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Today we have important news to share with the community. EA is restructuring its RPG and MMO games development into a new group that includes both Mythic and BioWare. This newly formed team will be led by Ray Muzyka, co-founder and General Manager of BioWare. With this change, Ray becomes Group General Manager of the new RPG/MMO studio group. BioWare’s other co-founder, Greg Zeschuk will become Group Creative Officer for the new RPG/MMO studio group. Rob Denton will step up as General Manager of Mythic and report to Ray. BioWare’s studios remain unchanged and continue to report to Ray.
Mark Jacobs, co-founder and current General Manager of Mythic, will leave EA on June 23, 2009. We thank Mark for his contributions at Mythic and wish him the very best going forward. Mark played a major part in the success of Mythic with his contribution as General Manager and Lead Designer of WAR.
Mythic retains a strong team led by Rob who co-founded Mythic in 1995. Rob played a critical role in the development of Dark Age of Camelot. In his previous role as COO, he was responsible for all day-to-day management of the studio including all development, operations and support.
Please join us in celebrating the union of these two award-winning studios.
The latest bit of news to hit the Mythic website is the upcoming keep upgrade system where by guilds will be able to make any keep they claim tougher for the opposition to take back.
Having read the article this seems like it is going to be a nice little system, for the price of increasing the upkeep costs of the keep a guild can make their doors tougher, increase the numbers of guards, hire static NPC merchants that their guild can use (including banking services) and later down the line a utility so the guild can bind themselves in the keep.
Now me being me, I started thinking of things that could be implemented that are not as yet trying to connive a means by which to add functionality that would make people go “Woah nelly, thats some nifty keano stuff”, okay I admit it, chances of someone actually saying that are slim but you get the drift. Well saying that I do actually know someone who uses the phrase Nifty Keano on a regular basis but we wont go into her vocabulary here. these idea are thus:
- Defend when you log out - have a utility set so you can pay for slots in the keep which would allow for your guild members to log out in the keep and when they do an NPC version of them would spawn and proceed to defend the keep, following an AI protocol based upon their class. For example a ranged DPS would stand on the front battlements and nuke away untill the door was broken, then he would move to the inner balcony and nuke on those attacking the lord, or a healer would simply heal nearby injured guards.
- An Armoury - have a new class of drop introduced to the game, armoury weapons/armour, a series of weapons and armour which in effect are useless to players, however when placed inside the guild armoury increase the power and effectiveness of guards in your keep, obviously these would have a limited individual lifespan and the armoury would have to be restocked. Taking this further you could have it so additional battle objectives are strewn across the lands in the form of workshops which when held periodically add items to your armoury.
- Unique racial defences - have each keep have a defence method which is unique to the racial element of the land it is in, I admit I have this in mind from the original cinimatic trailer, would be more than just a little cool if on top of greenskin keeps there was a catapult that a player could hpe on, aim up and fire himself at attackers, this would in effect be a self sacrifice however if it also supplied a nice little AoE on attackers it could rock. A nice thing here is that conquering nations could still use these, so a guild takes this keep and we could have elves hurling themselves at the same greenskins who built it.
Well there is my food for thought on how to take what looks like a really nice addition to the game and make it completely kick arse, if you have any ideas yourself please, please, pretty please let me know in our forums (the handy little link below regarding comments should take you there)
Many have asked and commented on our current status here at MMOGeek with Warhammer Geek as well as the rest of the network. I’m here to tell you that we have new plans and that we are very soon going to be doing some major changes. Some of the changes we have in the works include a brand new website design as well as new network additions such as a main network site, a new game we will be covering, and some new gaming blogs we will be hosting. The only downfall to switching is some of our content might be lost due to a switch in our back-end systems, however that should be recovered with new information quickly.
Why has it taken us so long? Well, the current staff here have been working hard on this design and have been focusing their energy on this new direction for the past few months. So as you can see, we are a bit short-handed on staff right now to cover Warhammer Online so if you are interested in doing this, send us an email at resume@mmogeek.com and we will be happy to have any number of you as part of the editorial team.
We look forward to showing off our new site(s) soon!
I can recall having Many Many conversations over the past several months, ever since the announcement that they would delay the 4 classes they delayed. Every time the conversation came round I would be saying “you know what, they should change the Hammerer to the Slayer. I mean why not have what is probably the most Iconic look in the Warhammer Fantasy univers as a playable character?” well it seems despite all the arguments against that Mythic Agrees With ME ! ! !.
The two final classes have officially been announced and I get to say I told you so… Pretty good day after all :)
And by Gyrocopter I mean my ability to play at the moment.
The credit crunch resulted in me losing the temp gig I had and no new ones came along, so went into the mode of using up my meager savings for a while and with christmas this is now tapped so tighten the belt straps time. Basically it came down to being a case of I could afford the £10 a month for WAR or the £10 per month share I pay for my households ADSL, well truth be told I can’t really afford either of them but I will scrape enough for one.
As you can see without internet access having a WAR account on the go is a little pointless, so the WAR account is on hiatus untill my situation improves, now I reckon a fair number of you are sitting there thinking “what the hell has this got to do with me?” and it is a fair question. An truth be told it means good things. As I am not playing anything now I have more time to spend scouring the web for content for Warhammer Geek ! ! !
And it starts now, the following are the bits and peices I found interesting in the world of Warhammer fan sites today
- Warhammer Online Wins Big in 2008 - It is really quite incredible just how many awards WAR has gotten from around the web this year, just go and take a look at their Awards Page theres 15 awards for 2008, granted I consider a couple of them to be a little prestigious than some of the others but theres some impressive awards there.
- Content Removed - I was going to highlight one of the coolest projects in my mind out there in the fansite ‘verse untill I noticed just how many HUGE gold selling adverts were on the site. So I deleted the paragraph I just wrote on it and put this instead.
- Old News is still News - I know this bit is a little old but you’ll have to forgive me for covering it. Book of Grudges unveilling the closing of their active blogging was a sad day for me, not only was one of my top visit almost every day blogs, but the guys behind it Arbitrary & Spinks (and their sidekick Badjawa) are all great people who I was fortunate enough to play with over here in the EU.
- Waaagh! - Syp made a cool blog extolling the virtues of returning to WAR, it makes very valid points to the point that if you quit WAR and are still reading this, he probably has a point to convince you to return.
Well this post is being cut short due to an unexpected phone call promising an intrigueing meeting, vague? well yes, gotta keep you guessing *grin*
I will endeavour to have more for you in the near future
As you probably know by now, my main is a Witch Hunter on the Burlok server in the EU. I have become a bit of a scenario fiend of late, mostly Tor Anroc as it pops the most. In general as I am guessing on quite a few servers, unless you have a guild heavy make up, Destruction seems to win most of them.
Now why is that? Could it be the balance of chosen classes, how Destruction has a hell of a lot of tanks compared to Order’s few? Could it be that the Destruction classes are unbalanced compared to their order counterparts getting an unfair advantage? Could it be that the scenarios layout is designed in such a way that gives the Destruction hordes an advantage? Are Destruction just plain better full stop?
I have heard all those reasons given in the various channels I frequent, however I do not agree with any of them, the reason as I can see it is very simple and can be summed up by a single word…
Are you ready for it?
Aggression
Simple as that, how many times have you been in a scenario and seen at least half the destruction players running in a mob straight at you? If your like me the answer would be most the time.
Now how many times do you see Order doing the same thing? Well from where I sit I see Order standing there very non-commital hoping to get a shot in here or there, Hate to break it to you guys but we are not playing “Kiss Chase”Hammer: Age of Bumbling, no this is WAR!
Get stuck in, thats all it takes, if your side commits in full force and gets stuck in, you may not win every time, but you wont lose everytime either and beleive me you will have a lot more fun.
As I said to a scenario party the other day; You have 3 Choices - 1) Death, 2) Glory or 3) Stand around like a Lemon and let Destruction win the match.
The Choice is yours.
Orlock
Our friends over at the RaveCast on Online Gaming Radio recently gave us their two cents worth on WAR.
Go check out their two part analysis of WAR now:
- Ravecast of Reckoning Part 1 (1/3)
- Ravecast of Reckoning Part 1 (2/3)
- Ravecast of Reckoning Part 1 (3/3)
- Ravecast of Reckoning Part 2 (1/2)
- Ravecast of Reckoning Part 2 (2/2)
I promise we are working on more content, life is just hectic is all *grin*
Few names in the massively multiplayer online gaming industry hold as much clout as the often quoted Mark Jacobs. Having been a part of the online gaming industry since the early 1980s, Mark has been a fundamental factor in the gradual evolution of massively multiplayer online gaming. With the release of Mythic Entertainment’s latest MMORPG, Warhammer Online, it looks like Mark has again played a fundamental role in the evolution of MMO gaming. But with any MMOG, the work isn’t done when the game is released, and the Ten Ton Hammer staff sat down with Mark to discuss the future of Warhammer and his thoughts on their initial launch. We hope you enjoy the discussion!
Ten Ton Hammer: What’s your general sense of how the launch went? We’re past the first weekend and into the first real week; how do you think things went?
Mark Jacobs: I think it was the smoothest launch in MMO history. For six days there were no crashes. No real emergency patches. No downtime. Not only did the entire game not crash, but no servers even crashed. So for the first six days, things were fabulous. Of course that evening we had two crashes and then two more after that, but that’s the only real blemish on the record.
But when you have 55 servers up, that’s some pretty good up-time.
Ten Ton Hammer: How are you dealing with game balance? Obviously you had plenty of testing in beta, but now you’re seeing it in full speed. How are you dealing with the class balances, faction balances, etc.?
Mark: It’s about what we expected. We got a lot of it right. The beta testers told us a lot, but they didn’t tell us everything. They never do. So, we have our strike teams looking at everything - the reports, the metrics - and we’re going to balance things. No MMO ever comes out fully balanced.
I think we’re certainly in better shape than where we were with Camelot. Are we perfect? No. I’d be hard pressed to think of any MMO, especially one that’s PvP geared that is, within sixty days, didn’t have some major balancing adjustments to the game. Hopefully we won’t be making major adjustments, but we’re certainly going to be balancing things.
When you have 55 servers and they’re busy almost all day every day, you get a lot more data than when you do during beta.
Read more at Ten Ton Hammer!
Folks,
I’ve always said that the pre-launch for an MMORPG can be just as chaotic as post-launch. Well, here’s a good example of that in action and in this case it’s good news! Gamestop today put a number of CEs that they still had in their system, up for sale. Thanks to the Vault, yes, I said thanks to the Vault, we found out they were doing so. As you can imagine, we were umm, rather surprised that they had some copies remaining. So, we have been working with them this morning and we are going to give them additional Collector’s Editions pre-order bonus codes (Open Beta, Head Start, and the two in-game bonus items) to cover the remaining CEs. So, if you still want a CE you will be able to get one, complete with all the expected codes for the CE. You will be able to get into the remainder of the Open Beta and of course, the Head Start (starting on the 14th) and get your bonus items.
So, if you still want a CE with all the keys, you can still get them. Quantities are quite limited (these are not new units but part of the original 60K) so if you want a CE and you want to get into the Open Beta and enjoy the full Head Start, get your orders in quickly. How’s that for a nice way to start your day, courtesy of Gamestop and Mythic?
Mark
Greetings!
Since bringing the Account Center live it has come to our attention that some Target Pre-Order customers are encountering errors when attempting to register their keys.
We have discovered that due to mis-printing the letter “Q” is displaying as an “O”. Pre-Order keys will never contain “O” or “0″. Be sure that in any scenario where there appears to be an O that you enter “Q” instead.
We apologize for this inconvenience. Thank you!
Author’s Comment: This is actually happening a lot! Happened to a few people I know already
If you happen to be interested in Warhammer Online’s open beta, FilePlanet.com just launched sign-ups for the open beta for Warhammer Online.
Warhammer Online Subscriber OPEN Beta: FilePlanet Subscribers can join the exclusive open beta for Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. Open beta keys are limited so grab one now! This program is for North America, Australia and New Zealand. Download the client and prepare to play on the 7th!
10TonHammer’s own Josh Hoskin went at this year’s San Diego Comic Con where he had a chance to talk and clarifiy some details with Associate Producer, Josh Drescher about the major career & cities drop-out announcements. You can watch the whole interview here.
EDIT:
Here’s Part Two of the interview where Josh gets into detail about PvE and RvR. You can watch the interview here.
Join Orlock and Wrenn for Episode #5 of the Podcast of Reckoning - Tune in Monday, July 14 at 3pm Pacific / 7pm Eastern / Midnight BST.
In this episode:
Best of The the Web: - Several highlights about what’s been going on in the WAR community since the last Podcast.
The Great Debate: We invite Snafzg from The Greenskin and ChaosCast to join us as special Guest Host to discuss the HUGE news of Mark Jacobs’ announcements! This is something you don’t want to miss!
Community Interview: We’ve invited Arcadiea from Guild Vendetta to join us. Hear what makes this Order guild tick, and some very interesting insights on how the guild was built! That’s right! This interview proves that not all guilds play Destruction!
The podcast will be available for download once it airs live at Online Gaming Radio, Warhammer Geek & iTunes.
AND ! ! ! !
Be sure to Tune in live before the show as this week marks the return of The Audiogasm
Listen to Orlock’s Return to Music Show Mayhem - starting at 3pm Pacific / 6pm Eastern / 11pm BST.
Every week he will be here, either to play in the Podcast of Reckoning or in the off weeks to do a twice the size show to keep you all entertained.
In what is the biggest announcement made by Mythic Entertainment this year, Mark Jacobs tells MMORPG.com why four careers and capital cities will be missing from the release of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning.
“We decided to focus our energies on two capital cities; one for Order and one for Destruction, and make them fabulous, said Jacobs. “Not good, not great, but fabulous.”
“We wanted to make our Capital Cities the best cities in any MMO. We think we’re doing that, but it came at a price and that price is that the other cities aren’t going in the game right now.”
“Four of the classes that we’ve been working on, we just couldn’t get great,” he continued. “We looked at them and we said these careers are just not great… and we tried, and they weren’t coming out well.”
Read the full article on MMORPG.com
A press release has been issued by Mythic on BusinessWire.com, stating that Guild BETA has begun. Oh the joy!
View the full press release here.
Recently, EA Mythic have had their rights from EA reclaimed and now they are once again named Mythic Entertainment. The following article came from MMORPG.com.
“We are going back to Mythic Entertainment,” said Mark Jacobs, the VP and General Manager of EA Mythic. “I’ve always been a believer of separate branding”
p.s This had my attention on the whole article though.
While this is the end of the announcements for tonight, log on to MMORPG.com tomorrow for a report on the rest of that interview that includes three other exclusive announcements specifically addressing Warhammer Online.
Waaagh! has revealed the next interview in the Imperial Inquisition series with Tony “RadarX” Jones from Ten Ton Hammer. Learn about his MMO experiences and his role as a Community Manager.
WAAAGH!: Tell us a bit about yourself — your handle/screen name/real name, age, real life occupation, your previous MMO experience, and your play style.
RADARX: My name is Tony Jones and I currently use the handle RadarX which I’ve had since the BBS days of yore. I’m currently a Community Manager at the Ten Ton Hammer network where over the years I’ve been involved with a number of our sites including EverQuest 2, Lord of the Rings Online, and Tabula Rasa.
My MMO game experience goes back to probably Ultima Online, but my first true love was the widely known EverQuest which I played for roughly a year and a half. I’ll leave out what I’ve played and just try and hit the most influential games for brevity. From EverQuest there I bounced around a few games but spent some time in Dark Ages of Camelot and Star Wars Galaxies before settling in EverQuest 2 for long while. After a few years there I tried played World of Warcraft on and off, Lord of the Rings Online for a few months, and then landed at Tabula Rasa for a bit…
Read more about RadarX.
Author’s Comment: RadarX is a Florida boy FYI, like me! Just giving you all the facts in case you wanted to know.
Fact. EA Mythic has announced today that WAR will also ship in Russia with a very own localised version. The WAR Russian community now have the opportunity to enjoy WAR in their native language. The official press release can be read here.
Join Orlock, Svoald and Wrenn for Episode #4 of the Podcast of Reckoning - Tune in TONIGHT at 7pm eastern time.
In this episode:
Latest News: A few tidbits of news, including the introduction of Wrenn (Warhammer Conflict) joining Orlock and Svoald (Warhammer Geek) as permanent co-host of the Podcast.
Important Program Note: Mid-way through the recording of this episode of the Podcast of Reckoning - Svoald had to leave for his vacation. So, filling in on the main segment is Guest Co-host - Josh Drescher, Associate Producer - Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning.
Community Interview: We had the honor of talking to Beibhinn from Warhammer Vault about a variety of subjects.
The podcast will be available for download once it airs live at Online Gaming Radio, Warhammer Geek & ITunes