Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

Even from the very earliest level, players are more than welcome to try their hand against other RvR combatants. The faction that controls a particular area in the game is awarded bonus XP generation along with the bragging rights that come with a captured RvR area.

And for those of you that haven’t tried RvR warfare in Mythic’s previous title, Dark Age of Camelot, realm versus realm combat is straight up fun. This is especially true when there are more than 20 combatants on the battlefield at the same time. Like a game of frenetic chess, realm versus realm combat was one of the most dynamic mechanics ever to be created for an online game and still carries that same designation years since its initial unveiling.

During my experience in the WAR beta test, I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to test out some very high level RvR mechanics (the brief video of this can be seen here) as well as some low level combat with a few different races and classes. Frankly every time I entered the RvR arena, it was a thrilling experience. While it took me a little while to figure out the mechanics and strategies that I should incorporate with my particular class – you can see a bit of my initial confusion in the RvR video – but once I figured out the mechanics and how to lay down the law, it was lights out for my opposition. My Witch Hunter was a ganking machine, and few of those pathetic Squig Herders could stand up to a blast from my muzzle loader.

Public Quests make up a large part of the "new" pieces of WAR.

Surprisingly, the low level RvR encounters were equally exciting. Despite having only a few abilities by level 6-7, I opted to try my hand out in some open world RvR. Since I typically play tanks, my main goal was to simply go after any casters I could lay my hands on, and this strategy seemed to work with relative success. However, it’s important to note that WARs RvR spread is broken into tiers, and at level 1-10 you’ll be at Tier 1. At this level you really can’t compete with anyone at a higher tier than you, but if you’re up for a quick shellacking, you can certainly try.

That Thanksgiving Day Smell

So what in Warhammer Online is actually new to MMO gamers? Besides the new setting, classes, and upgraded RvR experience, the most profound element that’s been added to Warhammer Online is the Public Quest system. While we’ve had a number of previews and features about this system, there’s really no amount of journalistic posturing that can really give an example of the “feel” of this system. That said, I’ll try to draw my comparisons to something that everyone – even non-MMOG players – can understand.

Food.

Public Quests are indeed like food, but more specifically like a several course meal that only arrives in pre-set portion sizes. Let’s say there’s a restaurant down the street that you’ve heard has the best tasting cheesecake you’ll ever put into your mouth. However, the cheesecake only comes at the end of this five course meal, which includes 15 baskets of French fries, 24 pickled ham hocks, 60 hamburgers, 84 plates of salad, and a monstrous half rack of ribs. This restaurant is heralded for having the above average food in all of these different courses, but apparently the meal is only supposed to get better as the courses progress. However, the servers at the restaurant will not give you the next course of the meal unless you finish the previous course, meaning that you can’t get that cheesecake unless you eat all that food!

Now you could order that entire meal yourself and attempt to gobble down all of that food, but that would leave you sick, morbidly obese, and probably dying of some sort of clogged artery. Instead, you decide to invite anyone that you see to help you take care of the meal. Friends, neighbors, and strangers on the street are all munching on the food with you. But the restaurant knows better than to simply split their delicious cheesecake amongst everyone that you’ve invited inside. They’ve been watching everyone that participates, and they’re going to give the biggest, nicest, most wholesome piece of cheesecake to the individual that has done the most work on this enormous meal.

You.

Really, this is how the Public Quest system in Warhammer Online works. Like the five course meal that I described earlier, players must complete all of the “courses” of the Public Quest before they can get their final reward. Although it may sound like a grind to get through each portion of the quest, the task becomes much easier when you have ten of your friends (or random strangers) there to help you. And the Public Quest rewards are nothing to sneeze at. Everyone that contributes to the PQ has the chance of getting a piece of loot from the whole scenario (along with anything that dropped off of the mobs that you were fighting) but the individual that contributed the most to the PQ has the best chance of getting the largest reward.

WAR should be a very popular game at launch.

In the beta, I had an opportunity to jump into a Public Quest with around 10 other 30ish level Elves that had been working in an area close to the Elvish quest hub in that region. While we really didn’t communicate a lot, the bunch of us all merged together with our single goal in mind: Plow through this Public Quest as many times as we can in order to get the loot waiting for us at the end of the tunnel.

Remarkably, it was fun. I had been a doubter of the Public Quest system for quite awhile, noting that it not only sounded “grindy” but wouldn’t have any sort of player participation to actually complete the giant tasks set before the players. But that wasn’t the case at all. While each section of the PQ did take a little while to complete, I was always eager to see what the next set of monsters would be that would emerge from the surrounding area to take us on. Each monster was bigger, tougher, and nastier than the last, so by the end it felt like we were taking on a major boss at the end of a dungeon. Once we had downed him, I was energized when I found out that I had actually helped with enough of the PQ to earn myself a reward! How I managed that, I’ll never know, but all in all, it was a truly enjoyable experience.

Parting Thoughts

Even though the final product for Warhammer Online has yet to be released, I can safely say that the game will find at least some measure of success. Every time I jump into the game, I know that there will be some element of the gameplay that I will enjoy, whether it’s PvE, RvR, or the Public Quest system. Over the course of the next few weeks, the Ten Ton Hammer staff will be exposing every element of the game we can find, especially those bits that we know players will be interested in (Public Quests, Realm versus Realm, and Character Classes).

On top of that, we have a whole crew of reporters stationed in Leipzig, Germany, checking out the Games Convention, and we know that they’ll be coming back with a barrel full of answers. So stay tuned folks, Ten Ton Hammer is primed to give you the best WAR coverage on the ‘net.