WAR NDA officially lifted. Post pics and info!

[Duppin]

Well, it's cool that they can admit that it's a mistake, then.

Are there any classes in WAR that are as awesome as the Friar in DAOC was?

[egoslicer]

Originally Posted by Duppin

Well, it's cool that they can admit that it's a mistake, then.

Are there any classes in WAR that are as awesome as the Friar in DAOC was?

Warrior Priest and Friar are somewhat close in nature. Offensive melee with heals and buffs.

[Steamrice]

Found this on the front page of warhammer alliance which is interesting... the rest of it is here. You ask the Questions - Q&A With Mythic - Warhammer Forums

Regarding the graphics, and scalability, are the graphics the best we'll see?

Josh Drescher: Well, performance is a big deal at this point. One of the things we've been doing is trying to set it so the system can procedurally dictate based off the hardware spec you are currently using, what the best settings are for you. Pretty standard for any game like this. We are also working hard to make sure that when we get a large number of avatars on the screen especially during things like city siege and so forth when you expect to have hundreds of player on the screen simultaneously, we're working on intelligent technology that will intelligently scale so that you don't sacrifice graphic quality unless it's absolutely necessary for performance.

A lot of that is done procedurally. For example, if there are a certain number of avatars on the screen, once you get past a certain threshold it will start removing some of the bones from the animation sets for things like your hands. So you'll actually notice that there are a larger numbers of characters on the screen, it starts to simplify some of the motions to speed up framerate, to reduce lag, and to make sure your performance and feedback with the UI stays high.

While graphical quality is importance to us, performance is actually more important to us. With MMOs you are always looking to guarantee that the performance, the feedback and the performance of the game is paramount, over whiz bang graphics. In terms of the overall graphics I think you'll notice, especially between the most recent beta and now. As we continue to implement the lighting system, as we continue to implement some of the final textures and some of the overhauls to the environments, you're going to notice a continuing progression of quality.

That comes down to when you are building these games, there are a lot of things that take a very long time. Our lighting system is the best example of that. Every point of light in the game had to be hand place by an artist, they had to choose the color of the light, size of the light, the ambient value of the brightness, what direction is it pointed in, what sorts of things is it reflected off of, and then you have to run the overall system and say, do all the math. You're look at millions of points of light in the game, thousands of hours of art integration, and an additional thousands of hours of processor time rendering it all out.

Which is why for a long time when you looked at some of the older videos the world looked a lot more washed out. We just didn't have the lighting engine turned on. Once we turned the lighting on, everything gets all lush and organize and it loses the 2d feel.

So I guess that is the culprit for why this game's animations and overall flow of it sucks? And it also seems like hes saying you won't have the option to change your graphics to your liking and they are all presets I guess.

[CylusSoulreaver]

Originally Posted by Steamrice

So I guess that is the culprit for why this game's animations and overall flow of it sucks? And it also seems like hes saying you won't have the option to change your graphics to your liking and they are all presets I guess.

Well, to be fair, removing bones from the hands, feet and face really won't make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things (ie, when you have hundreds of folks on the screen and have better things to do than look at their facial expressions). Their anims seem to suffer a lot due to the relatively slow combat (just from vids I've seen, have yet to try it). Additionally, the more time that you have to stare at your anims just means that you have more time to scrutinize those said anims.

From the SSs that I've seen, even recent ones, I've been mostly disappointed with their lighting and texturing

Edit: Granted, that could just be due to the SS owner's comp specs but I've yet to be floored by any of them. Maybe it looks better in motion? *shrugs*

[Lonin]

Originally Posted by CylusSoulreaver

Well, to be fair, removing bones from the hands, feet and face really won't make much of a difference in the grand scheme of things (ie, when you have hundreds of folks on the screen and have better things to do than look at their facial expressions). Their anims seem to suffer a lot due to the relatively slow combat (just from vids I've seen, have yet to try it). Additionally, the more time that you have to stare at your anims just means that you have more time to scrutinize those said anims.

From the SSs that I've seen, even recent ones, I've been mostly disappointed with their lighting and texturing

Edit: Granted, that could just be due to the SS owner's comp specs but I've yet to be floored by any of them. Maybe it looks better in motion? *shrugs*

I think what they're talking about, which has been mentioned before, is that some animations are culled when lots of people get on the screen. This makes the animations look jerky and disjointed with lots of players.

I think the lighting system looks fine in game, but many of the textures are still pretty low res. The biggest things for me would be higher res textures, AA, and AF. A little bloom would be nice as well.

[balouch]

So, to ask the obvious, what are the current overpowered classes?

Which 4 classes seem to be the best @ tanking / healing / dps / utility?

And please, no "the best class is the class you play" etc... I realize that but we all know in most games there is usually one premiere tank class, one premiere healing class etc etc.

So spill it.

[Velk]

Originally Posted by balouch

So, to ask the obvious, what are the current overpowered classes?

Which 4 classes seem to be the best @ tanking / healing / dps / utility?

And please, no "the best class is the class you play" etc... I realize that but we all know in most games there is usually one premiere tank class, one premiere healing class etc etc.

So spill it.

Ironbreaker for the tank, Runepriest for the healer, DPS is too situational to call ( zerg blasting ? pve sustained ? healer ganking ? killing tanks ? ), utility probably archmage, depending on what you mean by 'utility'.

[Wilfan]

Originally Posted by balouch

So, to ask the obvious, what are the current overpowered classes?

I'd say it's too soon to find out overpowered ones. There's not that many hardcore players yet and the few that know their shit keep it to themselves.

But it's well known which classes are currently piece of crap, though: White Lion, Magus and Engineer.

[Velk]

Originally Posted by Xenrauk

Question for the people that were in the closed beta before the preview weekend. Was npc pathing broken in the same patch they broke pet pathing? or did it exist even before that?

It was completely shit before then, but consistent enough to not be considered 'broken'.

By 'broken' in the preview weekend, they don't mean things like stuff taking ridiculous paths around objects, or getting stuck on a blade of grass and going invulnerable, but things like you strafe two steps sideways and they become unable to move for 10 seconds and when they do move, they run away from you.

There's a huge number of polish problems outstanding, some of which are disturbing solely by their nature - for example, you still get drops for classes which were cut, despite it having been declared to be fixed several times. This is a minor thing really, but getting it wrong repeatedly means that either something is way too complicated to work with easily, or their processes are failing somewhere, neither of which bode well for the future.

A few other examples are half the interface windows are in 'prototype' stages, the UI itself is clunky, unresponsive and unappealing. Group and raid icons frequently vanish from the map, textures clip and bleed all over the place, models interact in nonsenical ways ( tall person tries to walk into tent and gets catapulted into the sky ), boots with glove icons, gloves with boot icons, mispellings, typos, missing variables and messages ( '0 disrupted your attack !' ), quest item flashing randomly doesn't work, getting halfway through casting/interacting and getting 'not ready' errors, cooldowns triggering incorrectly, stances being lost randomly, frequent animation glitches, unsynchronised, missing or inappropriate sound effects ( try jumping as a witch elf for example ), login problems 'you are already logged into another (crashed) server', etc etc etc.

All of them are small issues but there are simply too many of them for me to have any confidence of them being fixed without breaking something else, and the whole experience is very unfinished for something which was largely a marketing event.

There's also a number of significantly more serious issues, like the amount of time that the Nordland scenario was crashed, Barak Varr regularly biting the dust at less than 1/4 of their target peak population, the frequent crash to desktops or bluescreens people got, and the fairly common problem with resource leaks during pvp that reduce framerate to a slideshow, and the video problem where the occlusion culling 'flipped' backwards leaving the screen a mess of black, flickering shadows and distant objects.

Those are things that it could potentially take them a month to work out what was causing it, let alone fix it.

And then things like the population levelling mechanisms being entirely untested, both from a technical perspective and from a psychological one ( for example, even if giving +10% renown gain to the losing side is automatic and works flawlessly, is that actually going to make people switch sides after the time/emotional investment ? ). Closed beta gave some experience of what it's like with a losing faction on a low pop server - it is *not* pretty.

[Saban]

All those issues aside, i cant fucking wait to buy this game, i had that much fun in beta.

[Necrolyte]

Though those problems probably do exist, most Preview Weekend testers I believe didn't notice the brunt of them.

I played about 8 chars to L10 during Preview Weekend, and never noticed many of those issues. I noticed the Nordland crashing once on me, and everyone noticed the GCD, UI and pathing issues; however, I never saw any of the NPCs flying into the air, missing variables, dropped gear for missing classes, or missing stances, etc.

I think as a marketing event, it went OK if the average player had the same experience I did. But again, I'm sure those issues exist and need to be fixed by retail because as more and more players advance past T2, those issues will begin to show up for everyone.

[Gilgamel]

I have a shitload of schoolwork to do, the NFL and college football are about to start, and I am spending at least an hour a day fiddling with the stupid talent calculator. That tells you how pumped up I am about this game, and I was one of those people who was skeptical before I got a chance to play it. The thing that seperates it from so many other mmo's is simple: fun. It is fucking fun to play.

That said there are problems:

1) All the UI and performance issues listed above.
2) A lack of usable influence rewards at the higher tiers for some classes.
3) Items marked great that are clearly supposed to be 1hers.
4) Shields that say right hand.
5) The targeting bug.
6) The memory leak.
7) Graphics options are almost nonexistent.
8) Defense of keeps is far too easy(4 of my guild held off 20+ at least twice this weekend).
9) Lack of item variation.
10) No cross server scenario queues, leading to some really long wait times for certain people. If I have to wait longer than 10 minutes for a scenario at release I'm going to be very pissed off.

[Qhue]

The killer for me right now is the implementation of Global Cooldown and how it effects classes who use primarily instant abilities. Right now there is no 'next ability queue' and the UI is very unresponsive when you are trying to chain a bunch of instants together.

Sometimes the abilities fire, sometimes they dont fire and just grey out as if they did, sometimes your character goes through the animation (and associated delay) and does nothing. Most of the time hitting a key right before the ability finishes a GCD results in a "ability failed" message blasted across the screen and another 0.5 extra cooldown while the UI recovers from the failed ability.

This makes classes like Chosen and WarPriest into exercises in timing futility if you are eager to try and play as efficiently as possible

[Itzena]

Originally Posted by Steamrice

So I guess that is the culprit for why this game's animations and overall flow of it sucks? And it also seems like hes saying you won't have the option to change your graphics to your liking and they are all presets I guess.

Animation thing is smart, low-res textures are smart.
Although I'm a little curious as to where this whole "There's a hi-res art pack waiting to be patched in!" thing came from, if Mythic are implying now that they never planned such a thing.

[matmanx2]

Most impressive thing to me about that video was the sound. It really sounded like I imagine a battleground should sound. It immersed me quickly, so thats a good sign.

But yes the Open Beta really will be telling. Like alot of you, I can deal with some annoyances if I am having a great time and they dont interfere with my gameplay too much. There's a threshold there and it's probably different for everyone. But once that annoyance threshold is crossed.... sorry, Game Over.

I really am in the mood for a great PVP MMO (no thanks to AoC for that tease) and I hope War can deliver.