WAR Beyond the Sands event begins

By Robert Purchese Published 21 April, 2009

Glory, titles, equipment up for grabs.

Mythic has begun the Beyond the Sands in-game live event for Warhammer Online.

This encourages the forces of Order and Destruction to search mysterious wreckages of airships that fell from the sky to recover artefacts from the clutches of deadly Liche Priests.

Successful parties will be showered in treasure and glory; unlock event titles Grave Robber and The Eternal; receive Tomb Kings trophies; and claim the very special Aviator Goggles - an elusive helm only the most dedicated will wear.

The Beyond the Sands event is part of the Call to Arms "live expansion" that Mythic is releasing in chunks. This will be capped by the opening of the Land of the Dead zone in June, where faction access to an enormous Tomb Kings dungeon will be hotly contested for and regularly change side.

The first part of the Call to Arms update - patch 1.2 - added new Dwarf Slayer and Orc Choppa careers; the Bitter Rivals live event; a limited preview of a new Scenario; improvements to realm-versus-realm warfare, itemisation, crafting, and the user interface; more "easy" public quests for smaller group sizes; and over 500 bug fixes.

Warhammer Online European publisher GOA also cut the price of the standard edition game to GBP 19.99 / EUR 29.99.

Picture of Robert.

About Robert Purchese

Bertie is Eurogamer's Senior Staff Writer. When he's not hunting down news stories he's often found playing with his kids or gabbling about fantasy games and strange online worlds.

Read more articles from Robert by visiting the Robert Purchese archive page.

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Comments (17) Latest comment 3 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • sneetch #1 3 years ago

    Awesomeness! Been looking forward to this.

  • sneetch #2 3 years ago

    Oh yeah, first!

    Damn.

    Second. :(

  • Dizzy #3 3 years ago

    /resubs

    On what server is the EG gang again? I am guild-less now apparently.. my old guild went the way of the dodo. I am on Eltharion BTW.

  • Spekingur #4 3 years ago

    Finally a price cut. They should've done it alot sooner though.

  • sneetch #5 3 years ago

    I'm not sure Dizzy, there were some on Karak-Hirn Order but dunno where they ended up. They may have ended up on Karak Norn but I can't guarantee anything.

    I love this game, I was in an open RvR last night defending Spites against a prolonged destruction attack and can't remember the last time I had such fun gaming, my mate remarked that the only time he'd had such a great sense of camaraderie in a game was when raiding in WoW; in WoW you only get that with guildies, in WAR you get that with random "strangers".
    Edited by 1 at 21/04/09 @ 12:46

  • spimmy #6 3 years ago

    war is going for £9.99 on play.com

  • Gl3n #7 3 years ago

    We WERE on Burlok Dizzy, i think the remnants merged with other guilds.

  • Lemming81 #8 3 years ago

    Get the US version if you are going to play. The Europe version is dying on its arse due to GOA's poor management.

    I swapped a couple of months ago and am loving it. It's like night and day.

  • Dizzy #9 3 years ago

    >Get the US version if you are going to play. The Europe version is dying on its arse due to GOA's poor management.

    Like?

  • Eraysor #10 3 years ago

    They'll have to do something more epic than thing to drag me back from WoW's delicious clutches.

  • hula hoops #11 3 years ago

    I tried this since two weeks ago and quite enjoying it. I used to play WoW for 3 years now, quite about 3 months ago and was looking for something to kill my free time.

    I contemplated to resub to WoW again but gave this a go for a few days and ended up reactivating my old WAR account back.

    Though I have a few things to say for ex WoW players if they are interested in this game. WAR is more or less about PvP (or RvR they called it). PvE side of thing is okay.

    You can level up you char by just PvPing. There are 4 tiers in total, from T1 (level 1-11), T2 (level 12-22) etc. In each tier there are rewards similar to WoW's reputation system. But it is much easier to obtain in this game. IMO, it is a good system because it reward players experience, as well as gear from taking part.

    The graphics is better than WoW, but it is not cutting edge. One thing that let me down in this area is that the world is smaller than Azeroth and between tiers there are loading screen. Each tier map consists of two smaller zones/maps. Travelling between these zones is smooth with very little load time. My feeling is that the size of these zones is a tad smaller than the average size of zone in WoW.

    Gameplay wise, it is similar to WoW so you might feel at home if you are familiar with WoW gameplay.

    At the moment I am levelling up loads of character and having fun at T1/T2. I think I have passed the stage of getting attached too much to your online character only to feel betrayed by the developer for making it useless.

    Edited by 1 at 21/04/09 @ 14:58

  • Kremlik Verified Co-Founder, Crash To Desktop #12 3 years ago

    Lemming is stuck in the old DAoC days where EU was at least 3 months behind US in patches - besides the site lag and the first few months billing 'issues' GoA have actally done a lot better, and TBH between the EU players and GoA server merges our end have been A LOT smoother then US..

    The biggest shame is the 'ez win' server hopping crowd thats made the game seem one sided on Azgal and K8P, it's seriusly hurting the game atm.. Lock the over populated sides from making new toons GoA PLEASE!

  • sneetch #13 3 years ago

    @Dizzy
    >Get the US version if you are going to play. The Europe version is dying on its arse due to GOA's poor management.

    Like?

    Haven't noticed anything bad really. Same patches (usually a day later). Same events. Same everything. Unless the US client somehow dispenses milk, cookies and sexual favours.

  • tenebrae #14 3 years ago

    To be fair, at the moment the game fails horribly on "endgame" side: two days ago we had an organized push on Karak Norn, and when we attacked Order fortress we had no less than three crashes during the attack, preceded by horrendous lag, up to 10 seconds before turning completely unresponsive.

    As WAR players know doors reset when server goes down so we had to assault the outer&inner doors four times (that's eight doors) total. Since second fortress was captured almost at the same moment, we got to siege Altdorf, the Order capital. You guessed it - server crashing again, at least three times (could've been more after I logged off). They also introduced a new bug in 1.2.1 patch which makes you lose progress since last login if you crash out, so fair few came out of that siege without even the proverbial t-shirt.

    The reason for all the lag and crashes? The server code and hardware cannot handle the number of players. They capped the number of players capable of partaking in fortress attack (city sieges are 24 vs 24 instances so no pre-emptive capping required) but it failed to stop crashes in any meaningful manner. At least the fortress doors no longer seem to have a chance of turning unattackable when server has a brain fart.

    Mythic still has miles to cover to make RvR more playable. The joke you can see being made on some forums is that we're in a paid beta test.

  • hula hoops #15 3 years ago

    @ tenebrae:

    I think the server crashes are intentional. Many Mythic technicicans play Order in Karak Norn, as single keypress will do the trick of setting back the attack.

  • Lemming81 #16 3 years ago

    @Kremlik: "Lemming is stuck in the old DAoC days where EU was at least 3 months behind US in patches - besides the site lag and the first few months billing 'issues' GoA have actally done a lot better, and TBH between the EU players and GoA server merges our end have been A LOT smoother then US..

    The biggest shame is the 'ez win' server hopping crowd thats made the game seem one sided on Azgal and K8P, it's seriusly hurting the game atm.. Lock the over populated sides from making new toons GoA PLEASE! "

    I've never played DAOC. I chose the US version because GOA fucked me off with their random downtime (blaming an ISP), transfering my character to a server with no one on it and the fact the population on the Euro servers relies MASSIVLEY on what time of day it is. There just aren't enough European subscribers to gaurantee I'll get to RvR when I want to. The US servers however, are abundant most of the time.

    I also think their website and forum quality compared to the main site is terrible.

    Anyone who hasn't already paid for a Eurpeaon subscription really has NO NEED to even consider the European version. Why would you bother when you know it's alot more looked after and busier across the pond? It just makes no sense.

    Anyway, I have six recruit-a-friends to give away to anyone who wants one. Just PM me.

  • spimmy #17 3 years ago

    yea GOA suck balls registered my cd key early yeasterday i couldnt even play gone 7pm if i enjoy the game ill by a yank version!