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The Last WAR Presentation
MMORPG.com's Carolyn Koh caught up with a very tired team from Mythic Entertainment's Warhammer Online as they completed the last of their many, many off-the-wall presentations. In this interview, the guys talk about launch and sleep and reveal some interesting statistics from the game.
At PAX there was little that Associate Producer Josh Drescher, could tell me about Warhammer that we had not already covered at E3, GenCon or Leipzig.
“We’re polishing, polishing, polishing,” he said. “All customization is in. The facial scarring and tattoos for the dark elves, the jewellery for the dwarves and the accessories for each race and career. They’re all in.”
The collector’s edition, I was told. will have unique face models and accessories for each race and career. We ranged over a number of subjects and grasping at straws, I asked about the success and lessons learned from the open preview weekend. Nothing to report from that either, it showed them that their work on their servers had borne fruit as the servers remained stable. The architecture is all in place and they are simply working on performance enhancement in the client at this time. Confident from the test that their servers would be able to handle the expected heavy loads on launch day, it’s all the backend, boring server and hardware work that they are concentrating on right now.
“We plan to push this out then sleep for a month!” exclaimed Josh. “We’re ready.”
They have the numbers to test their game during this last phase of beta, with 200,000 beta players in North America alone. This is not the first game that Mythic has shipped and in the early days of MMOGs, the launch of Dark Ages of Camelot was a comparatively successful and stable launch.
The Jeff and Paul (Hickman and Barnett) presentation on Saturday was the same show they had done at Leipzig, and this would be the last show for them. “There’s nothing left for us to tell you,” Paul reiterated. “The NDA has been lifted, the launch is September 18, and you guys know it all.”
They did share a number of facts and figures with the audience as part of the show:
Warhammer was 3 years in the making, there are 250 members on the team, every dev has moved offices 3.4 times and 2 million man hours went into the making of Warhammer. In a comedic turn, Paul told us also that 10 Warhammer babies were born to the team; the average weight gained by developers was 8lbs, although Jeff actually lost weight during the process.
Other tidbits thrown out during the show included the most popular careers: Witch hunter for Order, Black Orc (or BOrc) on the Destruction side and green is the most popular color.
As always, Jeff played the straight man in this comedic duo. Playing to a greatly appreciative crowd, including splitting the room down in half to cheer for Order that Jeff represented and Destruction that Paul represented and pitting the sides against each other for the loudest cheer, they threw WAR sunglasses out to the appreciative audience. This show proved to be so popular, the line snaked around the convention center they had to cut it down and do it twice in order to accommodate the number that wanted to see it.
WAR? Bring it; we’re all ready for it.
good luck with the game.
more polish is the right things, and fixing bugs. A stelar release will await WAR if all these stuff is polished.
And then, the next problems...
Wheeeeeee! It was so much fun. Jeff and Paul put on a fantastic show - I just wish the Q&A hadn't been cut :(
(and the Zealot/Witch Hunter cosplay, omfg, awesome)
Only 6 days until OB!
So I guess I was right in thinking that Auction Houses, Talisman Making and High setting graphics won't make it to launch since they haven't mentionned them in a month :(
Not mentioning it doesn't mean it's not gonna be there Myrdek, with around 3 Gb amount worth of patching, who knows?
Anyway I've read that those 3 Gb are mainly polishing textures, voices, details, etc...
Cheers!
Oh man 5 more days until we can play. I can't wait. Hopefully the game is a success.
Yeah i know mate. The Open Beta from Warhammer just feels like actual release
Right now I just want to play the game. :) The bad thing is Open Beta characters don't really matter. I just want the real game to start.
I'm actually NOT all that excited about Open Beta. I'm MORE excited about Head Start, because THOSE characters won't be wiped.
I'm not sure how much effort I'm really going to put into Open Beta, because of that really. I'm also just ready for the "real deal." I wouldn't make a very good closed beta tester, because I can't STAND when characters get wiped. LOL
It will be nice playing for keeps.
They did mention the Auction House a couple weeks ago saying they had been working on it internally and it will be there for the launch.
This is definitely good news that all they are doing is polishing, there aren't many bugs left to be fixed and I'm glad to hear they're doing well for launch.
Latest Patch notes has them all now live.
Latest Patch notes has them all now live.
what he said...everything has been enabled in game now...graphics, guild stuff, crafters, improved pathing, etc/
Wow, just looked at those patch notes and it shows that they have 250 people working on it now :)
I don't think any mmo has ever had that many people working on the game close to launch.
Doesn't say high settings are in though, I know they added medium a couple of days ago and now they said they added more controls.
Tutorials are a good things as well
I guess it won't be a year afterall until I buy it, probably 2-3 months if this rate keeps up :)
I'd rather play an mmo from day 1, even if it is a little unpolished/not finished, because IMHO it's fun to keep up with the initial wave of players and experience a new game with everyone else.Also, as I level up, it will be populated highly in all the areas I play, and a high populated mmo is very important for me, especially a game like WAR.
I'm looking forward to the open beta just to get a feel for the classes so I can decide what to play as a main. I'd have wiped most of those anyway.
in preview weekend are the
Latest Patch notes has them all now live.
where can we view the patch notes? if we were in preview weekend are they available?
Right on TacBoy, you and me both.
I came to WAR late, so I will need the open beta stage to decide upon my preferred (healer) class.
At the same time, it'll kind of suck to have done a fair amount of content, only to have to go through it all again when it goes live (which is what sh@t me about WoW).
How exciting, a new MMO. Lets just pray it doesn't suck as bad as AoC at release!
i dont think the devs should sleep after they release their game. if anything they should all pop some uppers and deal with the live bugs.
where can we view the patch notes? if we were in preview weekend are they available?
It's my understanding that this is still under NDA and in actual fact Myrdek shouldn't really have posted what he did.
I'm actually NOT all that excited about Open Beta. I'm MORE excited about Head Start, because THOSE characters won't be wiped.
I'm not sure how much effort I'm really going to put into Open Beta, because of that really. I'm also just ready for the "real deal." I wouldn't make a very good closed beta tester, because I can't STAND when characters get wiped. LOL
While I will dabble more with the OB characters than I will once release rolls around, I will still take my role as a 'tester' seriously (I've always done so for 14+ years now. I even still have my first 'Team Beta' T-shirt and mouse pad. Yes, they used to give things away to testers. I use them both on the opening day of any major Beta Test/Release for good luck!) While I enjoy the 'review and play' factor of OB and recognize that a lot of the meaning behind it is stress testing the servers, there will always be those unfortunately bugs. I will try very hard to notice them, if possible recreate them and then log them. Who knows what we might find as OBers that will help the game 'fixes' that go in at or after release.
I already did all that Preview Weekend.
I didn't sleep.
Just some advice for open beta, but everyone can do what they like of course.
If you plan on doing the open beta, some suggestions for not having to do the exact same thing for head start might be to do your leveling in another classes area. For instance if you are a dwarf, why not for open beta go to the empire or high elf area and play those quests/etc. Then when the head start comes and your character counts you can simply just play all the quests and such in your own area, unless you planned on doing this to begin with.
Another option is to simply not play your main, and try out the other class and races to get a feel for them. You never know, you might just enjoy something else.
Just keep in mind that your character will not stay so don't invest too much time, and try to just enojy the game and get a feel for everything.
As far as the patching, just remember that when the official launch comes there will more then liekly be another patch possibly topping off things from the open beta. Also remember that it is still "beta", open or not, i'm sure mythic won't be showing us just everything.
I plan on doing that. My main will be a Marauder so during open beta I'll play the other destruction races. Really I just want to spend time getting a feel for the game and UI so I won't waste time doing that during the head start. I'll probably stay in the first tier for open beta.
Read that in one or two WAR fan site-forums. Most probably Freddy's House or at WHA
Look around and you'll find it, also a good place beside those forums (there's so many good ones out there actually) is WAR data base
I'm eager (and longed for many months and I dare to say, years...) to play WAR, specially OB since you can try out diferent characters without carying too much about the twicks and spec. Doing that helps to make a better char afterwards sicne you probably tried other careers you might feel more prepared for upcoming PvP - RvR, knowing how to conter oponents.
Cheers...
P.S. - see you guys in a few days for OB.
Hey guys just because the closed beta test is over doesnt mean the testing is. There is still testing going on, however that is all still covered by the NDA :P
It's true that CB or OB is still a test but I don't see the conjunction between OB and NDA... NDA is over.
Be aware that OB is only 20 lvl cap... Think about it, it actually means quite some thing; hence the question: why really bother with NDA now*? - Seems now such a trvivial thing...
The game has change already in some minor details, just search and look around.
I may be a bit harsh for those who haven't follow WAR, for those, then, I'm sorry but please do look and search.
Cheers
edit : MLecl0001 , I don't think, in this thread, people said OB isn't a test.. If someone said it then I'm sorry, my bad, I probably passed to quickly over some smaller posts.
Oh and btw, I wasn't even in CB but, like I said, I've been paying attention to this new MMO for quite a while ('06 already) so...
*I was asking this because it's not the only thread or post asking about it.
Sorry for double posting but I wanted to send this to all new and older posters to WAR Forum on MMORPG.com:
See you this 7th Sep.!!!!
Cheers to all!!!!!!!