Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Squig herder birth video



Frapsed the first few minutes of the life of a squig herder and the starting zone. I stopped frapsing where i did because i alt tabbed, which messed up my client, incase you were wondering.


Warhammer Online: Squig Herder Birth Video - The best free videos are right here

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Thursday, May 22, 2008

RvR Upgrades and Updates



This section lists the current plans for the future of Keeps, Battlefield Objectives, Scenarios, Warcamps, Siege and Zone Control Messaging. Remember, this is beta so things may change!

Keeps

  • Guilds will be able to claim Keeps which will grant them many benefits via NPCs and augmentation to current systems that add several benefits to defending players. We’re also analyzing and adjusting Renown pool disbursement for taking and defending Keeps.

  • Guild ownership will allow guilds to Respawn inside a Keep and/or provide fast transit to their Keep.

  • Adding increased amounts and levels of Guards, siege pads and Merchants can also be purchased by Guilds once they own a Keep.

  • Keep appearance will change when controlled by the enemy Realm

  • Fast transit to and from the Keep via Guild Ownership

  • Messaging will go out to the RvR area noting when a Keep has been taken over, but there will also be detailed messaging for guilds noting the status of doors, guards, bodyguards and the Keep Lord.


Battlefield Objectives

Besides Guilds being able to claim Battlefield Objectives, we are looking to add more support functionality to help alleviate warcamp camping as well as providing increased utility:
  • Respawning and/or fast transit to claimed Battlefield Objectives

  • Adjustment of terrain surrounding BO locations to give a more distinct feel and sense of importance.

  • Clearer communication to players how Battlefield Objectives add guards to Keeps via NPC titles that denote which Objective they’re tied to

  • Extension of safe period of ownership to 15 minutes

  • Battlefield Objectives under attack will be displayed on the in-game map.

  • In addition, if a guild owns a Battlefield Objective that is being assaulted all guild members will be alerted.

  • We’re looking at adjusting the number of Siege pads available based on Battlefield Objective ownership for attackers/defenders.


Scenarios

Scenarios are readjusted with every Beta, but we’re also looking at Queue updates:

  • You’ve enjoyed forced fights over locations and flag objects (bombs, flags, murderballs) so we will continue to emphasize those rule-sets.

  • Spawn point and respawn points will continually be analyzed to discourage spawn camping.

  • No scenario will extend beyond the limits of 18 vs. 18 for population.

  • Dogs of War will help quell uneven battles until the scenario population balances out on a match by match basis.

  • Multiple Queue’ing will allow players to join all Scenarios queues which are available in the zone/tier they are in at once. (Note: once entering a scenario, the other scenarios in queue are dropped – no scenario to scenario hopping.)

  • Players anywhere in Tier 4 will be able to queue to the current active Tier 4 scenario(s).


Warcamps
We know that players want to take the fight straight to the Warcamps, and so we have already begun implementing the following items to fight against the zerg:

  • Siege will now be placed in all Tier 1 – Tier 4 Warcamps. This will be accessible to all players to fire only at enemy players lurking near their Warcamp.

  • Guard counts will be increased from 7 to 10 along with two additional sets of roaming patrols on the perimeter.

  • We’ll continue to make sure there are multiple exit points from Warcamps and investigate ways to make them more obvious to players.


Siege

We have many more things planned in order to take our Siege warfare to the next level:
  • Animation, effects and sound across the board will be improved in order to give us that polish that’s been missing.

  • Players will have the ability to attach themselves to the siege when firing. (i.e. attaching to the ram when in use)

  • Tweaking of firing mini games (i.e. Ram will now have a power bar for all 4 players to activate)

  • Renown Ability “Siege Abilities” will grant players additional means to breach outer walls and keeps along with specializing in using certain types of siege.


Zone Control Messaging

You, the players, and us internally, the devs, recognize that our current method for messaging players about epic in-game events is not clear enough. Below are a few things we will be adding to make this more obvious.
  • The UI team is updating the zone control bar to better show when a zone is currently locked down.

  • Adding longer screen shakes and audio cues coupled with skydome changes for both the winners and losers in a zone.

  • Investigating adding the current zone where the battle is taking place to the main interface when in any Tier 4 zone

  • Giving a status update on the war on the loading screen while zoning.

  • RvR hotspots will display on the map via the WAR symbol with varying sizes to denote where a fight is, and its size.

  • Minimap adjustments will denote wthe owner of a Zone at a glance (outlining the Minimap or some other visual in blue, red or white like in Scenarios).

  • When opening the large scale map, you will see who owns the zone you’re in and quickly be able to see where the Active zone is




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Monday, May 19, 2008

Beta Phase 1-3 Re-cap and Review



I will try to sum up the last phases testing including my opinions about the various elements.

Engine development across this phase:
  • More textures were added with each patch

  • Complete shaders and lightmaps are not in the game yet

  • Spell effects (particles, cast animations etc) were enhanced throughout so they are working hard on that end. Some computer specs have started to suffer in large battles due to this since the graphic options do not allow to tune down the effects yet (will surely be possible at release)

  • Many placeholder graphics for tactics, spells, morales etc were upgrade to very nice versions

  • Exceptionally stable client. More stable for me than WoW through its first year. I have yet to suffer from a single crash.

  • Animations are improving but are still not where they should be.

  • Still a small delay between click and effect/animation. This improved in Test 3 but was not 100% consistent (so was there are times and at other times not).


Last Phase Overview

Test 1:
Reikland, Praag and Chaos Wastes. The point was to capture keeps and battle objectives to conquer zones for your side. Battle objectives give buffs to the winning side (require you to interact with the lord at the battle objective).

Outcome:
  • Good layout of zones with the Chaos Wastes looking a bit dull.

  • Multiple ways to reach all objectives opening up for different styles of play.

  • Pathing issues for basically all PvE mobs creating 'retreat' bugs making keeps and battle objectives impossible to reclaim once the bug had been triggered.


Test 2:
Altdorf capture. The actual taking of a city involves taking hold of Praag, then the next zone, then the gate fortress (for example the Maw for the Inevitable City), then open city PvP, then an instanced PvE version to capture rewards where the 'king' is the ultimate encounter. We tested the PvE part of the process making the PvP city encounter untested at this point in time (since the other phase tested everything up to the fortress).

Outcome:
  • Beautiful city (in my mind) - even without all the light maps etc in.

  • The pathing bugs from Test 1 showed up and created alot of problems. It improved from Test 1 but did still not work well.

  • PvE scripting needs improvement - sometimes the mini-bosses fought with all glory (adds and abilities). Sometimes they hardly did anything (so pure tank and spank and meh when that happened).

  • Overall good design though (once again IMO). This phase is meant to be the glorious end of a long PvP road. One can debate the logic of finishing PvP with PvE but I kind of liked to casually roam around and be bad once the conquest was over (and hence hope that the PvE encounters are never over-tuned but rather of moderate difficulty - we do not know the final tuning since we had the best gear available and the bosses' abilities were slightly downtuned according to developers)a


Test3:
A replica of Test 1.

Outcome:
  • Pathing and scripting of PvE mobs improved immensly. No retreat bugs at all this time (for me).

    • With 15min lockouts of BOs and keeps the battle flow was great.


Overall conclusion
I like this game more and more, but...animations need to improve - both characters and NPCs. Most of them are in for characters but they need that final touch in terms of transition from one animation to the next as well as few extra frames for the basic animations such as running. Graphics are improving to a point where I would be very surprised if this game does not look great with shaders and lightmaps in (so I am not concerned). I find the gameplay to be very enjoyable at the moment so this is also an area where I do not really have concerns. With regard to balance I doubt it will be fully balanced at release - they are tweaking TTK and cc every patch and that will probably continue past release. The net code is improving but needs one more layer of sophistication (the delay between click-> animation/effect that is still there).

So I would conclude for now that they should continue to focus on balance (everlasting project I guess) but more importantly the final touch on the net code and the animations. So in my biased view it is coming together nicely.


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Friday, May 9, 2008

Patch notes for european beta



For anyone who cares to read patch notes here take some :

General
Setbacks now have diminishing returns on them; after the fifth setback during the same cast, further attacks will not be able to setback that cast any longer.
Individual ticks of DoTs will no longer setback an ability (the first tick, or 'landing', of a DoT will cause a setback chance). Channeled abilities should generally cause a setback chance each tick of damage.
Melee range has been increased to 5 feet. This removes the dead zone between when a melee attack can be used vs when a ranged attack can be used.
The four healer careers, Warrior Priest, Zealot, Disciple and Archmage, have seen significant changes for this round of Beta. An overview of what these entail can be found on the forums.

Renown Abilities
The Bane series of tactics now requires a single tactic slot.
Opportunist, Sure Shot, Focused Power and Natural fighter rewards will no longer display a buff icon after they have been purchased.

Bright Wizard
Explosive Shielding Tactic – Flame shield will now activate against all attack types instead of just melee.
Flame Shield will now base its damage on the caster's rank and mastery, but will be credited to the effect holder.
Flames of Rhuin will now base its damage on the caster's rank and mastery, but will be credited to the effect holder.
Choking Smoke has been rebalanced.
Burning Iron has had its cast time increased and cool down increased.

Chosen
Fixed many tooltip errors on Chosen abilities.
Trembling Weakness will now properly upgrade its effect as the Chosen increases in rank.
Warping Embrace will no longer be affected by stats or critical hits.
Gushing Wound (Tactic) now does: Seeping Wound gains a 25% chance to snare targets by 40% for 3s.

Marauder
Fixed tool tip description on Corrupted Edge. It now correctly states that it increase Strength instead of Weapon Skill.
Fixed tool tip description on Hulking Brute; this tactic actually modifies Toughness, not Weapon Skill and Initiative.
Feeding on Fear now displays a tactic Buff icon after it procs. In addition, crits made during the buff will no longer reset the timer back to 5 seconds.

Shadow Warrior
Spiral Fletched Arrow will now deal the same damage from any distance.
Removed the stance requirement text from the main body of the ability descriptions.
Opportunistic Strike damage and cooldown have been increased.
The cost of Throat Shot has been reduced, but the cooldown has increased.
Glass Arrow and Acid Arrow have been redesigned.
General damage and AP cost adjustments have been made on many of the Shadow Warrior abilities.

Sorcerer
If the initial target of Shadow Knives breaks Line of Sight to the caster or goes out of range, Shadow Knives will be interrupted.
Shadow Knives now pulses its damage slower, but does more damage per tick to make the total damage done by the ability stay the same.
Stricken Limbs has been rebalanced.
Stricken Voices has had its reuse time increased.
Hand of Ruin has a shorter maximum duration and will always be setback by attacks.
Word of Pain can only be stacked a maximum of 3 times, and the damage per counter has been increased.

Swordmaster
Redirecting force now requires a block before being used. This ability has been changed to an opener.
Gryphon's Lash has been moved from mastery to core at rank 8.
Sapping Strike has been moved from core to mastery at 5 points in Path Of Khaine.
Crashing Wave has been moved to level 18
Dazzling Strike has been moved to level 35
Wall of Darting Steel has been moved to level 40
Graceful Precision applies its effect to Gryphon’s Lash instead of Graceful Strike.
Graceful Precision has been renamed Gryphon’s Precision.

Witch Elf
Treacherous Assault no longer provides a damage buff.
Shadow Prowler now has a brief build time, and will be interrupted by any hit.
Shadow Prowler's effectiveness has been slightly reduced.
Shadow Prowler now costs slightly more APs per second , has an increased cooldown and the maximum duration of Stealth has been lowered to 30s.
Kiss of Death will no longer stack multiple copies from the same caster on the target.
The damage from Kiss of Death will now be distributed in a shorter amount of time (the damage is unchanged).
Kiss of Betrayal has had its toughness debuff reduced slightly, but duration extended.
Envenomed Blade will now only raise the chance to proc a poison to a maximum of 50%, instead of a flat 50% add on whatever else is already there.
Enthrall has been removed.
A new ability, Feinted Positioning, has been added to the Witch Elf in place of Enthrall.
Agonizing Wound has had its cost changed to 45 AP, its damage increased and it will now ignore armor from the rear position.
Throat Slitter has had its positional requirement removed, and will now only deal damage from the rear position.
Ruthless Assault now costs 25 AP/second. Its damage will now increase based upon the number of combo points.
Elixir of the Cauldron’s increased critical chance will now only work from behind the target.
Heart Seeker’s damage has been increased and now requires rear position.
Sacrificial Stab’s damage has been increased and now requires rear position.

Witch Hunter
Fervor is now part of the Path of Cleansing, and deals less damage over more time.
Sudden Accusation no longer provides an AP regeneration buff.
Incognito now has a brief build time, and will be interrupted by any hit.
Slightly reduced Incognito's effectiveness has been reduced slightly.
Incognito now costs slightly more AP/s, has an increased cooldown and the maximum duration of Stealth has been lowered to 30s.
A bug has been fixed in which Burn Away Lies was incorrectly labeled as a ranged attack.
The ability Powder Shot has been removed and replaced by a new ability: Feinted Positioning.
Torment has had its positional requirement removed, its damage increased and will now ignore armor from the rear.
Pistol Whip has had its damage increased, and now has a rear-positional requirement.
Silence the Heretic has been changed. It now requires a rear-positional rather than a front positional.
Burn Away Lies now deals increased damage and has a rear positional requirement.


Gamewide Content Changes
In response to analysis of our most recent phase of Beta, we have adjusted the level of difficulty for our standard PQs to be easier to complete. Now, two of the three public quests in each chapter have been revised to require only six to nine players to complete. The third public quest in each chapter is harder and requires two or three groups (at least twelve players) to complete.
We have adjusted the item and influence rewards of harder PQs to be greater than the rewards for standard difficulty PQs. We will continue to adjust loot, influence, and experience as needed in the future, and we are also planning on adding a UI element in a future Beta version to identify PQs that are hard difficulty. For this particular release, the following PQs are Hard: Chaos Ruins, Lake of the Damned, Bitterschaum Swamp, Unterbaum Cemetary, Mud Flats, Serpent's Fang, Bitterspring, Village Vermin, Tempest Horn, and Tower of the Elves. All other PQs you will encounter should be the easier Standard level of difficulty.
The overall requirements for basic, advanced, and elite influence rewards have been reduced for each chapter of the game. This reduction was not applied to the starting chapters as the numbers there are already in alignment with this newest change. We expect this reduction to provide greater opportunities for you to access each chapter’s influence rewards.
Tier Three Empire and Chaos Content: The zones of High Pass and Talabecland are ready for questing and exploration when a break is needed from the intense action of RvR battle.
Tier Four Empire and Chaos Content: The RvR Campaign rages all the way from the heart of the Empire in Reikland, through the war ravaged city of Praag, to the forbidding Chaos Wastes, and these zones will be opened in order to allow you to fight the RvR campaign there. When venturing into these zones, please keep in mind that the non-RvR quests and content there has only been roughed in, and is not fully ready for play. There’s a war raging in the RvR areas, and your realm needs you there!
We have resolved an issue where monsters would continue to bring friends, even when group members were not within visual range (yes, even lowly snotlings have friends). Monsters should now only BAF when group members are nearby.
To better support the war, Warcamp trainers and Renown merchants have relocated their shops to the RvR Keeps. You will find 3 merchants and one trainer on the third floor of each keep when it is captured. Please make them feel welcomed, especially if you are of an opposing realm.
In response to community feedback, Special con enemies have been renamed to the more IP appropriate Champions. This category name change does not affect their abilities or anything else about these dangerous foes.

Renown Items
Renown items have had their Renown requirements lowered by three levels. For example, if a Renown item has a level requirement of level 15, its Renown-rank requirement is now level 12.
Renown stores have been moved to the keeps (they’re on the third floor). Your realm must control the keep in order for you to have access to the Renown merchants.

RVR

Keeps
The Keep Lord Guards will now defend the Keep Lord when he or she is attacked.
Broadcasts will be sent to the RvR area by the victor when a Keep changes hands.
Renown Merchants and Trainers have taken up residence in keeps. These NPCs can be attacked and slain.
Keep Lords and Keep Guards now have appropriate abilities and tethers.
Keep and Gatehouse Doors have had their hitpoints increased based on Tier.
Players now properly receive Renown when taking over a Keep



AND HERE some clarifications about the cancelled i beta phase

Altdorf RvR (Contested Altdorf)
When the City goes into a contested state, it will become an instance. Players inside the City when this occurs will be given a message asking them to either stay and fight, or go to safe ground.

Players choosing to stay and fight will be placed in the Warquarters of Altdorf. Players choosing to go to safety will be placed at a blackmarket in Reikwald (the Fortress Zone).
Any players not in the City will gain entry into the contested version of Altdorf by going through the main gate or alternate gates.

Once inside the City, players will be in a safe spawn location behind three gates. Simply right click the gate to be teleported to the other side, and begin your assault or defense of the City’s Warquarters.

Control over the City is determined by battling over seven objectives in the WarQuarters of Altdorf. Gaining control over these objectives will work via population disparity mechanics. The more players you have in the area of a capture location, the faster you will capture it (similar to the Nordenwatch Scenario).

Each Capture location will contribute points over time to a “Meta Pool” of points which is tallied across all instances of the City. Population ratios have been put in place to ensure that instances with possibly imbalanced numbers will contribute differently than instances with even numbers.

Please note that simply getting control over the seven objectives in your instance will not result in winning. Players must maintain control and continue feeding the “Meta Pool” until the predetermined amount of points which result in winning control over the City is met.

The Zone Control Bar will display how well your Realm is doing as a race toward the center of the Control Bar.

If the forces of Order defend the City, the City will remain in its contested state for two hours before resetting back to the standard Altdorf. Once this occurs, the Campaign will reset. Players wanting to leave the contested city may simply click on the portal gate within their safe spawn location.

If the forces of Destruction take the City, a message will indicate such and the City will then be open for pillaging!

Items of Interest
What can I do in a city that is under attack?
Players will battle against each other in the War Quarters, one side trying to gain access to the city while the other side attempts to defend. Should the invader win, the city gates will fall and the pillaging begins.
Players may destroy objects, burn objects, smash open interior doors and kill citizens!
Players may participate in “invader quests” that will present rewards to the player along with increasing their capital city rating value
The enemy may participate in any available content that is in the city. For further clarification, if a certain dungeon is only available during city rating 4 and the enemy so happens to invade the city when it is at a city rating of 4, the dungeon is open to the enemy to explore!
Players may attack and capture the enemy’s King!
By gaining ownership of a city, the enemy will have forced players to use outside resources to perform their banking, auctioneering and other utilities, but at a higher price
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