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I don't play computer/video games, but Joe Mad's artwork dealing with 40K has me interested. I've followed his work through Uncanny X-Men, Battle Chasers and now Ultimates 3.

If this turns out to be anywhere near as good as dawn of war I will be very happy.

Honestly it wouldn't be that hard to balance Marines within the game. Early level marines would just be newly recruited neophytes with barely an implant just as early level guardsman would be standard guardsman fresh out of bootcamp. Of course the marines level progression would be much slower, probably capping at either a veteran assault marine sgt or an apothcary at max levels, wheras an equal level guardsman would be a commisar or captain. Similarly the eldar would simply train along their chosen path eventually becoming exarchs of some kind.

Orks would just get bigger.

Joe Madureira + 40K = W O W ! !

Even if the game does suck, it'll look fantastic. And if it does look fantastic, i'd buy it (and the nessecary pc upgrades :( ) just to wander around and sightsee

Just like the SW:galaxies MMO, they might be able to get away with making space marines an unlockable character after a few months of play. Kiddies love that stuff. And just like SW:galaxies, hopefully they make a bounty hunter for those of us who love killing the stupid marines. Call it the Inquisitor class. Give similar -XP penalties upon marine death and it'll be awesome.

Madureira is so inappropriate for 40k. Surely?

Why? Giant scrolls, skulls, musclebound hairless men in tights (w/o armor), and giant breasts to appeal to nerds? Sounds like 40k to me.

I wonder about Joe Mad being the creative director behind this game. Don't get me wrong, i collect his stuff when I see it, my own art is influenced by his.

But his art does not really feel he part of the gothic bleh darkness that we know and love as 40K. I don't doubt that he could render up a great ork or marine or nid, but it would be in his style. 40k is its own thing, its own entity, and doesn't need an artist's spin on it.

Joe Mad's artwork has a bit of the WoW feeling of cartoonishness to it. While I love that, 40k needs a much more realistic art style attached for its look to be taken more seriously and for it to have the impact that it requires. The direction that WAR is taking is the same direction that the 40K MMO should be takin as far as how it appears.

As far as being a marine in this game, it is certainly going to happen. But they should keep in many aspects of being a marine that would make it a pain to play - like severely limiting weapons choices and equipment because of the dictates of the Codex Astartes, they should ahve a very rigid command structure that requires the player to do certain things to avoid being penalized somehow.

I would almost think that a marine player would be hampered by his lack of choices in equipment, and most of his 'ranking up' choices are going towards his becoming a marine - black carapace, et al. So it would not nearly be as customizable and individual an experience to be a marine.

Now ORKS! That's where it would be at for this game.

Moopy wrote:HUGER than WAR? Every race represented? This dilutes the players all over the map(s) making it harder to get a concentration of players together to fight each other (which is what is toted), or get a swarm/mob together.

Only in the non-marine areas. PvP will consist of massive parties of marines looking for lone non-marines to gank. Yay!

GrimTeef wrote:As far as being a marine in this game, it is certainly going to happen. But they should keep in many aspects of being a marine that would make it a pain to play - like severely limiting weapons choices and equipment because of the dictates of the Codex Astartes, they should ahve a very rigid command structure that requires the player to do certain things to avoid being penalized somehow.

I would almost think that a marine player would be hampered by his lack of choices in equipment, and most of his 'ranking up' choices are going towards his becoming a marine - black carapace, et al. So it would not nearly be as customizable and individual an experience to be a marine.

That all sounds well and good, but you also have to remember where your bread is buttered. While giving marines all kinds of penalties and restrictions and making them a pain to play might make for good game design, it might not make for good business.

stonefox wrote:Just like the SW:galaxies MMO, they might be able to get away with making space marines an unlockable character after a few months of play. Kiddies love that stuff. And just like SW:galaxies, hopefully they make a bounty hunter for those of us who love killing the stupid marines. Call it the Inquisitor class. Give similar -XP penalties upon marine death and it'll be awesome.

Yeah, but then they changed it so that you could start out as a Jedi and removed all the -XP penalties and bounty hunting. And predictably the Jedi population exploded, driving all the others to the brink of extinction. Hooray!

I dunno about you, but I'm gonna roll a Tyranid Priest. Gonna grind to be the first level 50 Healerfex!

To echo similar sentiments, I honestly can't see how they plan to incorporate the diverse armies and still retain any shred of balance.

But then again, we know 0.001% about the game, so it's all just myth and conjecture at this point.

I'm gonna roll Grot Warboss. Mark my words.

That fact that every race will be 'represented' doesn't mean that they'll all be playable. Given that it has Chapters instead of Guilds, it's possible that the players are only Marines (and Chaos Marines for the other faction) and the other stuff is represented by what they go kill.

I'd be surprised if Tyranids were a playable race. They scream NPC monster race to me.

I was holding out hope it'd be Planetside, but I guess not.

Might still be fun, but what a missed chance.

I am really excited to see what the PvE aspect of this game will be.

Can you say Instance: Hive Fleet Behemoth?
Or Crypt of the Nightbringer?
Or Temple of Chaos Ascendant?
Or Temple of the High Ecclesiarchy?

Or how about Desecrating the Palace of Hera on Ultramar? Hell yes.

quote]

. I will give you no one has made a decent star Trek game to save their life though.

Aduro wrote:I'd be surprised if Tyranids were a playable race. They scream NPC monster race to me.

I'd be surprised if Necrons were a playable race.

H.B.M.C. wrote:

bigtmac68 wrote:I have to disagree on one count. Dawn of War was an excellent RTS with some innovative features, awesome graphics for the time and tremendous replay value.

Yes, but at its bare bones, Dawn of War was just 3D Starcraft with a coat of paint*. Nothing it did hadn't been done before.

BYE

*This is not to start another discussion about who ripped who off. What I'm saying is that DoW's game mechanics, unit structure, buildings, upgrade system etc. were very StarCraft like.

Actually it was very Dune 2 like (the first RTS). My issue with RTS's in general is that they haven't evolved much. Sure the graphics get better every time, but the basic core game play of build your base, build your glob of units and then send them out against your enemy's glob of units still hasn't changed. The only strategy involved is the plan on what order to build various units, buildings, and upgrades in. The only RTSish game that I've seen with any real innovation in the last 10ish years has been the Total War series.

as long as they have an option where I can line up my dice, after being soundly beaten in pve and pvp, and an option to destroy those dice, I don't care what else they do.

and I hope this game is nothing like SW gayaxies. that crap was so bad I went out and used my cd as one of my pulls at a skeet shoot. complete crap that was

Phoenix wrote:. The only RTSish game that I've seen with any real innovation in the last 10ish years has been the Total War series.

Total War, Call of Duty (aside from base-building missions), and other similar games are called RTT - Real Time Tactical games.

Abadabadoobaddon wrote:
That all sounds well and good, but you also have to remember where your bread is buttered. While giving marines all kinds of penalties and restrictions and making them a pain to play might make for good game design, it might not make for good business.

Agreed, but letting the same thing that happened to Star Wars Galaxies with the Jedi happen to this MMO with the marines might not make for good business either. If it's 70% marines out there in the game all the time, I would imagine that would lower the interest level in the game, especially if the marines are at the ubermensch level they are supposed to be in the fluff...

Who knows though. I would hope that they are thinking about these kinds of things.

I think the best thing to do would be to make playing as a Space Marine available, and without stupid penalties, but adapted to what makes MMO's addictive. The progression of appearance, power, and options. And none of that "penalty for being a marine" crap. I for one don't want the game to have a 99.9999999% ubermensch population either, but why are we gonna make content for the game for people to play, and then discourage them from playing it? What happened to "expand the game, don't restrict the players?".

Heres my idea.

Marine Tree. Pick a chapter(for minor "racial" bonuses and talents)

Start as a newly in/abducted Recruit, then about level 10 or so (whenever they decide to implement the near obligatory talent trees) you become a scout. This makes sense, as scouts are the lowest level of marines seen that come in vanilla, close combat, sniper, and heavy weapons varieties. At some other pre-determined mid level, you get your power armor. Then at about level 40 or so you can become a veteran sergeant with options to further specialize whatever you were going for with your previous levels. Some sort of tree like

Close Combat-duh
Medical/Passive self buffs-so you could actually plan on being an apothecary, or invest in stuff like, "Thick Skulled(HURR!1!)-5% less chance of being interrupted when attacking with powerfist per rank" and could have 1 point unlocks for Terminator and Artificer armour(with speed, strength, etc. buffs or debuffs)
Firepower

Most every piece of marine equipment could fall into one of those categories anyway.

But the point its, you can and will eventually be a super bad azz marine, but by then everyone else would be Eversor Assassins, Cannnonnessessess, IG Senior Officers with Fire Support artillery attacks (Hey! A Mage!) and all that.

And really, noone is gonna pick a guardsmen to be a guardsmen late-game. You would be better of leaving them as NPC's so that the players can be the small groups of heroes that make the differences in huge set piece battles.

Sounds good to me, Railguns.

I never enjoyed playing as mages but in the form of an IG artillery officer, I might. It's really stupid. It's the same game mechanics with a different skin and I'll jump through that hoop. Wow.

Its weird, isn't it? People keep bringing up the comparison between Guardsmen and Marines as some sort of wall preventing a balanced game. Who, honestly, who wants to play a fantasy game in a fantasy world of unbelievably epic proportions, but do it as something as blase' and un-epic as a guardsmen? No one plays WoW to be an Orc Peon or Alliance villager.

I think issue is that for the table top game, Marines are formed up into large armies and squad formations to fill in the basic troops, elites, fast attack, and all that jazz like every other army. The fact that marines are elite combat specialists that function more like the super-powered SEALS Teams of the future is lost in translation, and people start associating marines one on one with other armies troops subconsciously. I think as soon as people may need to realize that you don't have to balance a marine down to lowly Joe Bolt-Bait, because everyone is going to be playing some sort of elite, super-powered something or other with them. People want to play the Terminator Squad that teleports directly into the Demon Princes Inner Sanctum and have a huge dramatic fight, not the guy with a lasgun that sits outside shooting at other guys just like him but with spikes on their space-clothes for the 4 month siege leading up to it.

Phryxis wrote:I was holding out hope it'd be Planetside, but I guess not.

Might still be fun, but what a missed chance.

Totally agreed. A pretty much untapped market right now (MMOFPS) and they want to compete with WoW and (already in development) WoW 2? Good luck, this'll probably suck

You think nids will be in style?

Man, a rogue genestealer. Yeah, sign me up. lol

I would love to play Tyranids in an MMO

Railguns wrote:Its weird, isn't it? People keep bringing up the comparison between Guardsmen and Marines as some sort of wall preventing a balanced game. Who, honestly, who wants to play a fantasy game in a fantasy world of unbelievably epic proportions, but do it as something as blase' and un-epic as a guardsmen? No one plays WoW to be an Orc Peon or Alliance villager.

I think issue is that for the table top game, Marines are formed up into large armies and squad formations to fill in the basic troops, elites, fast attack, and all that jazz like every other army. The fact that marines are elite combat specialists that function more like the super-powered SEALS Teams of the future is lost in translation, and people start associating marines one on one with other armies troops subconsciously. I think as soon as people may need to realize that you don't have to balance a marine down to lowly Joe Bolt-Bait, because everyone is going to be playing some sort of elite, super-powered something or other with them. People want to play the Terminator Squad that teleports directly into the Demon Princes Inner Sanctum and have a huge dramatic fight, not the guy with a lasgun that sits outside shooting at other guys just like him but with spikes on their space-clothes for the 4 month siege leading up to it.

Yeah, except not everyone wants to play a marine chaplain, and honestly it would be pretty stupid to have 50 something chaplains and librarians assaulting a chaos compound in -any- event. The entire point of an MMO is the community aspect. Not to have everyone be some sort of bronzed herculean god capable of cracking moons in half with a rough glare. If all anyone ever does is play the exact same overpowered marine class and joe everyman who wants to play a guardsman or ork is left to just die constantly than it's a pretty horrible game design and will probably loose its player base in a few months and flounder. This isn't an argument against having Space marines be heavilly destructive walking tanks, but you can't balance a game like this around the fluff and still have it work. A space marine is twice as strong as an ork, faster than an eldar, is capable of taking clearly fatal wounds without slowing and can spit -acid- in the fluff. That doesn't translate to a game well. Unless you have some sort of sliding progression that places marines on a slower scale then they will just dominate in every aspect of the game and those -epic battles- will end up as the same boring one sided slaghter.

The imperial guard outnumber the space marine chapters over a million to one over. Orks probably much more so. Even the eldar and tau outnumber them in some rediculous fashion. I for one hope this doesn't become like star wars galaxies with the jedi, an elite tiny order of supersoliders outnumbering every other class in the game many times over.

I swear I would honestly play an Adeptus Administratum scribe over a Space Marine - I really hope they focus more on the rpg element than the running round murdering things element.

I think it'd be cool if they had different races playing different games.
IE:
Marine: FPS
Guard: Squad based FPS
Tyranids: RTS
It would actually balance the game a bit if you think about it. That way 6 guard players would be like a large raid, will 6 marines would be a lightning fast assault force, and 6 nid players would be a hive fleet.