Snafzg, aka “Brooke” (for some reason), wrote a… well, let’s just say it’s a collection of words, properly arranged with the benefit of a spell/grammar checker. There’s a thought or two in there, sure, but if you expose yourself to it for more than six seconds, you run the very real risk of becoming sterile. Also, dying.
Nah, I’m just kidding. It’s actually a great piece on his post-game analysis of what audience WAR was shooting for, exactly. I think he gets most of it right, and that’s even with his crippling meth addiction clouding his judgment.
Since the whole article revolves around multiple “what if?” questions that speculate different outcomes for the game, I wanted to throw one more into the ring. What if Warhammer Online was a purely, 100% PvE game?
It’s not that hard to conceive of such an existence. After all, Mythic was hard at work on Imperium, a PvE game, prior to WAR, and probably learned a heckuva lot through it. And the original Warhammer Online, which was in development for a couple years by Climax, was (by all reports) solely PvE.
PvE always got the short shift in WAR — both in the game and by most of the fans. Yet I wonder, if Mythic wasn’t trying so hard to get the RvR realm war thing to work… if their PvE could’ve met and perhaps surpassed other titles on the market.
Think about it: they had all the ingredients. Public Quests were highly lauded by most players, as was the Tome of Knowledge — both PvE innovations (at least of a degree). Live events were somewhat cool. The combat was solid, the game looks pretty great, and there’s a huge variety of classes to pick from. I can only imagine if more time had been spent on the PvE side what they could’ve accomplished. More and much, much better dungeons? Scripted PvE battlefields? More locations, a more interactive world, perhaps even trashing the horrible mastery path concept and coming up with a better system. Who knows — at the end of the day, it’s not what happened, and after Mark made the announcement that PvP was the future of the game (as Snafzg mentioned), that’s when I think I started to detach my hopes a bit for WAR’s future.
I guess I learned, for better or worse, that PvE is in my blood, and while I can tolerate and appreciate PvP, it’s not where my gaming passion lies. So for all that, I hitched my blogging wagon to something that was the polar opposite of my interests, but it still had enough PvE to keep me going.
P.S. – According to Wandering Rogue, Brooke is a girl. The things you learn!
Haha, I guess the saying about assumptions is true. I wasn’t familiar with Brooke before now. Thanks for the correction, I’ve made the edit in my post.
If you take a look at the interview we have at Warhammer Alliance with Jeff and Gabe, you see, strangely, that Land of the Dead is really “a PvE zone with RvR mixed in”.
The new LV-level dungeon – Tomb of the Vulture Lord, is quite PvE and the encounters are great. Invasion of instances is always a risk, but that’s what the traps are for (and have been used by my groups) to great effect.
Unfortunately, this ended up making the RvR-centric players angry, and T4 being empty due to LotD is a real problem right now. Hopefully the devs will come back from holiday recharged and ready to tackle the bugs that have come up.
Just wanted to say that i much rather would have seen the oposite from mythic, a full focus on the rvr part of the game. The world already have some great pve mmorpgs, world of warcraft for one, and they are hard to take down.
What if they had made a rvr game that worked? A game with minimal/no lag (atleast so it can be played with more then 40 ppl in the same spot) and with balanced skills and classes, I think that that would have been a greater revolution then a new pve game with neverending grinding for loot, or as it is in this case a game that isnt a good pve game or a working rvr game.
Why not expand the path of dungeon siege with their version of skilllearning, what you do you learn to do? And why not go for a system thats free of lootgrinding, or a system thats more of “if you are good at this you get good things” not “regardless of skill or lvl roll for what ever you want”.
Dont know if I made any sense at all
/Lionie
@ Myrix – Don’t worry to much about it, he is pretty girly.
As someone else mentioned, LotD is VERY heavy on the PvE side. It’s actually incredibly well done PvE. It’s some of the most fun in PvE I’ve had in a long time. However, me being the opposite of you, and having PvP in my veins, it’s a big disapointment to me.
I have a post in the works on this where I’ll go into much more detail, but I think you have it right to a point.
Basically, I’m starting to feel that making your game 85% badass PvE and then making the remaining 15% badass PvP/RvR is the right mix. WAR tried to go for a more 50/50 or 60/40 (PvE to RvR) approach and it just didn’t work because neither was very thrilling. They even tried to bring PvE to the PvP (e.g., PvP your brains out through the RvR campaign and then go on this mostly PvE city raid).
My post will focus on this: Five steps Blizzard could take in WoW to win back my subsciption.
Basically, WoW has so many great PvE and polish elements. It’s just that their PvP lacks a bit of refinement.
I’ve always said Warhammer wasted a huge opportunity by being PvP focused.
Mythic created an exceptional foundation for PvE in this game. All the opportunities were there. Unfortunately the house they built on top of it was not so stellar.
Hmm…. I guess that if Mythic had made WAR a pure PVE game, it might have worked. At WAR’s release, WoW was in a huge pre-expansion lull. Blizz had released the new talent trees and everyone was op for BC content. WAR could have capitalized on that lull if they’d had a strong PVE game to grab and retain players.
It’s been said a million times before, but I think that if Mythic really just focused on fixing the technical issues and balancing, rather than releasing new content, they could easily save WAR.