PAX 08: Warhammer Online Impressions

By George Walker | August 30, 2008

I have a confession, guys.

I am slowly becoming an EA convert. It’s been happening slowly, but Dead Space looks fantastic here at PAX, Madden 09 has actually been pretty decent for a football title, and after spending some time talking to EA Mythic about Warhammer Online, I’m almost ready to declare EA to be capable of something other than mediocrity.

Regarding Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (aka WAR), the NDA has been lifted on the Beta for quite some time, now, so there a lot of reviews out there, already. Now, is it a WoW clone? Well, there are going to be similarities, but compared to what I’ve played in the past, there are SOOOO many more layers that they’ve built up for WAR.

RvR (aka PvP) actually has some pretty interesting implementations, both as World PvP and instanced PvP. Taking and capturing entire faction cities just seems too awesome for words. I won’t go into deep details here, you can find out more from some of the in-depth Beta reviews out there. Suffice it to say, that Mythic has put a LOT of thought into WAR, and some of these guys have experience going back to EQ and Dark Age of Camelot.

That being said, there is one area of concern that has been mentioned by a number of beta testers. That deals with Mythic’s systems for automatically grouping people together to tackle content within the different tiers. In theory it’s a great system, but it kind of depends on there being a steady population of players at all the various levels. I asked EA Mythic what would happen when the majority of people moved on to the end-game content, leaving many of these automatic systems unable to cope with the much smaller population levels.

Mythic doesn’t have a solution, right now. They are looking into some possible solutions, but they see it as unnecessary right now. They MIGHT implement some changes, 6, 9, or 12 months down the road, but there is nothing definite at this time. This concerns me, because I hate grinding, but Mythic has included so many different things to do (all of which will give you XP, including PvP) that maybe I won’t even notice.

Another MAJOR selling point for me is interface customization. The first thing I do with WoW is strip out the default interface, reposition my action bars, and customize the player frames. With WoW, this must all be done with 3rd-party interfaces.

WAR offers this right out of the box. (Star Wars Galaxies was pretty good about this, too, but WAR goes above and beyond even SWG in terms of interface customization.) For the hardcore UI modders, WAR does offer a Lua/XML based API, but again diverging from Blizzard, they are starting with a very restrictive set of functions, and will slowly open this up more as time goes on. This is 180 degrees from what Blizzard did, as anyone who learned to rely on the old Decursive will tell you. Blizzard allowed maybe too much to occur in interface addons, then restricted it later, causing huge amounts of angst and frustration at now having to basically relearn to manually do things that had been automatic before.

If Mythic starts out as restrictive, then you can only move in a positive direction. And being more restrictive would normally be an annoyance to me (like in LOTRO) but with every detail of the interface ALREADY opened up to customization, I pretty much have everything I would want from a UI right from day one.

All I need to do now is convince my WoW guild to give WAR a try… because I will be there!