PAX08: WAR's Jeff Hickman on patches, open beta and content rumors
Filed under: Fantasy, Warhammer Online, Massively Interviews, Massively Event Coverage
Massively: So what's going in with the next patch?
Jeff: So the next patch for open beta includes player vaults, guild vaults, auction house, a whole bunch emotes an crazy stuff, general effects clean-up, a new Public Quest and quest tracker for the user interface, so the main UI will be completely done after this patch. All of those things are going to be ready for launch.
Massively: Are there any more map art tweaks?
Jeff: Yes, absolutely. The full world map will be there.
Massively: Will you be tweaking the realm balance map, or is that staying the same?
Jeff: The second level map with all the racial pairings are pretty much the same, but there are some changes happening to the right-hand side that tracks all your quests and stuff. We're cleaning that up. A lot of final clean-up and polish.
Massively: So that patch is going to hit for open beta on September 7th?
Jeff: Soon.
Massively: Well, right now is the closed beta even open?
Jeff: So, closed beta shut down yesterday or the day before in preparation for open beta. Gotta remember, open beta is going to be ... huge. We're putting up a lot of servers and we gotta prep 'em all.
Massively: There has been some complaining amongst some of the more hardcore player-base that the length of the open beta is not enough for people to properly experience WAR. What would you say to them?
Jeff: I'd say we're trying to give you as much time as we possibly can. We want to get the game out and there's just a lot of pieces that we wanted to get into this last patch before open beta. So we're trying to get all this patch in -- which is going into testing right now -- and then we're going to open up the open beta as soon as we feel comfortable with it. We want to give you as much time as we can in open beta before the game launches. The simple fact is that we've lifted our NDA and you can see what we got. We had this sneak preview weekend where everybody's talking about it -- very positively -- and then we have open beta. Anybody that really wants to experience the game most likely will get the opportunity to at least get in and play around with it and then you get in to play the game when we go live. There's nothing to fear, the game is great.
Massively: Oh yeah, being in the beta for a while now, we can easily say that the rumors of Tier 3 and Tier 4 being barren are-
Jeff: [highly amused laughter]
Massively: Yeah, exactly.
Jeff: That's just, not true. [residual chuckling] So Tier 3, Tier 4, the capital cities, all the high level dungeons -- all of that stuff is there and ready to go, it's ready. We just need to open the flood gates, you know?
Massively: We're glad we could clear that up.
Jeff: Absolutely.
If you'd like to hear more of Paul Barnett, Jeff Hickman and Josh Drescher talking about everything but Warhammer Online itself, check out a PAX special edition of our sister site Big Download's podcast, the BigCast. It's possibly the most entertaining and random discussion we've heard in a long time. Bacon Salt!
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
pufonthis said on 9:34AM 9-01-2008
Ever seen a video interview of Jeff? The man has to start every sentence he says with "So". It's pretty funny.
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recursive said on 1:18PM 9-01-2008
Try counting the awesomes in the previous transcript :P
Wjowski said on 11:57AM 9-01-2008
Quit frankly, after the AoC debacle I'm extremely skeptical about any game that has the high-end stuff cordoned off.
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Wjowski said on 11:57AM 9-01-2008
...Game's open beta that is.
recursive said on 1:18PM 9-01-2008
Now don't be so cynical, we have the developer's word for it. Oh wait.. >
Brian! said on 2:36PM 9-01-2008
Even if the high level stuff was broken, WAR is fun enough when stuck at the mid levels. This is one game that I don't feel the need to rush to the end. I am more than happy to battle those at my level.
As long as they solve the high rank gear turning up in the lower ranked areas then it won't really matter. You know you are on a level playing field pretty much the whole way through your tier.
Reader said on 5:04PM 9-01-2008
The nice thing about RvR games is there's always an endgame, RvR. Of course there'll be some PvE stuff, but that's only to template your character out for some more RvR :D
wha? said on 12:46PM 9-01-2008
dont worry, this is no AoC. Its a blast to play
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So sorry said on 4:58PM 9-01-2008
Yeah, don't worry about T3/T4 content. It's all there, and it works, and there's a crapload of it. This game is so polar opposite of conan it's not even funny.
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Larry-Steve said on 3:43AM 9-02-2008
@ Reader
I see in your sly comment you hide your true colors sir/ma'am...
One of the things that's also great about RvR games is that the middle levels are enjoyable enough to go pvp then. And I don't mean WoW twink'age, I mean template out for Thiranki or Molivik and level a toon specifically to murder there.
If they followed a similar path for WAR, you can guarentee there will be some players with nothing but an army of characters at level 19 JUST to compete at the tier as best they can and it will be glorious.
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Yulian said on 7:26AM 9-02-2008
Not possible. You gain EXP when killing enemy players, there is no XP Off function. So you will out level the tier quite quickly, so no twinking or staying at 1 level. Unless you dont play them.