great. It being a game based in PVP is also promising (unlike WoW where the PVP system is hugely reliant on you participating in PVE).

Grrr...VANGUARD!

Posted By Infantryman on 12/03/2006 2:28 PM
Grrr...VANGUARD!

I have been waiting for the 2nd coming of Everquest, for some time.  Perhaps Brad McQuaid's second game will truly be the 2nd coming.  We can only hope.  And pray.

***SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT***
STOP READING IF YOU DO NOT WANT YOUR HOPES DASHED

I'm in the Vanguard beta: It sucks. It is exactly like the original EQ except that there's twice as many classes and three times as many races. No quick travel, harsh death penalties, and no pvp (they expect to launch with one special rules set server). I've given it 5 months and it's still trash.

No, this isn't because it's still in beta. This is because it has a horrible design. The magic of the original EQ was, I hate to say this, a one-time thing. If EQ was just a wonderful experience that you spent days on end playing, it's most likely because it was the first "mainstream" MMO you played. The actual features of the game are quite bland when you compare them to what's available now: The combat was not interactive, there were ridiculous camp times, there was no balance in pvp etc.

What Brad has done is just transplant the original EQ into newer graphics and added player-sailable ships. Even the font and the character name-colors are the exact same.

I disliked EQ so I doubt I would like Vanguard. I did enjoy DAoC, so I have high hopes for WAR.

Posted By Mosg on 12/03/2006 4:06 PM

What Brad has done is just transplant the original EQ into newer graphics and added player-sailable ships. Even the font and the character name-colors are the exact same.

Is that bad?

It was the first MMORPG I ever played.  But I loved it because it was so damn hard.  That's why it was fun.  And that's why every game I've played since hasn't been fun after a certain point.

I don't think I ever felt like EQ was *hard*. It was fun because it was immersive--It was the first game like that for me. I think that that's where the magic comes from for so many people: It was the first game that made you feel like that. I don't think that it was the graphics, or the content, or the classes etc; I think it was that magic feeling of your first realization of a bigger world out there.

Unfortunately, that would mean that you'll never get the spark back That's why I announced a spoiler alert. I *wish* I could find another game (Other than DoWC; I'm hooked) that made me feel like that.

These games aren't really hard. They're all about a time investment rather than
a difficulty level. Maintaining life while grinding levels and skills? Now that's hard.

/rant
What I got out of playing WoW was that MMORPGs are lame. As Malfred pointed out, they reward people who invest rediculous amounts of time in them, not those who actually have any ability.

What's hilarious is when people try to defend that these games do take talent. They point out things like "well, raiding's hard and takes skill/coordination!!" which is assinine if you consider that in WoW 99% of groups raiding copied their strategy from its original creator. All it takes after you have a strategy is 1) ventrilo or some other voice communicator, 2) the ability to follow BASIC instructions (which, is difficult for some, but I digress...) and 3) large chunks of time to blow.

The whole premise of these games is keeping people playing to keep the money coming in. That's why every single aspect of the game is drawn out in some rediculously stupid way. It's simply easier to add time consuming content than it is to keep adding that which is innovative or genuinely fun.

Want that elite mount? Oh, better spend eons grinding items to get the gold for it! Want to be able to compete in PVP? Oh well, you better spend 50 hours in some zoned instance with 40 other losers repeating the same four mindless tasks ad nauseum.

Frankly, I think that the popularity of MMORPGs is a terrible portent for the future of western society.

Well, if you want a pseudo-MMO that takes skill, play Guild Wars. It's on the difficulty level of counterstrike. You gotta be ace with your build and the game's so balanced that the next hot build changes every few weeks (yay metagame!).

You forgot that you need people like Leeroy Jenkins in your raid. Obviously, you won't be able to win dungeons without dedicated, coordinated, people like him.



Believe it or not, a friend of mine was able to maintain a college social life (and the perks that go with it) while beta-testing and later playing WOW for a few months. He's now out of college and contemplating the military, but whether that has to do with his drug addiction, WOW, or obsession with girls in college, I don't know. I do know that it can be done, however. (Girls and WOW, I mean.)

Uh, it's pretty obvious that you never got past Fankriss in AQ and that you never stepped foot into Naxxramas You sure can copy your strategy from someone else, but that doesn't mean it'll work. Especially once you get to Huhu and every boss beyond, your people need to have an intuitive understanding of the fights if you want to win. It's a lot more than just following directions because of the design of these encounters.

While I personally never did, I have a couple of friend who played the game through MC, BWL, AQ and a bit into Nax. My views are largely influenced by their experience in the game. I played through MC a couple of times and realised that I preferred having a productive life to sitting at my computer for 4 hours at a time to get "loot" which would quickly become meaningless.

I don't think there's any comparison between the skill games like counter-strike require and that required by WoW. Things like CTraid, decursive and, arguably, voice-chat, function to dilute the challenge that WoW might represent.
CS takes a rediculous amount of time for the development of actual ability. WoW takes a rediculous amount of time to "earn" the items that replace skill and make the whole process move forward. In CS you try to improve to be better than other people so that you can kill them before they kill you. In WoW you invest huge amounts of time to earn items that give you a real advantage over those who don't have the same items. WoW is all about activating the gamer's inner insecurity...

Posted By jojo_monkey_boy on 12/04/2006 7:02 AM
and 3) large chunks of time to blow.

Or you could take up drinking and have large amounts of time to blow chunks.

What is "ability" exactly? The way to progress in an MMORPG, and by "MMORPG" I mean "WoW," is to be very good at the game, to be very good at social networking, and to put in a very large amount of time.

How can it ever ignore the time you put in? I don't care if you're twice as good at the game as another guy... If he plays four times as much, what do you want the game to do? Do you want it to admire how wonderfully you choose your talent builds and surprise you with free levels?

In my experience, playing my character was never the problem. I could go into the Battlegrounds, with gear I got myself, take on totally twinked opponents, and still finish at the top of the board most of the time. But if you want to progress past L59 or so, you have to start grouping 90% of the time, and sitting around Orgrimmar playing World of MySpace is not my idea of fun. I don't want to have to buff some preteen's knob so he'll let me join his group, only to spend 45 minutes sitting outside Stratholme waiting for another guy, then having a guy drop connection for 20 minutes, then finally going in, getting wiped five times, and having the preteens curse at each other.



I don't know that I agree with that. I've found that WoW will pretty much level you up if you do a lot of the quests of a given level, do some time in the BGs, do a couple runs through an instance. I think some people make the game play like this... They insist on getting a certain drop, so they do a given instance twenty times in a row, have frustrating experiences with people, or with their net connection, or whatever, and then blame that on the game.

There's certainly some drawn out grinding in the game, but it's all a matter of making it fun and doing it on your own time. Sometimes I'm in the mood to kill centaurs in a repetitive fashion. Sometimes I feel like getting the pulse rate up with some PvP. Don't get fixated, go do what's fun. That's the thing with a game like WoW. It's so massive, so immersive, so sophisticated, that it really demands that the player find their own enjoyment. It's too open ended to spoon feed you.

WoW is just a fantastic game. That doesn't mean I haven't been incredibly frustrated with it (few things have pissed me off more). That doesn't mean I haven't quit playing (I have). It's still the most immersive, expansive, addictive experience in gaming. Nothing else comes close. In a way, that's a shame. There's little point in any other game trying to compete in the same space. WoW takes the "EQ model" and does it better than anybody else has. With their ongoing updates, they'll also probably continue to do it better than anybody else.

So, when it comes to WAR/WHO, I hope they can find a way to make things work, but not to be a cut-rate WoW (and everything will be cut-rate, since WoW was a great game to start with, and has only grown over the time it's been out). Guild Wars is a fun game, and is far less time intensive than WoW. It didn't hold my interest nearly as much as WoW did, but it was still a decent game, and might hold hints as to how other MMORPGs might succeed next to WoW. I've got a brand new kid, so games that are less time intensive, especially in large uninterrupted chunks, are desirable.

DAoC was/is a great game, so I trust the guys behind WAR/WHO. In many ways the environments of DAoC were more characterful than those of WoW, at least considering how much older DAoC is. DAoC had a good following, but I think its release was timed a little early (not as many internet users at the time) and it didn't have a popular gaming world behind it. I don't expect anything to challenge WoW in the near future. They're the Microsoft of MMORPGs. You can compete in their space, you can put out similar products and have a following, but you're never going to "unseat" them. There's no unseating. You want to be at the biggest and best, you go work for Blizzard.

I think Guild Wars IS a good example of the balance between time put in and
combat. At some point, you don't steamroll people because you spend more
time. You win because you change tactics, skill sets, gear around for the arena
depending on what the new stuff's coming.

At least that's how it looks on the outside.

Well, what's "balanced" when it comes to these sorts of questions is totally impossible to nail down.

With questions of Fantasy/40K army list balance, there is, at least, a general notion of what balanced looks like. It means that all army lists in the game, when played equally well, will have equal chances of victory. And even that, people struggle to agree on.

When it comes to an MMORPG, "balance" between talent and time investment is purely subjective. It can all be reduced down to a ratio, but that ratio's correctness is subjective. I.e. the "ratio" would be how fast the most talented player earns xp as compared to the least talented player. The closer this ratio gets to 1:1, the more time investment is the primary factor. But what's "balanced?" 2:1? 10:1? There's no balance, there's only preference.

Guild Wars does value time investment. It's true, everyone can start at L20 and PvP that way... But you won't have access to certain special attacks, gear, etc. until you get them in game. Or however it works, I don't recall the exact names of things, I just know you needed to get certain stuff in game. But, even then, you can compete fairly well right away, and running through the game fully takes a fraction of what it does in WoW. Also, that presumes that PvP is the purpose of the game or the focus. While I enjoy PvP, I don't think it's critical to an enjoyable MMORPG.

What WoW is best it is giving one their MMORPG fix till WAR comes out.

While the grind can be boring, FFXI can be very difficult in it's later missions (quests that advance the main stories). Not as newb friendly or forgiving as WoW, but leveling, getting that sweet item, or finishing a mission is much more rewarding. Still, YMMV.