Warhammer Online is definitely garnering more and more of my attention lately with the let down of Age of Conan and the repetition of World of Warcraft making me look for new horizons. Yesterday afternoon I was reading some Ten Ton Hammer interviews with WAR developer Mark Jacobs about the way crafting will work in the game. One thing Mark was very clear on is that the grind in WAR won’t feel like a grind at all. Many tasks will be more quest oriented than making thousands of the same item to level up crafting.
In much the same way, combat leveling in the game will be unique and anti-grind feeling as well. Players can run PVE quests to level up or could go strictly PVP and gain items and experience just for killing other players and never have to run a PVE quest. They’ll also feature public quests players will get when they enter a particular zone that has one, allowing for a sort of raid feel from the WoW days. For example, maybe there is a public quest to sack some fortress (just an example, I have no idea what the quests will be) but when you get there other players will be working on completing the quest with you. When the quest is comlete everyone involved gets some rewards.
Given that I have less and less time to game with one young child and another hot on her heels, this game is looking more and more for me. It’s going to be a real God send to the casual gamer who doesn’t have a whole lot of time to invest running long chain quests or crossing the world looking for nodes for crafting. But if the game is seemingly going to be so great for casual gamers I have to wonder, what is it going to be like for the hardcore gamer?
This is all completely speculation, but if it’s somewhat easy for the casual gamer to level up the hardcore player you would think would level up quite rapidly. Will this game get boring quick for the hardcore guys? Or will there be enough content after you reach the max level to keep them interested? From what I’ve been reading so far I’d have to say yes, there will be plenty of content. First there are 12 different classes you can play per side so the hardcore guys are probably going to have one of each. Second the Realm vs Realm action is probably really going to be hot and heavy once you max out, as they used to say in WoW when you hit 60 (pre-BC) “that’s really where the game starts”.
I’m going to be really keeping my fingers crossed on this one, I have high hopes that WAR will be the next big MMORPG. I thought Age of Conan with it’s realistic graphics and it’s blood and guts style of adult play would be the one, but realism wasn’t really all it was cracked up to be. Bo over at TheGreenSkin.com pretty much conveys some of the major problems of realism in a fantasy based MMO in his article, “Realism at What Cost?“. It’s a good read and he makes a good point that in a game that doesn’t try to be real like WoW or WAR, ‘it doesn’t have to work in the real world’ to work in the game.
With that in mind, I hope this game can reproduce some of that WoW magic and make what works in the game work to keep it fun. The mass of MMO gamers out there is thirsting for the next big thing, let’s hope this is it.
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