Now the first thing that will pop into most peoples head, will be new content. New content for PvE, new content for RvR, maybe new character types. Now for me, it’s something more basic than that, it’s more people. Of course any new addon will pull back in previous players, that’s part of what they designed to do. But this first addon needs to do far more than that, it needs to be cataclysmic (Had to use it).
I have previously stated, that Warhammer by it’s very nature has to reflect the ebb and flow of our “epic” cough cough war. I have always felt that an addon pack would be the best time to perform these major landscaping updates. However I have slowly come to the conclusion, that this first addon pack needs to be more far radical than that. What would achieve this for me? Simply put it’s, drum roll please ….
A 3rd Realm/Side.
Yep that old chestnut. If you spend sometime searching around, you will see many blog posts on the 3rd realm topic and how it could be achieved, it’s been hanging around in the electronic ether since launch. I’ve had a couple of good ideas on the subject, but I would be first to admit, that there’s a long way between having a good idea and implementing it successfully. We only need to look at ORvR at launch to realise that. I want to see 3 way fights and no more bloody games of warcamp yo yo.
Mythic need to regain the crest of the wave and this would pretty much guarantee that (Okay it’s merely an opinion on my part, but bollocks to the people who’d say it’s just copying DAOC, I couldn’t give a rats ass at this point). It’s a massive undertaking and I am not convinced they could still achieve it, especially given the paring down of staff numbers. From a development point of view it would be a huge job, which would involve a top to bottom review of every facet of the game. But isn’t what we need? We need more people? A standard content addon isn’t going to garner the headlines we need, it’s got to grab people by the scruff of the neck.
Otherwise, I honestly feel that the good work that Mythic have undertaken this last year is going to pass a lot of people by, especially with the deluge of new MMOs coming out of the gate at the moment. Hell, didn’t two launch yesterday, DDO F2P and Champions Online (aka CoH2). MMO launches are starting to become like buses, never one around when you want, then they arrive all together.
What we don’t need is more landscape. We need players to fill a landscape and players are in short supply, especially on my server. To much med vs med, med vs low on the logon screen for me to be happy and this is after just a year. I never thought I would be seeing Prydwen syndrome so soon on Karak Eight Peaks (Prydwen was my DAOC server).
This first addon needs to do something of the scale that WoW is seeking to do with it’s next addon, which by the way is long overdue in my humble opinion. Warhammer doesn’t have that luxury of a massive install base, so it can’t rest on it’s laurels, not that it deserves any yet. I would be happy to go back to the days of having to queue to get onto my server. People moaned about little things like that at launch, how they must feel foolish now. Probably not, they are long gone by now.
This addon needs to hit people so hard, they are seeing stars, so hard in fact that they see this first addon as the launch that never was for Warhammer, and for gods sake lets avoid dropping this baby anywhere near that bloody big monkey in Irvine.
Give the people their 3rd realm/side and if that doesn’t work I will never offer an opinion on Warhammer again, because it would trully show what a clueless ass I am.
I think by this time they aren’t even planning a expansion yet, which means it would take 1 year for them to plan and then release one (the time taken to do LotD).
I do agree that anything like a 3rd side would be great, and your reasoning is simple and convincing – new zone = less people in each zone for WAR.
I think we will find that the expansion is well past the design stage and is probably deep in coding.
I imagine Mythic waited 6 months to see how things were shaping up, before going to heavily into the addon design, since only with a handle on numbers could you see what your game could accomodate.
But I would kind of expect an addon spring of next year.
They’ve stated that the game was not created in a way to allow a third faction. I say bullshit.
Right now, I don’t see myself ever going back to WAR. But if they ever put in a third faction. Mark my word, I would resub.
“bollocks to the people who’d say it’s just copying DAOC”
It’s their game, I think they’re allowed to copy it hehe.
Exactly, they can copy what they like and basically bollocks to the people who say “They can’t innovate blah blah blah”. I don’t believe they took enough of DAOC forward into Warhammer, for fear of that kind of comment.
If they can get around the lore issues, then I would run the 3rd realm underneath the currently existing tiers. Make it a completely underground realm. Where it’s RVR warcamps would be underground and would emerge from somewhere in the ORvR zones. Seriously if they have problems with the design then email me, I will come across for the 3 months to sketch out the ground rules.
The problems aren’t don’t come from the initial design, it’s from people not saying “What if this, What if that”.
If there is a will there is a way.
Warhammer needs something monuemental.
“They’ve stated that the game was not created in a way to allow a third faction. ”
Judging from this sentence, there can be no denying though, because they are the guy who designed the whole game, and at design stage they did not allow any possibility of a third realm which is normal. We may never know the reason there is only two realms in the first place, but WAR was not designed to hold a 3rd realm.
That’s not to say it is impossible to have a third realm, just extremely difficult. Some example of systems that need changed:
Realm War (web page)
Character system (transfer rules, character creation rules, etc)
Instancing
City siege/Campaign
Zone control/RvR system
and it’s not counting new assets, new careers and new zones to make a 3rd realm feel less tacked on.
Of course, they can make the third realm a NPC faction, or a temporary faction(mercenaries anyone?), which would not require them to have major overhaul in design.
Still, personally I’d prefer a fix to other major problems(bugs, performance, career imbalance) before tackling a third realm.
@ Radishlaw,
Firstly look at my reply to Slurms.
Nothing you listed is difficult to sort out at a conceptual level. The hard thing is intergrating and weaving the 3rd realm’s actual zones into the current (Wartorn) landscape. But since I would envisage a massive proportion underground, that’s a lot easy said than done.
What is also alot of work is bringing into the text that already exists in game, the impact of this 3rd realm. That’s a lot of stuff that’s got to be reviewed and changed to reflect this new in game force.
You are going to need to change a lot of quests and also create a lot of quests in each racial pairing which utilises these new assets.
Possible what we are talking about, is something parallel to City Of Villians ???? The problem would be selling it to the players.
It could be bought stand alone, but only provide access to the careers of the 3rd realm ?