Warhammer 40k Online

[boars]

http://au.pc.ign.com/articles/107/1071607p1.html

Shall be shown off at this years E3 in June...

[Axeclown]

Bit early for that, I didn't think it was out for another 3-4 years. 3 factions, please, just this once! Otherwise I may have to set fire to their office.

[boars]

wouldn't you prefer to have ... I don't know... say 6 or 7 ?

I hate what they did with the story to get different races in the same faction in war.

[Axeclown]

6 or 7 would spread the population far too thin. Sometimes it was bad enough with 3 sides, but there was always the option for the outnumbered sides to pile up on the faction with the most numbers on at any point in the day.

[Mireden]

let's choose orks, i like being space mushroooms.

[Axeclown]

Nyd said he'd go Imperial guard if they had them. As much as I like orks, I'm pretty sure they'll get gimped to hell in an mmo version. They'll be given shitty accuracy but high close combat, and everybody knows ranged attacks always win in virtually any mmo to date. Either through power, distance, or just sheer bulk of damage done from enough attacks at once against targets as they try to get in close.

Besides, imp guard have a LOT of artillery & tanks, and randomly shelling everything in sight is more fun than running at somebody with a blunt object!

[Mireden]

pft, orks smash! waaaaagggghhhhhhhhhhhhhh

[Axeclown]

Your argument is persuasive, you may have convinced me.

[boars]

I typed a long assed reply to this, then my iphone crashed... hrmn android... hrmn.

Anyway the short of it was: we know verrrrrrrrrry little about WH40Kmmo that saying IG will even have use of their arty... or be playable for that matter is a little too premature. How will the pvp even be? Will it be open field PVP or scenario/instance focused?

Looking at how the minis play... I tend to think there's a possibility that it'll be more focus on points armies vs points... or rather... small scale. Who knows it could be like Allods where you're able to control more then one character as a character. ie as the tiny gerberlings in allods, you control 3 little buggers that act in unison.

Small scale pvp melee goes well... especially with a dedicated healer... how does healing fit into WH40k tho? I mean generally speaking do the armies have healing? I never really played tabletop...

[Koenyg]

Closest thing to healing I can think of is some of the orks being able to juice themselves up on drugs to ignore wounds. Space Marines pull that trick as well, along with some CSMs being able to regenerate.

I wasn't sure how they'd handle the combat when they first started talking about the game. Small scale squad based combat would make more sense than playing a single character, but who can say?

Maybe we'll get lucky and someone will mod Crysis for Orks as well as Mechs

[Axeclown]

Well Warhammer Fantasy didn't have much in the way of healing either, except trolls having the 50% chance to regenerate a wound at the end of each turn, and maybe a few one-off spells which had a chance to revive a few units in a regiment? It certainly didn't have warrior priests spamming off group heal to prevent the imperial army dying!

If you don't have some form of healing, a game just becomes a DPS race. It is anyway really, but healing gives you a way to mitigate or entirely negate that and RPG's in general would be pretty awful without it. Whoever had the most of whatever class did maximum burst damage, with the best assisting, and fastest target picking would always win. With healing and resurrection in combat, at least that option is negated somewhat.

[Koenyg]

I honestly think they'd be alright leaving healing out, assuming of course there is a strong FPS influence on the game. If it's third-person "I haz laz0rs!" ranged combat like other MMOs then I'm not sure how they'll do it, and my vote is still for small squad combat (even if I don't particularly like the idea).

If it's single character, first person, large scale combat to stick true to the theme I wouldn't be surprised if it was simply a "load into scenario, die, respawn" twitch fest like most FPS games to date.

Orks, obviously, would be trying to close the gap because most of their shootas are goddamn fail. 'Nids would be in the same boat, and I'm not sure how they'd handle different unit types in combat. No one is going to want to play a fire warrior when the guy behind them is in a battlesuit.

The fact that they've mentioned vehicles in the past has me leaning more towards an FPS Battlefield play style as well. I guess it's just too early to know conclusively one way or the other.

Quite frankly I'd play IG as well, but God help the poor bastard that has to try to balance a singular guardsman against a Necron... <---- argument for squad based combat.

[Axeclown]

Don't mix FPS with MMORPG you bastards! Twitch reflexes have no place in an MMO. They're supposed to be about strategy and thinking, not button mashing.

How about something crazy, like imp guard players get an entire squad, but necrons only get a lone necron, or SM's only get a lone space marine to control.

[Koenyg]

I have no qualms with an FPS game with persistent characters. That being said, you alienate all of the dimwitted children who seem to be the backbone of the video game industry nowadays.

Third-person "point and click" adventure games are one thing, but when all you have to do to hit someone with a gauss rifle is tab target them you have to start balancing damage values, hp/defense etc. It all gets a bit much. You end up watching an Ork running at you while you repeatedly shoot him in the face with a lasrifle, then he hits you twice with his powerclaw and you die because he's melee and has to be able to .. you know... do that stuff.

I'm all for squad command, as long as you can give each member of the squad quick commands. You know IG might be packing 20 units per squad, some of which will have grenades, others with plasma guns etc. Even Necrons fight in squads, hell, everything does. You're essentially making the game into an even more retarded Dawn of War where instead of an army you build with resources, you just start with one unit squad and go at it.

As for strategy and thinking in MMOs being more prevalent than button-mashing... What MMOs have you been playing and where do I sign up?

[boars]

Scenarios. Your team has x points. Do you take more players in with lesser equipment ... or less players and a tank?

Could be a fun kinda concept... not sure if you'd be able to stick with one type of char like that tho... so you'd lose some of that persistance... but still. there's some funky army/unit value type of things they could play with. It'd be nice to do something different.. then level a char... from 1-50 (yawwwwwn).

I want pure pvp leveling... actually screw leveling at all. Unlocking things... over the course of... oh I don't know 20 hours tops? then you know just letting us rip into "end game content" ... making a new character should be FUN not frustrating as all @#$@. Grinding can go bite my arse.

There's a thing in Black Prophecy that i found particularly awesome (cover your eyes Axe, I found this on TenTonneHammer):

One of the more intriguing mechanisms in the game is a PvP matching system that evaluates a player’s level and equipment and matches them to them other players; while it doesn’t sound all that different from existing systems in other games, it has a unique twist according to Falko “If the top three players in the game are grouped up together they may find that there isn’t a lot of competition, so what the system does is evaluates those factors and will match them up against an appropriate group to make it fair, so it may be a group of eight lower players that make an even match for these three.”

SRC: http://www.tentonhammer.com/events/gdc2 ... ckProphecy