WAR revamping early levels

By Oli Welsh Published 8 October, 2009

Also adding buddy system.

The next patch to Warhammer Online - game update 1.3.2 to its friends - will make significant changes to the starting experience for new players, as well as introduce an "apprenticeship" program allowing players of high and low levels to synchronise their ranks.

As detailed in a recent developer diary, the New User Jouney (as Mythic has dubbed it) will now put all starting players together in the Empire versus Chaos campaign, regardless of their race. Players previously began in one of three different pairs of starer zones according to which race they'd chosen to play.

The change is intended to provide a better player population - which should make it easier to find groups for Public Quests and open-world warfare - and focus Mythic's efforts on improving the overall flow and reward of those early Tier 1 chapters of the game.

"Because we are dealing with a single starting location, we are able to tailor and revamp the content offered in the pairing to make the quest flow more intuitive, give better itemization / rewards for players' efforts, and provide a better detailed and informative play session," said associate producer James Casey.

There will also be an improved tutorial system, new help tips, an overhauled in-game manual, and a chat channel specifically for advice.

The apprenticeship system, similar to City of Heroes' sidekicks, allows you to scale other players to your own rank - whether it's higher or lower than yours - making it possible for new players and old hands to play together.

As far as WAR's endgame is concerned, Fortresses are being removed from the Tier 4 campaign to lower the requirements for staging an attack on the enemy's capital city, which Mythic hopes will make city invasions more frequent. There will also be the usual round of class balancing and bug fixes.

You can read more about what to expect from the next WAR patch in the test server patch notes.

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About Oli Welsh

Oli is Eurogamer's acting deputy editor and reviews editor and likes to take things one word at a time. He is among the best dressed people in South London.

Read more articles from Oli by visiting the Oli Welsh archive page.

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Comments (21) Latest comment 2 years ago

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  • anomagnus #1 2 years ago

    i had such high hopes for this game. They lost it at the end game, and are now suffering the death of a thousand cuts at the back end.

    Starting all characters in the Empire zone? I weep for what this game could have been.

  • Bodd #2 2 years ago

    So they're effectively burying the Greenskin starter area, probably the best part of the entire game. That's a crying shame.

    I guess this process of concentrating whatever playerbase they still have in Empire v Chaos also means that WAR will never get the four missing racial cities.

  • actionfitz #3 2 years ago

    for me it was separating everything into teirs etc. so much messing about just to get my fight on.
    Instanced battle grounds with narrow walkways over lava... a stealth class with a 30 sec timer on stealth and almost every other class having the ability to punt me into the lava at a moments notice...
    /sigh.

  • Senate #4 2 years ago

    The empire zones are usually the most popular anyway - If only order on norn weren't such cowards i would enjoy the game better.

  • Kremlik Verified Co-Founder, Crash To Desktop #5 2 years ago

    This game can bounce back if EA don't close it first - it's not the first MMO to be declered dead and come back to life (EVE).

    This year is 99% damage control, whicgh is kinda good Mythic are basically trying to keep the population seremingly big but basically controled - best idea to keep WAR going is to just have the single server and just work on that and close (sadly) the other areas down and reopen them once the population starts to bounce back up.

    It's going to take time to fix WAR but with TOR going big - it's going to be very dicey

  • drchocapic #6 2 years ago

    Wasn't the start of the game the best part of WAR ? If anything they should revamp T4.

  • Eraysor #7 2 years ago

    WAR...it was fun for the first month I played it, until I realised it was basically WoW reskinned with more PvP and hardly any endgame PvE.

  • cianchristopher #8 2 years ago

    This is a great game

    /waits for positive karma

  • Marshall2008 #9 2 years ago

    I thought that this game had shutdown. I still find it hard to believe that this and Conan are still running.

  • skullstorm #10 2 years ago

    It's a shame they have had to resort to such changes and I'm sure other changes, especially more to boost open rvr, could have been made instead.

    I did like the game but I think it has been a curse for Mythic ruining the reputation they built with DAoC. Thats why I want them to bounce back, because they HAVE done something right in the past.

    But not new frontiers.

    @marshall2008,
    Of course it hasn't shut down, very few mmo's have. Despite the low pop and the doomsayers it is still very much enough to keep running. I've said this countless times before. You don't need a fraction of the subs WoW has to keep an mmo up and running, it used to be more of a niche anyway.
    Edited by 1 at 08/10/09 @ 11:57

  • Hypercube #11 2 years ago

    Thing is, whenever I was playing, no matter what race, everyone ended up in the Empire zone anyway. This is just bowing to what the players were telling them.

    In a way, it should make the lower level experience better. But it is slowly moving away from the idea of an online 'world' and shifting towards a series of pVp arenas. Not necessarily a bad thing, but evolution is necessary to survive.

  • Snidesworth #12 2 years ago

    That's a shame. When I played WAR on release the greenskin starting area was one of the best bits. Each starting area was all about conveying the race's identity. For greenskins that involved loading yourself into a catapult to expedite the process of getting to some stunties so you could krump them. It'd be nice of they allowed players to choose which zone to start in.

  • JammyPez #13 2 years ago

    So they got the opening experience wrong, and the end experience was too hard = wrong again. Nice.

  • MikeP #14 2 years ago

    I always seemed to end up in the Empire areas too as I levelled, the others were too empty after the initial rush of levelling when it launched.

    I still think the biggest problem is that there are only 2 factions, so as soon as the RvR action gets unbalanced it's hard for the 'losing' side to recover. If they'd had three factions from the start (Maybe Skaven, not sure on lore?) then you'd at least have something to mix the dynamic up.

  • Jockie #15 2 years ago

    @JammyPez I wouldn't say they got the opening experience wrong, as others have said the greenskin start area in particular was very well done.

    The change is more about trying to populate the starter zones and streamline the experience for a new player.

  • dogmanstaruk #16 2 years ago

    I can't help but feel this game has lost all sense of direction.

    I played the game from closed beta to about 4 months post launch. At that stage I felt that the game was losing momentum despite the fun pvp aspect. Now a year after launch and Mythic's answer is to dilute the experience further by removing the option to level up a character through the Greenskin, or Elf areas. While this could solve the immediate problem of no low level characters leveling removing the other two areas restricts player's preference.

    Reading between the lines and the removal of the Fortresses leads me to think that Mythic have been unable to solve the lag issues which ruined that apsect of the game. First there was the population and level capping of sieges. This obviously didn't work so the answer is to scrap them. Shame City Siege was a mundane series of Public Quest. Unless of course Mythic have revamped that too.

    I like many others had high hopes for this game, but in the end it is all a bit of a mess. If only the game's content and execution equalled the amount of words which comes out of the dude with the white sunglasses (I forget his name) then it would be the best thing since sliced bread.
    Edited by 1 at 08/10/09 @ 12:58

  • Kremlik Verified Co-Founder, Crash To Desktop #17 2 years ago

    @Mike - what Mythic really should have done is kept the game sandbox as orginally planned - Warhammer itself rarly has the 'good' races pair up (thats only againest Chaos mainly) and the 'evil' races have never really worked togerher at all - ALL the races hate and/or distrust each over.With all the sub factions of each race the game you have easily been Orc vs Empire vs Chaos and it still would have worked

    Mythic's biggest mistake was let Jacobs completly ignore the core baseline of both DAoC and Warhammer, both IPs are a perfect fit for each other yet WAR somehow managed to be neither and then continue to dig the hole deeper by just stacking unwelcome content on it and ignore the core problems - balance and rewarding avoiding RVR

    @Dog - Paul Barnet was a legend with the game's PR the problem wasn't him over hyping the project it's just as you said it's Mythic's complete U-turn in design every 6 months, it went from Sandbox to level based, then from Instanced RVR to open RVR then from PVP focused RVR to PVE focused RVR so every time Paul said somthing good about the game his information was out of date by time the next video hit.. I bet he is as disapointed about the project as we are hence the reasons why he got recalled back to GW..

    A true fix would be just to do what Blizzard did with Cata - just rebuild the game with an expantion, exsept do what Sony do and bundle the orginal game with it
    Edited by 1 at 08/10/09 @ 13:03

  • johnlenham #18 2 years ago

    I really like the look of this and playing my Ork tank dude was pretty fun... maybe ill give the 10day trail another bash but the orks starting zone is massively more fun than chaos

  • dogmanstaruk #19 2 years ago

    @Kremlik

    Has Paul Barnett left Mythic? Missed that. On hindsight my comments looked like a pop at him. It wasn't really more at Mythic's execution of the game.

  • darkmorgado #20 2 years ago

    Never mind this, why haven't we heard any new information on W40K Online in ages????

  • Dissociative #21 2 years ago

    Two words people....death throes. This is what this game is in at the the moment.