Incomplete, Content

Incomplete

Prior to the Lord of the Rings movies launching, back during filming, word leaked out that the core story was being altered to include a love story between Arogorn and Arwen. Nerd rage ensued, as this was blasphemy to the Lord of the Rings faithful. Peter Jackson, director of the trilogy, eventually made the decision to cut most of the love story that had been added to the script, because it wasn't working out. The love story remained part of the movie, but no where near as involved as it was originally scripted. Guess what, no one screamed that the films were "incomplete". Actually, most people would agree that they were pretty damn good movies, even with just a third of the love story included.

Fast forward to this week's announcements from Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (WAR). People are screaming that what is being left on the cutting room floor will now make the end product "incomplete". Really? Just like the Lord of the Rings movies were left incomplete in the wake of a major plot theme being cut? Peter Jackson had a great saying for the pre-release fans: "Don't worry, it'll be in the Collector's Edition DVDs!". Same as Mark Jacobs saying; "Folks, we'll work on it, and if we get it right, we'll put it in."

Fortunately for WAR fans, an MMO has far more luxury to add in major additions later down the line. However, like movies, MMOs have to come out of the gates swinging to capture an audience before another movie does. There are plenty of people looking for a new movie this year and they will only be satisfied by a movie that makes it to the credits.

Content

It really enrages me to hear people claim that 2/6 of WAR's content will now be missing, so I want to take a few moments to talk about content.

Starting off, capital cities in WAR will be broken down into five different stages and grow with the playerbase. Yes, cities in WAR will level. A major point to this argument is that each new city level will increase the amount of content available to players of BOTH realms, because once captured, enemies gain access to that content as well. In reality, there will actually be ten different capital cities worth of content to explore in WAR. With the announcements, Mythic clarified that they will be adding even more content to the cities now that there is only two, on top of polishing what was already there. How that message is being translated into a loss of 2/6 of the games content is beyond me.

World of Warcraft's guild system is nothing more than a chat channel and a members panel. WAR's guild system will have forty levels, guild standards, a shared guild tavern, guild-claimable keeps, in-game guild calendars, and both of the items mentioned for WoW.

WoW has nine player classes. WAR will have twenty. The "classes are just mirrors of each other in WAR" argument falls flat. If classes were simply mirrors, none of them would be getting cut from release. WAR's classes will have similarities, but all will be unique within themselves, with their own flavor.

WoW's player skill system has three paths available per class, as will WARs. However, in WAR players will be able to gain additional skills from the Tome of Knowledge and Realm vs. Realm ranks.

Oh, and WAR will have the Tome of Knowledge, which Blizzard is trying to match with an achievement system in Wrath of the Lich King. However, we've seen the Tome of Knowledge and it houses ten times the potential of an achievement system being tacked onto an aging game.

WoW has Arena rankings, which followed a failed and abandoned Honor Rank system. WAR will have eighty planned levels of RvR ranks. a system Mythic has perfected over a decade of game development.

WoW has four PvP battlegrounds. WAR will have some as well, rumored to be several more than that available in WoW.

WAR has a Campaign System, culminating in a Capital City siege and capture phase. WoW will have one zone in Wrath of Lich King designed to be an open world siege.

I could go on and continue this vane argument, but what I'm trying to get at, is that we should be standing here and asking if WoW is "complete", because by the measuring stick being leveled at WAR, it sure the hell isn't. It isn't even close. Of course that can't be possible for the Holy Grail of MMOs, so the measuring stick is obviously flawed. I actually agree with that assessment, because the measuring stick is broken. However, as broken as it is, it will be used to measure WAR while WoW sits idly by, immune to the same criticism.

If WAR pulls off what has been SHOWN already, it will be launching on a content platform far more diverse and unified than anything offered by WoW. It will take time to grow that content in quantity, but that is fine when Mythic sticks to quality first. In the end, that approach to quality will keep players interested, just as it has kept players interested in WoW for four years.

What these cuts for WAR tell me is that Mythic is dedicated to sticking to what works and making sure it s done as best as possible, just as Blizzard does. Last I checked, that worked out pretty damn well for Blizzard.

Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning - Told You So!

Sad news, Mythic has announced that Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning will only feature two capital cities at launch, cut back from the original plan of six.

MMORPG.com has learned that a decision has been made to reduce the number of Capital Cities at launch from six down to two. Altdorf (Empire) and Inevitable City (Chaos) will stand at launch as the Capitals not only of their race, but of their faction as well.

“A number of months ago,” Jacobs began, “we sat down and looked at where we were with our Capital Cities and we looked at what we were doing with Altdorf and Inevitable, we looked at the Greenskin home, the Dwarf home and we went ‘there’s an awful lot to do here and there are some issues‘.”

This will allow the development team to focus on making the two included cities the best they can possibly be. Which is a good thing if you've been following Mythic's immense plans for how cities will operate.

Capital cities are more than just “a place for people to hang out, buy stuff and run around making Chuck Norris jokes,” says Jacobs. He went on to talk about the detailed nature of these cities and how, no matter how good you or your team is, you’re not going to get it 100% correct on your first time around. Starting with two cities will allow the team to learn from their mistakes so that when the other four are incorporated, they will be better and the devs won’t have made the same mistakes six times over.

Secondly, some classes have been cut from the game.

“Four of the classes that we’ve been working on, we just couldn’t get great,” he continued. “We looked at them and we said these careers are just not great… and we tried, and they weren’t coming out well.”

This left them with a decision similar to the one that they were left with for the cities, do they continue and try to get it, or do they shelve them? In the end, after looking at the metric data that they have been collecting throughout the beta process, they saw that there were four careers that just weren’t working for the players.

“We tried,” Jacobs said, “we tried to see if we could make them better and we just couldn’t make them great. So we had a choice. Do we put in some non-great careers just because they are iconic, or we cut them out and put them in post-launch if we can get them right, or do we not put them in at all?”

Classes Cut:

Choppa (Greenskin)
Hammerer (Dwarf)
Blackguard (Dark Elf)
Knight of the Blazing Sun (Empire)

I for one am not surprised. I knew for a long time that the brick wall of information being let out officially was due to something large not being finished and heading towards the chopping block.

I just want to say: told you so.

Anyways, I am still a WAR fanboy. It pains me to say, but the game is in beta, and that always means news like this is around the corner. Amazing what happens when developers stick to their guns, because most developers *cough* Funcom *cough* would just launch with half-assed items that didn't work.

Bravo Mythic for dealing with these issues now instead of after launch!

Perfect Analogy

Sometimes, an analogy fits a point of view perfectly.

Age of Conan is to "The Fantastic Four" as Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is to "The Dark Knight".

Thanks Satarious!

Covering the Gap

Its no big secret that I am desperately waiting for Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (WAR). Hopefully, later this year it will launch!

I am hopefully done with World of Warcraft forever, unless WAR epic fails (which I doubt), but I have to bridge the gap until WAR releases. I don't want to buy any new games, and I don't want to get involved in any game that requires too much time investment to advance a character.

That leaves me with the action games I already own. I've never really stopped playing Team Fortress 2 or Call of Duty 4, and I've recently jumped back into Day of Defeat: Source. I am also tempted to reinstall Battlefield 2 and its expansions, as I stopped playing it due to burn out more than from hating the game (though I still hate aircraft whores).

So, that is where I will be for the next few months hopefully. That is, unless a beta invite comes knocking.

Team Fortress 2 Achievements and Unlockables

First the Medic. Then the Pyro. Soon, the Heavy. Team Fortress 2 (TF2), an every-man's FPS, has been making me nostalgic for MMO class nerfs and buffs. Every player is a fan of a certain class. It is their class and they can not wait for it to get "updated". Unfortunately, "updates" for one class, are nerfs for another. This holds true in most class-based MMOs and TF2.

Unlockable Weapons

I was quite excited to hear about unlockable weapons for TF2. The game was great already and this was just icing on the cake. TF2 was a complete game at launch. These unlockables were not used in a "patch the game in later" approach that so many MMO failures use. However, Valve has committed a sin that many MMO developers have, and I am a bit miffed on how the unlockable weapons are being rolled out.

Valve decided that unlockables would be rolled out one class at a time. This is reminiscent of MMOs that often choose to update classes one at a time. As one class gets "updated", the other classes suffer. Fortunately, for TF2, the classes are pretty strong and well-balanced to begin with.

Unfortunately, whatever TF2 class receives an update becomes overplayed and it doesn't take long for the "X is overpowered" cries to begin. When the Pyro, the first offensive class to receive unlocks, update came out, every server was filled with Pyros, all trying to unlock the new weapons. As the zerg of Pyros began upgrading their weapons, many players felt that Pyros were unfairly made overpowered.

I play a lot of TF2 and I strongly feel the new Pyro weapons are not overpowered. The problem is that there are a million Pyros running around and when a player constantly dies to the same new weapon, it feels overpowered. The servers are starting to settle down as most die-hard Pyro players have received their goodies, but it will all start over when the Heavy class is updated.

Achievements

In order to unlock new weapons, players must complete class-specific achievements. Sticking with the over-the-top theme of TF2, the Pyro achievements were a riot. Like the Medic achievements, the majority of the Pyro achievements take actual skill and teamwork to achieve, but an ugly truth hides just under the surface.

The ugly truth is that Valve has no system of official ranked servers and most players simply go to "achievement" servers to cheat. On an achievement server, specifically built for a set of class achievements, it takes a matter of hours to complete all achievements. A feat that would take hundreds of hours in normal play.

To me, this completely invalidates the entire achievement system. Worst of all, the weapon unlocks are directly tied into the achievements system. In order to unlock the new weapons, a player must complete a set number of achievements. Players aren't stupid and achievement servers are big business.

The argument comes up that achievements are a personal goal, but I don't give a damn if a player can say to themselves: "I know I didn't cheat". No one else will care and it won't matter when the player that exploited runs them down with a Level 10 Backburner. Either players cheat, or they suffer at the hands of those that do.

The class updates should be a boon to all players, not just those that cheat. This could easily have been achieved by allowing everyone access to the weapons, completely removing the unlock system. The weapon unlocks should have never been tied to the achievements, as it just promotes the rampant cheating that is occurring.

Valve desperately needed an Official Server system in place prior to these achievements going live. Without a means to control how achievements are gained, there is no merit in any of them. Lack of integrity is wont on the Internet, especially where frags and pwning are concerned.

Its a sad state of affairs for an otherwise great game. The achievements and new weapons themselves are brilliant, but the achievement/unlock system as a whole is just another sad excuse for cheaters to prosper over honest players.