Warhammer Online:
Recently I was at PAX where Warhammer Online had an expo booth that I spent some time at. I got to fiddle with their premade characters a bit and listen to them pitch their product. I’m starting up a new year of college so I’m sorta busy, but here’s a quick rundown of what I saw/thought.
Pros:
Graphics – Very pretty. Also, seems true to Warhammer. I’m not a die hard fan so I dunno everything about the history of the game, but it feels like Warhammer as I understand it.
RvR – The game does have PvP, and is built around it. It is not normal PvP though, that’s why the call it RvR, combat between races. You can level entirely off of killing real people, and there are quests involving RvR, similar to battlegrounds quests in WoW. Some of these quests are regional and can have 100’s of participants, which seems like it could be cool.
Combat – From what I heard they seem to have a few ideas to make PvP combat more interesting. They’re going the opposite direction of Darkfall and slowing combat down. They’re supposed goal is to make it less twitchy, and more strategic. Players will have to plan the use of their powerful attacks and such. They also have implemented some things not out in the current games, like solid characters that must be pushed through by using moves and through general character stats, (i.e. dwarf warrior harder to get through than goblin healer) and taunting ability that debuffs targeted characters damage to all characters but taunter.
Cons:
Leveling – They say it’s not a grind, but it seems fairly standard. You get XP which you can use to buy skills from a tree. There are 3 trees that are leveled simultaneously. One you eventually will fill, one adds specialization, and a third is kinda miscellaneous specialization. The tree set up does allow you to customize to some extent what you improve first, but it’s nothing special.
Guilds – They didn’t say anything about player made guilds. I’m sure they’ll have them, but I don’t think there will be much point to them other than another chat option.
RvR – The 6 races are paired in warring combos on 3 separate islands. Transport between them is possible, but it seems like there will be little incentive for a dwarf to go help the humans, or vice versa. This kinda makes it lame for you and your friends to all have to be the same race. Obviously you won’t be forced to, and you can still go play with your differently raced friends, but I got the impression that it would be a bit of a hassle and not rewarded by the game.
Overall I was somewhat impressed. The game definitely has a sense of humor, as it should, and is more PvP friendly than anything that’s come out recently. I would certainly play it if a lot of TBHer’s gave it their seal of approval, but I won’t be pre-ordering it.
Archlord:
So as mentioned earlier I was invited to the Archlord Beta. I played it over the span of 4 days, my total time is just a guess, but I’d say like 15 hours. I played an Orc Berserker or whatever. Everything in this review is based off of that experience, which isn’t much, so just keep that in mind.
Ok, so the game pretty much blows. Only 3 playable races, only 9 playable classes, and no mixing. Each race has 3 or 2 classes that can be played. Even distinguishing looks are about on par with EQ 1.
Most items are Race and Class specific. They all have level requirements too. As far as I can tell there is no crafting of items except for temporary ones, potions and food. Some items have sockets that can have magical inserts, like in Diablo. These inserts are permanent. The inserts can be refined to become more powerful, like Diablo. Items can only take a certain level of power however, so you can’t twink by having uber inserts.
Leveling can be accomplished by completing pointless quests, classics like, get 10 bat teeth, and find random item in random area, and kill random named boss guy. Or you can just kill stuff. I’m not sure if you get XP for killing someone, as I never did so. The quests, besides being unimaginative, don’t provide worthwhile rewards. It is faster to level, at least at the beginning, by just running out and slaughtering stuff. This way you will also get more items, and better ones.
The main item in the game, as far as I could tell, is the healing potion. 2nd is mana potion. One of these drops on nearly every kill. Use of them is the only way to regain either health or mana, besides standing around for a long long time. No sitting. The potions have about a 3 second cool down, and give you their benefit in small chunks over that cool down time. The result of this is that PvP is pretty much either one person gets ganked, or the person with the most potions wins.
This is effect is further enforced by the leveling scheme. Besides being very slow, (I had to get to level 4 before I had any ability besides attack) there is little room for customization. You get points to spend when you level, some of which can be used to raise stats, the rest are used on special abilities. There are not enough special abilities to go with your points. So most people by stats, but most people also buy the same stats, and the stats make little difference as far as I could tell.
Crafting skills are made available to you at certain levels. You have to us points to get the skill, and money as well. You then can find the ingredients, some which I think you have to buy, to make a recipe. The recipe also must be purchased. Once you have the recipe you can make something. It pretty much sucks.
If you die to an NPC you lose 3% experience, you can’t lose a level. If you are killed by a PC you get sent back to town, and nothing else bad happens as far as I can tell. You can put bounties on people, and spend your time collecting bounties, although I think the system was sorta broken in the beta.
The only possibly interesting things about this game are it’s grouping. Apparently when you group you take on some of the characteristics of those in your group. So when I, the fighter, grouped with two sorcerers, I had about 300% of the mana I normally had. When I grouped with two other fighters I did about %115 damage. I don’t know the details of how this works, but it seems like it could have interesting PvP implications.
Lastly there is a system where by you can buy one time use items with real money. The idea is that this will reduce the monthly cost to $9.99. This is nice, unfortunately I’d never buy the game unless it turns out they released beta with about 5% of their features in it, and the game is actually nothing like the beta.
These reviews are just copied from things I posted on my guild forums. I’ll make a post with the classic updates sometime soon. Although our blog seems to be down right now, so my incentive is somewhat lowered.
Edit: It has just been annouced that Archlord won’t in fact be using that fancy pay system I mentioned in the review. As a result the cost of play is now up to a typical $15/month. GG!