DAoC in the Crysis engine

Noticed this little gem while browsing through a WAR blog I'd never seen before (That's Skar with a K) and thought I'd share it as well. It's Dark Age of Camelot (well parts of) re imagined through a modern game engine (in this case Crysis), it's nice to see what could have been....

http://mharjula.blogspot.com/

Jeff Hickman speaks... Let the speculation end

But we know it won't... Every little word and phrase will be digested, picked apart and used now... No matter what Jeff would say he was in a no win situation with the doom sayers. But still, sod 'em.. I'm happy in WAR and will continue to support it for years to come as it's a gud (if amazingly frustrating at times) game!

http://herald.warhammeronline.com/warherald/NewsArticle.war?id=980

".... At Mythic, we remain committed to our games and the passionate people who play them – we’re going to continue to deliver the content and service that keeps you playing. We want to assure our community that we will maintain the same high level of customer support you’ve come to expect and continue to improve our games with an exciting schedule of patches, live events and new content.

... -Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning has had a solid first year despite some issues that we’re working to address every day. We’ve seen a great response to 1.3.2, which introduced tremendous performance improvements. A flood of new players are discovering the game every day thanks to the recently released Endless Trial and New User Journey. Moving forward we remain committed to releasing more great patches, continued performance improvements, and changes based upon your valuable feedback!..."

The day after....

I have to admit, I was expecting to wake up to some sort of post apocalyptic MMO world this morning. As I sat in work first thing (the joys of being the only one in the office at 7am) I hit a few websites and forums to see if there had been any response, any news, perhaps a sign of the end times or a pulse of life. Instead all I found was the world moving on, Destructions king had been killed again at silly AM, the odd website had made mention of the layoffs but things seemed to be moving along with no change.

It's only a day after the news broke, but I honestly feel that if we were at panic stations for WAR then it would have been noticeable by now, not just from the layoffs at Mythic but in general. I still see more and more people returning from Aion or from elsewhere to visit the old world.

A days thought about it makes me believe that EA might be putting Mythic on 'maintenance mode' but this doesn't mean a halt to production, simply that the game is focused on how it stands rather than adding more to it and at this point it's what WAR needs. A good solid focus on removing those pesky bugs and working out performance issues.

There's many games out there with less subscribers that are surviving fine, many are planning expansions and are staying afloat nicely. Yes, WAR has lost subs, but it is in no way a non profitable game, EA wants to make money. You don't get rid of something which is making money, no matter what the profit margins.

Personally, I'm looking at it as stage 2 of the Mythic/Bioware team. I can see Mythic being fully Incorporated into Bioware over the next few months with Ultima and DAoC also coming under the Biowa(aaagh)re banner.

The Waaaagh might be quieter right now, but the green tide is rising...

Warhammer has weathered the storm... But losing its creative arm?

http://bitemyreview.com/2009/11/warhammer-online-effectively-dead-in-the-water/

From the above article...

"Word of mouth has 80 people being laid off from EA Mythic today. The information started coming out on Friday, and folks officially got the axe today.

Our insiders tell us that EA corporate may be laying off up to 1000 people worldwide, and that the Mythic properties themselves are going into “maintenance mode”. Seeing as most of the folks laid off were in the creative departments at Mythic, this makes sense — you can’t be producing a new expansion or writing new content if all of your writers are gone."

I'm sure we'll find out more over the next week or two if this is not only true, but what the future holds for WAR.

Update: Seems to be confirmed now from a few different sources. Wishing all those who have lost employment the best in the future and hopefully a quick return to work, good luck folks and thank you for your time and effort put to our community.

As a side note, the numbers will be spread no doubt over WAR, Dark Age of Camelot and Ultima Online so to stem the inevitable "the sky is falling" posts, by all accounts WAR might not be seeing any lay offs at all.... maybe....

Broken Blockas & Cracked Choppas

My Blocka o' da Doombull and Choppa of da Chieftain are starting to look a little battle worn and run down these days. The Blocka has been in use since the middle of February and the only upgrade for it comes from Land of the Dead after killing the Colossus a gazillion times (funnily enough a PvE thing). The Chieftains choppa has an upgrade, in the Warlord PQ (good luck getting there on Karak Norn) but the better two are a Sandstorm (from land of the dead grinding) drop or from... again... the Colossus.

See the theme here?

Barring the tier 4 RvR influence rewards there's no real way to get weaponry in RvR. And those weapons are quickly replaced by PvE weapons.

The two logical choices would be to expand the influence rewards or allow weaponry to be purchased with all those tokens starting to build up in people inventories. I'm in favour of the influence system, it's guaranteed that you will get them if you work towards it rather than waiting on lucky drops.

Start a new influence bar... Basic influence you can only gain if you are renown rank 50 or above, advance influence only gains when you are RR60 and elite influence you can gain from RR70. The reason for this is to stop people being all influenced out before they can even wear conqueror to help the sense of progression. Keep a renown requirement on them so you have a dual goal, your rank and influence then let people go smush!

The same can be done for jewellery items, barring the dreadful Warlord and Sovereign pieces (seriously, who thinks +8 will power is of ANY use to a tank?) all other jewellery pieces come from PvE.

Let us gear up and progress in RvR, not stare at the same items for almost a year because there's nothing left to get other than rare PvE drops...

It was something else...

D'oh...

Hello Testers,

You may have noticed by now but those of you who attended the Keep Reward System tests on the Monday 5th of October between 20:00 CEST and 22:00 CEST have been rewarded for your participation with the Face of Condemnation.

This item is sure to make you stand out in a crowd. We'd love to see some screenshots of you wearing it so please feel free to post them here!

Thanks once again for your contribution!

The Slann are watching?

Could our next 'destination' be Lustria, the realm of the Lizardmen and Slaan... Or is it just part of the halloween event? Or something else entirely....

For Gorks sake.. give us something to do other than sieges!

Well as the Hand of Blood wait around for another siege to end we're at a loss... No ORvR... No scenarios... A lot of guilds just seem to log out now if it's not going to look like a lock.

We NEED RvR to do during this time if the city instances are empty and dont give us that horrible city scenario we had before please.

My thoughts? Open up The Twisted Tower and the Maw of Madness if IC is under siege and Reikland Hills and Reikland Factory if Altdorf is under attack. When Highpass Cemetery was on as the event scenario I've never seen scens pop so fast, you would be going straight into them after wards... People would rather fight than stare at empty instances.

I don't know what the average play session is but I'd say no more than three hours for the casual WAR player.. if two and a half hours of this are taken up by a city siege which is half empty then it's not productive to the game. The novelty has worn off already and the grumblings are starting again...

Updating the Blog roll.

Cleared it out a bit and added a couple of Blogs in there that for some reason (and I have no idea why since I check them regularly) never got added. If you're a Warhammer Blogger or have been with a new blog that looks at gaming in general (sorry, not interested in people now posting about another game entirely) then leave a comment here and I'll add you to the blog roll..

WAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaghhhhhhhhhh

There's life yet in Warhammer

Oh my Gork! I'm not allowed to say that am I? I'm not foretelling the death of War or that it's lost millions of subscriptions and there's only five people still playing it.

In fact, I think people are returning to WAR and new people are discovering it...

Aion (for a few folks) wasn't the best thing since sliced bread that some made it out to be and a fair few players are already returning from it. Mortal Online although still in beta seems to have people already walking out of it (which is a shame since it does look prety decent). The rinse and repeat formula is starting to grow thing for those playing WoW (well at least until Icecrown raids and then Cataclysm) and they're starting to become tourists again. Champions Online seems to have stalled but will keep a solid core of players.

So a year on for a lot of people and they're starting to check out WAR again. I've heard a lot of positive comments from people regarding the performance of the game, balance and content. We're now starting to get tasters of the end game loot and gear (for those who don't know Karak Norn has never had a king kill from either side yet). WAR needs to tidy up a few things here and there (for the love of Gork fix some of those graphic bugs that have plagued us since closed beta) but if they can keep pushing at it, keep the flow of content and if WE the players have faith then more shall return. WAR will never be a 500k-1m sub game anymore, it's lost the momentum. I can see it sitting steady around the 200-300k mark for a long time especially if EA sorts out online payment packages for it's four games when it releases The Old Republic. I also think that Mythic needs to start talking about it's first expansion soon as that should start to generate some more hype, though I get the feeling they're holding off until they can avoid an announcement conflict with WoW regarding either Icecrown or more Cataclysm news.

WAR has a bright future, it might be dimmer than it was a year ago but I'm still going by my 5 years at least life span on it.