Set to release this fall, EA Mythic's anticipated Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning MMORPG was on display at Monday's EA Spring Break event in San Francisco, Calif. Trying to play a massive game like this for preview within a limited time as other publications cycle through doesn't exactly make it easy to write an informative preview. So instead we just asked a few questions of Destin Bales, content director at EA Mythic, regarding how the game's beta testing is going and what to expect in Warhammer's end-game content.
In case you're not familiar with it, the game is based in the Games Workshop's Warhammer Fantasy universe and centers around what's known as realm-versus-realm (RvR) combat. In this setup, players pick either the side of Order (Dwarfs, Empire, High Elves) or Destruction (Greenskins, Chaos, Dark Elves), work their way up a level curve to the 40 cap, and eventually try to take over the territory of their opposing faction and conquer their capital city. For a detailed account of how the gameplay works, check out our
previous coverage.
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According to Bales, "In our beta test we just did our first tier four campaign testing. That's where we artificially level players to the highest level in the game, give them access to the highest content in the game, and said go fight through these zones. We also did a one-night test of an invasion of Altdorf, which is our Empire capital city. We let people go in, burn down the city, kill the king, capture rewards, sort of the culmination of the entire RvR game.
"Our next phase of beta is going to release the Greenskin and Dwarf tiers one through three content, and that will allow players to see stuff they haven't seen in almost a year. We've been focusing heavily on the Empire and Chaos and recently the Elves in beta, and so now we're going to give players a chance to see the Greenskin and Dwarves and see all the improvements and polish we've made to those areas."
Mythic is also at work on a high level player-versus-environment dungeon. "We're working on a high level dungeon, it's called the lost vale," Bales said. "That is a dungeon that's going to be instanced and it's geared toward one group of players. It's our highest PvE dungeon in the game and we only require six players to do it. It further emphasizes the kind of gameplay we want to encourage players to do in WAR; you can play almost the entire game solo if you want."
The biggest thing you can do in PvE is dive into and conquer the lost vale. Once you get all the best gear out of the place, you're pretty powerful; much more so than normal level 40 players. Then you can, through RvR, acquire another tier or two worth of gear. "The most powerful at the end of the game will be those that RvR. And then we'll obviously release an expansion and continue to build on that with PvP and RvR together," he said.
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Territory is taken over in numerous ways, from open world combat to instanced battles with set player limits. Eventually you'll get to the siege gameplay, something that Mythic is currently working on. "We just got siege hooked up," Bales said. "We've got siege cannons. We've actually got a targeting reticule and you can zoom in and fire on people. We've got rams; you can have six people band together and ram the door." Once you've smashed your way to the enemy gates, you'll find various PvE opportunities open up. In Altdorf there's an instanced assault on the king, for example, which can yield king armor for groups that successfully overcome the challenge.
As for plans going forward, Mythic is "probably not going to do open, open beta where you just have the entire game open to everybody all at once," Bales said. "We like to do more targeted strikes in beta where we can actually get people in and say, 'Test out tier one, test out tier four, try and invade this keep,' and that way we actually get feedback that will help us actually improve the game on a more targeted level."
Those who aren't able to get in and play before the beta ends should still expect to hop in this fall when the game is set to officially launch. "Fall is our target," Bales said. "It's a target we really want to hit. It's not something we take lightly but if the game's not great we're not going to launch it until it is."
