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 INFYMUS .COMMichael S. Hoenie Hosted by FasterPing Compiled With: Caligra 1.10 | 4 JUN 2008 No portion may be used without express permission of Michael S. Hoenie aka Infymus. |
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| PLEASE NOTE: If you have reached this page from an outside source such as an Internet Search or forum referral, please note that this page (the one you just landed on) is an archive containing articles on "GAMING - WARHAMMER ONLINE" from a Blogger named Infymus. This website, INFYMUS.COM - is a blog belonging to INFYMUS. Click "MAIN" on the Main Menu to see current blogs. |
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| Warhammer Online is an MMOG that I am looking forward to playing - sometime this year. The original release was set for 1st Quarter 2008, but now has been pushed to mid 2008. That means summer, which then means I won't have a lot of time to play it then.
This game looks insanely cool. Here is a dwarf (my favorite kinds of characters).  Hopefully they will get it polished enough to release and I can read more of the reviews. |
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| Just found out today that Warhammer Online is geared pretty much all around PVP.
From an MMOG site: So what's going to happen when that WoW player base signs up for Warhammer and they find that not only is PvP emphasized far more than they are use to, but that it is also AT LEAST a bit more tactical than the 'hotbar spam and die' game they know? While we don't know all the details of WAR PvP, we can safely say it will be at least a little deeper than WoW's model, both in terms of actual gameplay types (not just instances BGs) and in terms of character skills and abilities.Crap. I don't mind PVP (player vs player), but I prefer PVE (player vs environment). Looks like it is not going to be the game I want to play. If Warhammer Online sounds like a title that contains a large amount of PvP, well, it does. In fact, the game is such that a player could foreseeably play the entire game in a PvP fashion while still gaining a respectable amount of money, items, and experience. PvP is based on the epicenter system, where players actually have to be in a specific area to engage or be engaged in PvP combat. On the other hand, to wash away those who are already thinking that PvP is limited to out-of-the-way areas, every city in the game will be mostly PvP areas.Here is a good review: http://www.worthplaying.com/article.p... |
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| Warhammer may not just be pvp all the time.
Talked to a friend of mine who works in the gaming industry. He has friends who are watching the game carefully. They said that Warhammer is not going to be PVP all the time and you will be able to do a lot of stuff without PVP. That peaks my interest. Perhaps I may still look at this game, unless it comes out mid-summer, of course I will be out doing my thang with the family. |
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| Ok, ok, I said I'd wait, I've been burned before by other gaming companies, but I just couldn't help myself. I really wanted to see if this game would be the next good MMOG to play.
So I picked it up for $49 bucks, first month free. Comes on two DVDS. You can pay $79 bucks for the collectors edition, or more and get pewter stuff and what not. I created Tolstoy, on the server Saphery. She is now a level 3 Warrior Priest from the Nordlands. There are a lot of other races to play, but I choose one that could wear good armor and heal - a hybrid Paladin of sorts.  So far? Not bad, not bad at all actually. No serious graphical problems, no insanely bad HUD or graphical anomalies. I think the only thing that is seriously annoying is having to click through the EULA every single time you play. And you can't just click accept, you have to scroll to the bottom, click YES that you accept, and then click YES that you accept. WTF? Once should be enough, OK? The game is a beautiful mix between Lord Of The Rings Online and Vanguard. It was easy to spot quest givers, it was easy to find quests on the map. It was easy to group and find other players. When I looked up, two hours had passed and I was still playing. Only one crash with a pop to desktop - application gone - but other than that - no major annoyances. Graphics are nice and the settings are easy to use. Grass, bushes and trees did not vanish if I walked 10 feet away. It has been actually quite enjoyable. The HUD is intuitive. You can easily move all of the items around. And so I spent more time having fun than I did with Everquest - where you spend the first several hours just tweaking it to make it run right. I think one very cool thing is that there are public quests. They reset every so many minutes allowing anyone to participate. The more that you contribute to finishing the quest, the higher on the loot roll you get. It is very cool because you can find yourself suddenly in the middle of an open public quest and help out. Definately a long term game. |
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| I've been playing, instead of studying, Warhammer for the last seven days now, and I must say, this is one hell of a fun game.
I've made it to level 10 which has been quite an accomplishment. I can make it to level 10 in World Of Warcraft in about 1 hour on the Alliance side. This side, the amount of experience points that you need for each level is ten times the amount of WOW, EQ2 or LOTRO. The graphics in this game are absolutely beautiful. The quests don't flow very well however. Usually MMOG games give you quests that take you from one point in a zone to another part of the zone, and eventually, move you from zone to zone. This game, the quests do not move you very well. At level 7, I had to go to a zone that was level 10+, but it took me deep into the zone. Flight points - there is one FP per zone, and it is always located in a War Party area. It isn't intuitive and you do a lot of back tracking. Some zones don't have FPS making you spend a lot of time walking. Every Zone in the game has dual use for Chaos and Order sides, or good and evil. So there is half the zone dedicated to good, half the zone dedicated to evil. The road for the good side takes up one side, and don't bother going over to see the other side because there are level 55 "Champions" and "Heros" that will kick your ass in a swipe. Yeah, in WOW, monsters are normal and elite. In EQ2 they are one, two or three arrows up. In WHO they are CHAMPION and HERO. At level 10, a level 5 CHAMPION will be a challenge. A level 10 HERO will kick my ass and not think twice. It seems to me like they have such a great game, but it is so mixed up with the PVP that a solo player, well, there is only a small portion of the game that is solo. Well, in all reality, this isn't a solo game, it's a PVP game. Every zone is PVP, but if you are on a PVE server you don't flag PVP unless you go into a PVP zone - which is about 25% of each zone. Quest givers in each zone push you into those PVP zones and you get rank, title, experience and goodies by doing the PVP shit. This may come as a negative to people who do not like to fight other players, but shit in zones is controlled by who dominates the zone. If your side is winning, then you get a bonus to merchants and more. There have been releatively few bugs that I've encountered. Some of the most annoying are getting stuck and having to /STUCK and zone to my rally point. The drop-to-desktop-fuck-off bug really sucks - especially when you're in a battle and POP, the game is gone. When you finally get back, you're dead. Since I play about six hours a day, it happens about once per day in that six hours. Other annoyances are getting stuck. You get stuck on walls, rocks, floors, between the bar maiden's titties and what not. It is easy to use the /STUCK command, but it forces you to log out and log back in. Pathing needs help. MOBS path in the weirdest ways, but it doesn't mess up game play. Animations are screwed up - I watched a dog that was sick in Altdorf (the capitol city of the GOOD side) slide across the ground rather than walk. Saw a guy carrying a barrel slide around rather than walk. But this shit means nothing - they can fix it later, it doesn't mess with your character or the game. The game needs more players. WHO now has 550k players as reported by the gaming sites. That's almost 100k more players than Funcom's (fuck Funcom, BTW) AOC, but it still feels like there are very few players. And with an interesting note, on WOW servers, the Alliance is like 100 to 1, but on WHO servers, CHAOS is 100 to 1. They always dominate the PVP sections. Like I said before, I made it to level 10. Found the major city. Found the auction house, bank and trainers. Here is my level 10 Warrior Priest, who can tank and heal:  That's a nice 2h hammer I picked up today for only half a gold. I have nearly 4 gold on me, so no big deal. The thing that I worry the most about this game is that in the end, it isn't going to pan out to be much more than a Quake Fest. Can I continue to level 20 + and beyond without having to constantly PVP? We will see, but so far, I have had nothing but fun in exploring this new world. Oh and Paul Newman? RIP man, RIP. |
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| Mob loot rights. Right now if two mobs are engaging in combat and you hit the mob once, you will get the loot rights even if you didn't land the first blow. You can make a lot of cash and a lot of loot doing this because right now its one great exploit to get experience and loot.
Spawn rates. They are insane. I can attack one mob and then attack his friend, and the first mob will appear on top of me before I finish. In the Elfish lands there is a Champion Troll that appears and attacks two NPCs. I sat there for an hour tagging the mob and within that hour picked up 4 blues, over 20 greens and over 20 grey items. By the time I was done I'd made over 15 gold on the AH for just an hours worth of work. The troll spawns every minute and usually always has a named item. He sits next to two guards who help you take him down easily. These kinds of scenarios are everywhere. See a level 20 elite mob that has 1% health left? Tag him, wait for the guards/etc to take him down and whalla - take the loot. Mob agro. The mob agro is very small. I can walk next to mobs and not attract them, even if they are levels above me. Of all the quests, hardly any of them in the first couple of zones were champion or hero. Go kill this mob. Ok, that mob is sitting in the middle of a bunch of mobs, but hey, I'm a warrior priest, I just pull him from a distance. Easy, he comes without anyone else and he isn't elite so down he goes, quest done. Quest after quest after quest, not a single elite among the “go kill X”. It was just too easy. Vast emptiness. After completing Nordland, I moved on to Norsca and completed those quests. I saw no other players at all there. After that I moved to the Dwarf lands and went to Mt. Bloodhorn - completed all the quests easily. I saw not a single player anywhere, except the starting zone, and only a few there. Maybe I'm on a server (Saphery) that hasn't got a very big player base. Hope that more will come. Lack of quests. In Mt. Bloodhorn there were less than 30 quests for the whole zone. I saw lots and lots of unused space, lots of mobs that had no elites within their groups. Why so few quests? Is the game so PvP that they figured everyone would be doing that - and not questing? Some of us like a bit of both, but I have already made it through six zones in just a few days of playing, just trying to find quests. In other games like WOW or EQ2, there are hundreds of quests in each zone, many cross-zone. Mobs are intuitive, elites scattered among the mobs. The game is insanely fun to play with relatively few game stopping flaws (like Funcom's AOC which out of the box wasn't even playable). I think in a way, it's too easy and it will come as a blow when they do fix it. So I'll give Mythic plenty of time to get things fixed. Just hope they don't do what EQ2 did and make such drastic changes that you log in and suddenly don't know how to play your toon anymore (this wasn't the toon I've been playing!). |