Originally Posted by parte uno
American press tour at EA-Mythic. The Empire and Chaos take the honours.
As you know, I had the honour to represent JoL at the press event organized by GOA, at EA-Mythic in the United States.
Here is my report of the presentation of WAR and the first public access to the Empire and Chaos factions. Two RvR scenarios were also shown to us. In this article I present all the information that it was possible for me to gather.
I hope that you will appreciate it.
It’s Thursday January 25, two o’clock in the afternoon, after having spent the morning being shown the respective presentations for UO Kingdom reborn and DAOC Labyrinth of the Minotaur, when we feverishly enter the conference room to attend the very last presentation: Age of Reckoning.
For the occasion, GOA and EA-Mythic gathered no less than forty machines in the conference room of the hotel in order to enable us all to test the innovations simultaneously. But it isn’t time to play yet. The presentation is given by Jeff Hickman (senior producer) and the priceless Paul "Custard" Barnett (lead designer) and is displayed on two giant screens via PCs connected to video projectors. And yes, the ways being deployed and the partnership of EA-Mythic and GOA sees big things for WAR, and you can believe me, they have every reason to be confidant.
The projectors light up and Jeff welcomes us warmly while parading innocently in front of a scene obviously representing an imperial village in the streets of which some passers by walk. It’s at this time that the experts received their first slap of the afternoon, I insist on the primacy of the slap because we all are brought out with very red cheeks at the end of four and a half hours of Warhammer. The change of style with what we know of the greenskins and the dwarfs is radical! There is no longer any question of talking about cartoonish aspects or pastel tones. The animation is impeccable, graphics fine and detailed, obviously the engine has been improved lately.
The program is announced to us. We will be shown the presentation of the Empire and Chaos. Not the Dwarfs or Greenskins, nothing new for them, classes, background etc … After each presentation we will have a chance to test the first moments of play of imperial and chaotic characters. On this occasion, we will have the opportunity to play as a bright wizard and as a chaos magus for almost an hour each. We will then move to the heart of the game: RvR. We will have access to the demo of the game system including some crisp details (?) then we will be able to clash in two scenarios with fully equipped level forty dwarf and greenskin characters. The scenarios will be "the Gates of Ekrund" and "the Mourkain Temple".
After an overall description of the game by Jeff that I will skip for the experts that you are (who will already know that there are a hundred and fifty working on WAR), Paul Barnett comes onto the stage to present the classes of the Empire to us. And there, the " Barnett effect " is immediate, it is the start of a staggering show. Paul shouts, howls, gesticulates, is passionate about the hat of the witch hunter (It’s true that it’s a pretty classy hat), collapses in admiration in front of the armour from the knight of the blazing sun and with a uniquely British ardour exposes us to the pyromaniac side of the bright wizard. The audience laughs with every joke and all the set ups, this man is truly a miracle for the EA-Mythic PR department. The way that the Empire stands as the last defence against chaos and how the end of the world is the dominant environment is well explained. Humans are fighting in a desperate attempt to prevent their extinction, some will say that it is in these moments and only in these that mankind shows its ability to be noble, and you will have plenty of occasions to prove it!
Before moving on to the story of my young imperial magus, let me say a little about some additional details that were revealed to us concerning the Empire. The witch hunter is a hand-to-hand dps class, it uses ranged weapons but its potential is in melee. The warrior priest of Sigmar is the group healer but they can also deal out heavy blows in melee, by doing this, they accumulate "faith" which they can use to heal or buff their comrades. In accordance with what we know already, the knight assumes the role of tank and the bright wizard that, I quote, of thermonuclear weapons.
Let us speak a little about the machines. Good news, they didn’t have any high-performance machines! There were two types of config, the laptops equipped with T2400 dual core processors, 2Gb of RAM and X1600 graphics cards and the usual kind powered by P4D 3.6Ghz, 2Gb of RAM and X1950GT. No need to worry about our future configs for the end of the year too much. Obviously, not all the effects are there and the options probably turned all the way down but the game clearly runs OK.
Finally the moment for our playtest arrives, and with the Empire to start with, it’s an exclusive world that waits for us!
After logging in there are no less than forty level one bright wizards who make their way towards the first quest giver: An imperial knight posing with a gigantic flamberge resting on his shoulder.
First report, it’s magnificent! The environment is radically changed from the dwarf and greenskin decorations that were often classed as cartoon-y or pastel-y. Nothing here shows cartoon tendencies. The characters are carefully animated, with good movement, even better, with forty madmen leaping in ten square meters with no conflicts! Which is not the case with the interface (provisional), indeed, swapping a piece of equipment takes some time. The quest giver announces himself very clearly by a parchment above his head. When someone speaks to him a window explains to us the terms and outcomes of the quest and indicates the possible rewards to us. These rewards are obviously adapted to the class, here it showed us bits of cloth. Once the search is accepted, an indicator shows on the right of the screen and shows us our progress, passing the mouse above revealed a summarized description. If it is clicked, the tome of knowledge opens on the page of the quest giving us access to all the rest of the information.
Very well, first stage, kill some of the norse… norse!!?? But they are our enemies! Henchmen of chaos! And indeed hardly a few meters further we become aware of the situation, our small village, Grimmenhagen, is besieged! The hellcannons thunder a little way away and bombard us. Extremely fortunately our own guns overlook them and return fire regularly. OK, therefore we have to go there, "- For the Empire!! ".
I go down along the way and I locate the norse in question, they are busy loading the hellcannons and are supervised by a big, powerfully armed man.
I engage an adversary, and shoot a fireball at him from my spells. Burned to death, the infamous norse is thrown towards me while I channel a second incantation…
Technically speaking, firstly the magic spells carry very far. An incantation bar appears when you start to channel. There is no interruption when you are hit in hand-to-hand combat, for now in any case. On the other hand, it is not possible to move at all during the incantation unless you cancel the action (?).
Objects are literally stuffed with stats, intelligence, willpower, toughness, resistances of all kinds … It’s all going on. I noted that the objects are ordered by colour according to their order of power. White for the basic, green objects for the more advanced and blue for the "elites". Advancement of skills (spells, tactics, morale, actions) is independent of the level, the bars fill with experience and you will be able to buy new abilities or to improve existing ones several times during the same level, at least as long as you have things left to learn at that level. When an improvement is available, a small "plus" sign flashes in the top left of your screen, with everything that happens written in your tome. By clicking on these icons you open the tome straight to the correct page and information disappears from the screen. The level of each spell ranges from one to ten and you have to make a choice between them. When you have accumulated enough experience, you can either improve your existing talents or choose new ones. The concept is the same for tactics. To remind you, tactics take a certain number of slots and improve your abilities in a passive way. It acts as a crucial element of the gameplay. For example, "volatile flame" occupies four slots and at my level I only have six available. My other tactic is "playing with fire" (one slot). I therefore have one free slot left. I have the choice between buying a new tactic with a slot or to improve "volatile flame" because it occupies more than three slots meaning I can add another tactic to my combination. All our abilities (Actions, Morale, Tactics, Skills) evolve with experience. With each one having a bar divided into ten levels.
No mana here, a yellow bar indicates your action points and these points are consumed by every action you take (sprint included). The bar fills regularly and extremely quickly when you are not in combat.
Money is separated into gold/silver/copper. There is only one slot for rings and a slot for a banner. The rest of the inventory is rather traditional and you have already seen it in any event. When the character falls it always gives an unpleasant impression of floating. But let’s go back to see what happens to my magus:
With three norse burnt to a crisp, confidence increased (and I have a new spell!). Before returning to visit the knight to claim my reward I feel like an attack to turn their chief into ash. I move into action, my strategy, to slam down all the dice and unleash all my power before leaving. As I leave, I incant the spell which will hold him still and … it’s a failure… the colossus comes towards me! I throw everything that I can at him without causing him any great damage and he almost cuts me into two when he reaches me. I take to my heels but the git doesn’t let me go. I try a manoeuvre, jump, half turn in the air and I cast my more powerful magic spell to enchant him with a strike of my staff. A few seconds later he finishes me and I die one last time (rhoo too bad!).
A small window tells you that you have died and it doesn’t have to be shameful, it should happen in due course. A one minute countdown tells you your nearest resurrection place. If you click on the button, the countdown goes straight to five seconds and you find yourself in the kingdom of the living in great shape. I didn’t note any penalty.
So then I awake in excellent company, slap bang opposite the quest giver! I tell him about my exploits and let him know that my mission is accomplished. He congratulates me and grants my reward (boots in this instance). Having gained many victories and having even escaped from the kingdom of Morr I feel fully confidant (lvl up!).
Then he gives me another task, a journey further out to start our guns higher up on the hill firing. I run there. Arriving in front of the artillery parts, forged in Nuln of course, I introduce myself briefly to the sergeant who authorizes me to carry out my shooting, I will aim some near the knight. Later (lvl 5) I am entrusted the happy task of going out to kill the chief of the norse, history is not repeated and I carbonize him easily.
Jeff Hickman tells us that we will move on to the public quest. We all take ourselves over to the meeting place. Once in the right zone a message informs us that we have just begun the "recruit an army" public quest. Let me tell you more about the brilliant concept of public quests. As you know these quests activate themselves when you enter the right zone (a somewhat smaller zone than elsewhere) and involves all the players who find themselves there.
First bit of news, these quests can be repeated. And it’s good that they make it possible for us to gather our "influence" in this quest zone! There are three levels of influence with a reward for each level that goes from consumable things to "elite" items while not passing a reward known as "advanced".
The public quests proceed by stages. Ours were simplistic and were limited to three fast stages but certain quests have up to six of them. As time goes by, the progress of the quest is indicated to you in the top right of the screen. A green bar fills and the three stages are very distinctly indicated. With each change of stage it indicates that something is waiting for you. The more you take part in the collective effort the more your influence will increase in the area. Certain public quests can also be antagonistic (PvP). That’s to say that you will face unfriendly players, either directly or via antagonistic objectives against them. A click on the progress bar brings you, as always, to your tome of knowledge, a true personal encyclopaedia, and tells you which level of influence you are at compared to the rewards offered. For reasons of convenience, the first stage of public quests is always unlimited in time. You will be able, with a lot of patience, to complete it all on your own. The following stages have a time limit beyond which one goes back again to stage one so that you can’t block a quest at an advanced stage. But let us instead revive this quest through the eyes of Sigmund the wizard.
We were all gathered there, forty bright wizards having proven their worth.
Firstly, we are asked to speak to the terrorized peasants in order to rally them to our cause. The poor people have taken the side of the norse who take pleasure in making them tremble in fear. We must therefore set out to go and reassure the farmers. Once the necessary number is reached (moving on to stage two) we are required to kill the norse, you’d be right in thinking that it was a chore we did happily. It was very funny to see magic missiles flying out all over the place and it was difficult to save a target for yourself. (moving on to stage three) Suddenly, a Chaos giant appears! The being is colossal! It is bearing down on us. Fortunately, there were a lot of us and we instinctively concentrated our fire on the thing which succumbed in a few seconds before collapsing heavily … on me! Once freed from under the corpse we all celebrated this glorious victory as we should! This brings to an end the short history of Sigmund, the bright wizard who saved his village from the forces of chaos. We can guarantee that many adventures await in the wide world, later … later in the year "You’ve been disconnected".
I can ensure you that opinion in the room was unanimous. We adored this experiment for a short hour, the climax was the public search and the appearance of the giant. Really impressive. This feeling can’t be explained very well in writing but these public quests are really very fascinating and amusing as well as being useful thanks to the rewards. Paul did not fail to comment on the stages of the quest with the verve as anyone who knows him will understand, simply howling out "OMG!! Kill him!! Kill him now!" as soon as the giant appeared. It was the very first public access of the Empire faction and JoL was there.
But this isn’t the end, time for destruction, time for chaos!
Jeff again takes over to present to us the second headline race of the day, chaos. A panorama is posted behind him, it obviously shows a village far to the north. The sky is entirely occupied by an open vortex and Paul exclaims: "Haaaa! Look! A portal!! We're doomed!!". The trees are corrupted, made from half plant, half flesh... A dismal environment, welcome to the home of the northmen, chaos!
Following the panorama, another slap, a gateway through which can be seen wandering tormented faces, rocks that levitate, high up in the air, small demons are visible here and there. On the ground of the camp, an immense symbol of Tzeentch, the bird god, shines with an unhealthy gleam.
Paul explains a little of what chaos is all about in the world of Warhammer. Then he shares a good metaphor with us... "Chaos is Custard" as he juggles a box of custard in his hand. Yes because, just like custard, chaos makes it possible to mix things which do not usually go together. Just like English cooking according to us. I saw the same Paul Barnett eating a cake with chocolate sauce and whipped cream before starting a plate of pasta that very evening at the restaurant.
Why was Tzeentch chosen? As you know (visit the World/Races section of our site if you don’t know how things are in Warhammer) there exist four dark gods.
Khorne, the blood god, is exclusively devoted to war but detests magic. It was thus difficult to make followers of Khorne playable. Nurgle is the god of decay, some people would not have appreciated playing decomposing characters, intestines oozing from their belly and full to the brim with wretched diseases. Slaanesh, god of vice and pleasure. And Paul lustfully adding, "Oh yeah, I wannabe Slaanesh I wannabe Slaanesh!" did not follow for ethical reasons. Warhammer is not planned for the lowest common denominator. Tzeentch remains, Master of fate, architect of destiny and lord of change. Tzeentch is supremely intelligent and calculating, well beyond any human design, he works out plans which are formulated to play out over tens of thousands of years and which together make up THE plan. Tzeentch is the master of magic as well as combat and can maintain a relatively uncorrupted look. The natural choice was thus the bird god.
Paul moves on to the presentation of the chaos careers. The chosen will be the tank, Paul insists on the link between the warlike career of chosen and his armoured appearance. A successful strong link should make it easy to recognize him. The Zealot will be the healer, magically adept. The ranged dps will be the chaos magus, which will carry a staff as Paul illustrates with the assistance of a microphone stand. And he will be mounted on a flying disc. During five good minutes the insane laughter invades the room while Paul explains the magus how will do everything "on the disc". And Sir Barnett concludes: "Don't underestimate the disc!"
The last class of chaos is not revealed, it will act as a melee dps. To tell the truth, I got some information the following day by visiting the offices of EA-Mythic... It breaks my heart not to reveal it to you but I don’t want to betray EA-Mythic or the GOA team who are all incredibly nervous in sympathy. However, a quick search of the above should point you in the right direction. It resembles a very well known chaos career.
It is time for us to to test the chaos magus! Just like the bright wizard for the empire, it is this career which we will have the pleasure of testing. We all arrive in the camps represented above. An unsettling northman in plate armour gives us some quests.
Donning my blue robes, embroidered with symbols of almighty Tzeentch I set out on the path which will carry me to supreme power! For that I must accumulate experience and increasingly more powerful items and the essence of my soul! It is long lost already! In the East, the crypt and its skeletons and ghosts, in the West the camps of the beastmen who huddle around their stones. In the South, the Imperial villages which we have been sacking since yesterday. In which direction should I go to make my first desecrations?
It will be the crypt. The chief of the camp tells me to go there to send some undead back to their own plane. you could say that they could have found a worse destiny, they could have found the dear children of stupid Nurgle! I destroy some skeletons then some ghosts when I enter the vault. My spells are already powerful, my enemies fear my projectiles! I enter confidently and I stop at the bottom of the building. The vile entities are numerous!! There are six behind me! I am forced to flee to ensure my revenge at a later time.... Bloody ghosts! They do not let go, for several minutes they are constantly on my heels as I run in vain (the mobs do not give up the chase for a moment, however, with well placed sprints they do not catch us up). A superb idea comes to me, I lead my tormentors into the middle of my colleagues, these idiots, gathered around the quest giver. It works! They attack the creatures which now prepare to massacre them while I flee! I am definitely dedicated to a beautiful future in this world.
Return to the camp. I am rewarded here with a powerful belt and I learn a new magic spell "Fling red fire". Impatient to see what kind of damage I can inflict with it, I ask for a new mission. This idiot does not suspect that sooner or later I would take his place as overlord of this camp. He asks me to go to massacre some beastmen gors and ungors then to corrupt their herdstone. So I head to the West and it doesn’t take me long to find an isolated gor over there. I launch Fling red fire! Surprise! The creature is cut down with a single blow! (oneshot! Fling red fire imba!). I use more or less the same spell with his twin and after some carnage I find myself in front of the stone. I channel my chaotic energies into it and it becomes a receptacle of the power of Tzeentch. By now the degenerate beastmen are our slaves, glory to the bird god! Head south to sow terror in the remaining villagers. I am ordered to burn the last houses still upright. I use a torch to set ablaze the log piles which are found at the foot of certain houses. Joy! Survivors escape from the flames! I will be able to amuse myself a little. I take advantage of this to rid myself of an old spot which was hanging around on the side of my head (?), to kill some imperial lancers. I find the other wizards in the camp, these ambitious types who hope to overtake me on the path to power, as they are mistaken... In the heart of a cemetery we find four magi in the process of carrying out a bizarre ritual around a carcass of cow (public quest: Eidolon in the unshackled host) It acts to kill yet more lancers. The butchery is total!
We are then told to collect daemonic energy which is escaping from the nearby tombs. When sufficient energy is accumulated for the completion of the ritual, we witness the summoning of a child (?) of Tzeentch which we have to protect from the wizards who want to banish it (?)! Unfortunately we were too slow and the divine creature succumbed. The ire of our god will undoubtedly be terrible, I should better leave, go far away from here... "You’ve been disconnected".
And so we must disconnect ourselves to move on to the third part of the presentation. I must add that the world is sleeping and already rather alive, birds fly everywhere in the sky, small demons are perched here and there and the incredible clouds are animated.
