Siege battles in Mythic’s upcoming MMO Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning -
Crikey, what a pile-on. These climatic PvP tussles will be quite the thing to witness.
There is of course an elephant in the room, and I’m not going to be the one to mention it. Play nice when it inevitably comes up in comments though, gentlemen – you can’t fight in here, this is the WAR thread.
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Good grief, is it 2001 again? I don’t ask for top of the line visuals, but when it gets as low as that…
Looks very messy. And I was expecting a somewhat darker atmosphere what with it being a Warhammer game.
You’re not wrong – visuals are terrible. They remind me of a slightly less cartoony WoW, but worse. Hmmm.
Why am I meh-d out by all these new MMOs? Ultimately I wish they’d just do something totally original. Or remake Planetside.
Being not too familiar with the state of current PC gaming (or MMOs, for that matter), I’m somewhat happy and sad that this looks as crappy to you as it does to me. Shame.
The graphics aren’t that bad, some of the spell animations are a bit off though.
Terrible graphics are terrible.
Meh. I’ll leave it at that.
More advanced lighting effects and higher resolution textures can be expected to be available in the retail client. That is one of the things Mythic are still working on in advance of launch.
Also, check out the ongoing client performance issues that Age of Conan is having with their siege warfare. Pretty graphics are all well and good until you throw 50 other avatars on screen, each potentially sporting unique armour textures and firing off all manner of pretty particle effects.
Mythic have very deliberately aimed their client at low spec PCs so that as many people as possible will be able to play it at satisfactory performance. It didn’t do WoW any harm, after all.
It looks a great deal like DAoC, and not just in terms of its graphics. In particular, the first couple of minutes where players are charging up towards a keep and then battling it out a in a drab room was like a flashback to many boring sieges that I participated in. Although I suppose much MMORPG PvP looks similiar anyway.
If players have to carry siege parts to build things like battering rams and catapults I’m not fricking buying it.
I was kind of hoping that PvP might be a bit more structured. I seem to remember reading that players wouldn’t be able to run straight through each other like they usually can in MMORPGs. Is that not the case?
Holy cow, that’s a very ugly game. For a beautiful-looking game targeting low specs machines, look at Aion. And it will have massive battles as well in the “Abyss” (think RvR in DAoC). Ok, it’s Asian fantasy but it looks good at least.
WAR is just… ugly and looks worse than WoW, technically speaking.
Hmmm I have to agree, the graphics ARE bad. However, not that bad. With the better lighting + textures, it should look decent, at least better then WoW.
Still, when I see this and look at AoC, I really feel pleased I bought the game. AoC, while buggy, repetative, etc. is still quite fun even though the level of content is pretty bad.
I killed my subscription, and I will come back in a few months or less to play again. Currently have a level 72/80 hox.
Looking forward to some performance inscreases, balance and content. Don’t wanna touch WAR.
BTW, Erinan, have you played asian games before? MMOs I mean… I have to say that they can all be shuffled into a pile and burnt. I have looked at Aion and there is NOTHING there that is even worth bothering with… The whole asian culture is just so unappealing to me after playing free mmos :(.
Well, Aion wants to be different and appeal to both the Asian and Western markets, i.e. not have a leveling phase exclusively based on (very painful) grinding. Aion will (and already has, the game doesn’t have any NDA so it’s easy to check :)) have many quests and allow you to level up without having to grind, in theory. Plus, its PvP will be very DAoC-like, with forts and castles to take, etc.
I’m keeping an eye on (see what I did there?) it, because I hated AoC (and the game won’t have much of a suscribers base in a few months) and WAR is looking more and more disappointing.
Aion looks like a “good old” MMO, with massive battles, organised PvP, original IP (finally!) and gorgeous graphics.
Wait & see!
Well, at least the elves look suitably poncy. I just wish people would make some decent pvp again, I miss Guild Wars (when it launched and up until Nightfall). Random brawls just don’t do it for me.
And the game seems to look worse now than in did months ago. Meh.
Dan, I believe the collision detection only applies to enemy players.
That looks just like WOW to me! Thought the visuals would be more in their own style..
Oh Dear!
The game looks terrible atm, why release a video like this?
Sure looks awful without any proper lighting, but that’s not half the problem. There seem to be enough house-sized particle effects in those fights to completely obscure the battle half the time, and it’s utterly incomprehensible as to who is fighting whom. That looks less like pvp and more like an exercise in random button mashing.
Man, I´m glad that 100% of the posters share my thoughts when watching that trailer. Anyone noticed that music? Damn ugly as well. ;) I fear that WAR will fail big time. No innovation, no proper port the WH World to the PC… fans of the franchise will turn in grief and cry for the good old days of pen and paper.
Random beta screenies, certainly looks better:
http://savepic.ru/241666.jpg
http://savepic.ru/230402.jpg
http://savepic.ru/234498.jpg
http://savepic.ru/222210.jpg
http://savepic.ru/196668.jpg
http://savepic.ru/197692.jpg
But yea the trailer was crap
Just found a better trailer, it gets all Rainbow Online near the end but whatever
http://www.ea.com/theater?mediaType=video&itemId=Warhammer%20Online-20080712123228449
The pic at http://savepic.ru/196668.jpg does look eerily similar to the Gnome/Dwarf start area in WoW.
Underwhelming
I was thinking, yesterday, about why all the MMOs I’ve seen seem to have not so much bad graphics, but just really choppy animation. And it occurred to me that when you’re playing an MMO, you aren’t looking at the character. You’re looking at the health bars on the top of the screen.
All these different trailers with vastly different graphical quality are starting to get confusing. That trailer Jamie linked shows a good contrast between the two graphic settings or clients or whatever. I imagine it will look decent on release, and hopefully it runs decently as well. But these DAoC looking trailers aren’t helping them any.
80% of the people on the screen at any one time aren’t either stunlocked or feared or both, so it’s likely that the PvP will at least be better than in WoW. I never really doubted that anyway. It’s just about everything else that I’m worried about. It’d be nice to see more about the environments and quests and such.
Getting a bit redundant at this point, but yeah, the graphics aren’t so pretty.
Yeah cyrenic supposedly they’ve been working on a lighting system and it looks real lovely, but they don’t want to fully integrate it into an E3 trailer because I don’t know
I had a pretty severe DaoC flashback watching that. The RvR looks hectic and random.
The RvR looks… very very dated. It doesn’t seem fluid to me. Its like a turn based game changed into real time, a bit like how DAoC was. I don’t really think that they have learnt anything from DAoC or even WoW. At least in WoW you can run around your opponent, in this its like you have to stand still.
Not impressed. Lets hope they can do something otherwise I’ll just be sticking with WoW until someone comes along and fixes Planetside.
When I was younger I never really imagined battles in Warhammer to just be a random clusterfuck with hundreds of flashy neon effects shooting all over the place. I was kind of looking forward to a more gritty, dark MMO but this looks like WoW (i’ve never played an MMO, so it might be quite different to WoW but to my untrained eye it’s almost indistinguishable)
@ Noc
Sometimes I feel like in terms of animation, nothing much has improved since the original Prince of Persia came out using CGI-graphics (on my PC anyway :P). I still think back to the fluidity of the motions, the way he climbs back up a ledge… since then, only the ragdoll-behaviour in HL2 really captivated me.
I liked the cannon.
[You do not share my opinions]. You watch a LOW RES movie and go “OMFG the graphics suck”. This graphics debate will never end, regardless of how many billion dollar studios collapse because of it.
Find a HD trailer for the game, like the ones at Gamespot, and then tell me WAR’s graphics are subpar for a game coming out these days.
Not sure it’s smart to comment on RVR on a few scenes taken to show the most spell effects possible on the low-res client…
When I was younger I never really imagined battles in Warhammer to just be a random clusterfuck with hundreds of flashy neon effects shooting all over the place. I was kind of looking forward to a more gritty, dark MMO but this looks like WoW (i’ve never played an MMO, so it might be quite different to WoW but to my untrained eye it’s almost indistinguishable)
Indeed. The character models look nice enough.. one can hope these effects are placeholder art. As for gameplay.. I hope it’ll be good.. but it won’t be like the tabletop game, I’m sure.
In fact, WoW’s ability effects look a lot better. And, of course, WoW isn’t meant to be dark and gritty.
Almost the entire video is placeholder. Other videos have demonstrated the lighting system and high-res textures that will be in the final thing, but aren’t featured in beta footage. The beta videos contain none of the shiny shader effects we have become used to yet.
god forbid somebody should release an MMO that’ll actually run on the average person’s PC!
Please please say that the graphics are better on release. I know that that levels of graphics works for wow, but that game is 4 years old.
I don’t want to have to endure dated graphics just so some people with crappy 4 year old computers from PC world can play. It doesn’t need to be Crysis, but at it could at least look good.
I’d say WoW fits that bill, harrumph.
The dodgy looking gameplay is what puts me off this game rather than the graphics, lighting system implemented or not. The gameplay hasn’t changed since the original footage I watched in 2006: choppy and paceless.
My God… say goodbye to your hype Warhammer Online
am I the only one left with an impression of the movement and interaction/animation that the game is like a fantasy themed section of Second Life?
It’s just missing the flying penis attack!
DAOC2, but rather what worries me is that I for one was expecting dark & grim, grimdark even as the general look of the armour and effects. Now it seems that the characters shop at a local clown outlet hoping to find new and vibrant colours for the next summer fad.
All I could really think while watching this video was “MY GOD PEOPLE! FIGHT AT THE NODES! THE NODES!”
Very disappointing just how similar it looks to WoW. I can understand not having high end graphics in order to keep the specs down and make it easier on mass pvp, but having it so bright and cartoonish is just not a good move.
My biggest problem isn’t the level of graphics, but the utter lack of any… artistry to them. Where’s the style? If you’re gonna have poor graphics, at least make them nice poor graphics.
It looks like wow v.1.5
I hope it plays better than it looks because AoC is a disappointment.
You know what, if it plays anything like DAoC in it’s who day, I couldn’t give a toss. I’ll be happy with it.
I sincerely hope that none of you graphics cry-babies play this game.
Hell, one of the best games I played last year was Dwarf Fortress… and guess what?! It has ASCII graphics!
I swear there was none of this non-stop bubblegum blowing when I played woof-rup. Whatever happened to a beard full of ale and a dagger up the chuff?