Overly Positive

As some of us are (hopefully) taking the long weekend here in the US for Labor Day to have a nice little barbeque and spend some time with family and friends, I thought this was an appropriate time to talk a little more about that wonderful thing that happens when it comes to highly-anticipated MMOs – the lull.

The lull happens when you are between two major milestones in a game’s release timeline. Those that haven’t been scared away by the disturbingly obsesstive fandom or been so disgusted with previews that they wanted to slice their wrists open with a dull spoon are left wanting for more during this time period. They hunger for a taste and lumber along in forums and blogs like a zombie shambles after human brains, and pine away counting the days until their next delectable bite.

Warhammer Online is no different in this regard. Right now, with the NDA drop and Preview Weekend behind us, and Open Beta and the chaos of release ahead of us, things are in a calm period, and people drool over even a hint or a tidbit of new content. They bang virtual cutlery on the table, looking to be served their WAR dinner on a platter, and when it isn’t forthcoming, they try to amuse themselves with doing some oh-so-productive things like start threads on forums that are half in all caps and repeat a topic worse than a parrot mimicks its owner.

Now I have to say, it isn’t all that bad that you folks are not playing right now. Sure, it might seem like we moderators and admins want to shoot ourselves in the head because you want to spend so much time on the forums hitting F5 like a crazed monkey, but we still care, so  I’ve got a pick me up just for you.

Not playing the game right now means you’re going to prevent yourself from burning out on it, for example. Because you can’t log in for 20 hours a day literally to beat the snot out of someone else on an opposing team, you are at least a 20-hours a day work week away from being a cynical, bitter, inflammatory bundle of joy. Already there? Well, you’ll basically have one less game to complain about, right?

It’s also good that you’re not playing because it allows you to give the rest of the Internet their due. I’m sure that when you might have been playing WAR over the Preview Weekend or for the double secret Collector’s Edition beta, that you were arguing all the wonderful Internet meme spawning grounds, from 4chan, to Youtube, to Bit Torrent, and other such tools of the tech trade. Not playing gives you more time to waste on other superficial things, giving you a way to post later about how he game will be an epic fail and create videos set to random metal music.

And let’s not forget the online social element. WIth no MMO like WAR at your fingertips to start playing at any time, you’ll have to actually try to hold an online conversation with someone, now that you can’t mark yourself away because you’re in the game already. Besides, it’s good practice, because when the site gets past release, you will have all the time to try to make sure every 3rd person doesn’t spew some random nonsense. To get a good idea, just play a wonderful game of Halo 3 over X-Box Live. If you survive for at least 15 minutes without wanting to reach through the screen and choke someone, then you’ll be nice and ready for open beta and release.

So don’t worry about not being able to play WAR right now, fans. There’s so much that you can do otherwise, that it’ll re-charge your batteries and get you ready for the next round of inevitable tests and concepts that make you play a grand total of 13 minutes at a time. I know I look forward to it.

So with today’s NDA drop for Warhammer Online, everyone who was in the closed beta seems to be scrambling to put down their keyboards and mice and post their thoughts about the game as it stands today, a little less than one month before release. Well, far be it from me to not jump on the bandwagon and start yee-hawing away myself, so here’s a great review of a product that isn’t out of the oven yet. Now, some of us have been licking the bowl longer than others. I myself have been in the beta so long (since June of 2007) it seems like I’m licking the plastic shards off the bottom of the mixing bowl these days. But with that comes a certain impression, and, like with everything on this site, it always looks on the bright side.

Perhaps the best portion of all this stuff has been going through the process as long as I have. Make no mistake about it – WAR has been polished so hard you could almost see the blisters on our fingers from all the rubbing we’ve been doing for the past year or so, ever since public testers were first invited. The core elements of the game – the fact that you can queue in a Scenario and bash someone’s head in from rank 1, the idea of the campaign, the zones and the classes on each side – the experience of going from chapter to chapter living a story in your own fantasy world – all of this stuff has been fine tuned as much as it could be for the time we have left. Even as a half-baked pie, it tastes decent.

I mean, sure, every time you logon to actually do some of that “Realm vs. Realm” thing, you’d better be a race that was beaten by an ugly stick, mutated by one, or clutches one looking jealously at people with better sticks. If you’re the perceived “good guy” Order folks – don’t worry – while you can look forward to many, many beatings by superior numbered Destruction people outside of WAR’s balanced scenarios – it’s a challenge right? You like being the underdog that takes on 5 on 1 and somehow manages to beat them to the point of them calling for a nerf to your class, I’m sure. So don’t worry – if you’re Destruction, you’ll have plenty of time to get in a swift kick to the nads of any Order corpse after it’s been sliced to death, and if you’re Order, you have the wonderful opportunity to trudge uphill both ways and post on Youtube about how you somehow prevented a “zerg” from killing you because you have “l337″ skills. You’ll also get to command all the clueless people who filled your ranks on release who “thought humans looked cool”. Everyone wins!

Gotta say, the UI looks great. Yep, you can move all the elements around, you have an amazing Tome of Knowledge that would (and probably could) record when you last picked your nose and how often, and everything is easy to find and convenient, from the action abilities to the party windows to the layout, all customizable. Hey, it’s easy to make a variation on a hamburger when someone has it pretty well done already, right? Heck, I’ll get this out of the way right now – most of you who are reading this played WoW , and if you say you didn’t I would question your honesty, because it’s like masturbating – millions have done it at least once, but not everyone’s willing to admit it. The UI is definitely easy to teach to someone who’s sat down with WoW – it has similar shortcuts, it has similar feel, and it has similar layout. But don’t torch me at the stake yet – why, I think it’s a good thing. There’s no need to innovate or think of TOO many new features, because you don’t want to overwhelm someone with too many selling points, right? I mean, when was the last time you had a choice between a hamburger or an exotic new dish that might have been made with the brains of a monkey, and chose the latter? Yeah, I thought so. WAR’s UI better be like a hamburger, because today’s fast-food society demands it! The customer is always right!

And what about all those “Secondary” things about WAR’s beta right now? Crafting, for example. Boy, I do have to say that finding my own recipes is kind of interesting, challenging, and fun to do. Of course, when I do make something it’s probably something that might be more useful to a 2 year old with a crayon for a weapon instead of my character, but hey, it applies somewhere, and it’s the thought that counts, right? Oh, the many things that I have crafted with my own two hands that I have generously donated to some merchant who takes in orphans to feed. Slight Allaying Draught that heals 50 over 4 seconds, I salute you, and the pet cat or rat who benefited from it does as well! And let’s not forget the PvE dungeon aspect. I mean, yeah, the dungeons might have been more deserted than an ice cream store in the dead of winter, but I’m sure the 60 or so people out of the hundreds or thousands who tested the dungeon found all the bugs and there won’t be a single one for release at all. With all those other people testing how hard they could slam their weapon into their opponents’ faces, someone has to do the boring dirty work of testing a wing of a dungeon that has mobs with pathing and direction issues worse than the Blair Witch Project kids.

So with all this going so well and with so much time to test since everything appears to be just peachy keen, is WAR ready right now? You bet it is. It’s ready to be judged within 5 seconds of footage by people who like to get their daily lulz out of posting chain letter comments on YouTube videos. It’s ready to be potentially cast aside as the MMO with “the worst launch ever” and the common words “epic fail” attached to it. It’s ready to be invaded by tons of players who might not have the slightest idea how to ask for help unless it’s with three letters and the grammar of a Wookie. And of course, it’s ready to deal with the angst of many people who were somehow bested in combat not because their opponent was better than them, but because they are “OP”, “need a nerf now”, and “use cheap BS”. In a game where the point is to take the enemy’s capital city and moon them at the same time, expect to see a lot of bare geek ass on fansite forums as Mythic is smart and sane enough not to run their own.

I can’t wait. Can you?