Anyway, judging by what's coming out of the closed beta, this is shaping up to be the MMO event of the year, a game to finally provide real competition to WoW where pale imitation Age of Conan failed.
I've got to give credit to Mythic straight off the bat, they had a solid MMO under their belts in the form of Dark Age of Camelot and they've got an appealing licence in Warhammer. They would've been guaranteed no small measure of success if they'd essentially copied WoW and thrown a Warhammer skin over the top, but they haven't. Instead it appears that they've built the thing largely from the ground up (with some aspects borrowed from DAoC) and are trying to make an MMO that plays very differently from WoW.
For starters, it's a very PvP focussed game. When I first heard this, I was instantly put off because of my experience of PvP with WoW. I couldn't bring myself to play on a PvP server in WoW, so a game that depended on it was right out. Combat with each of the classes is a very nuanced affair, with players encouraged to cast a variety of spells in order to be fully effective. A good example of this is the Goblin Shaman. Warhammer's greenskins have two gods, Gork and Mork. In the game, the shaman's offensive spells build up power in Gork's idol, which then makes the shaman's healing spells more effective. Those healing spells in turn charge Mork's idol, making offensive spells more powerful. This has two significant effects: firstly that even healing classes are effective in PvP combat (and the system actively encourages them to heal others while they're at it) and secondly, it breaks from the "spam primary attack, watch mana/energy bar" mentaility that has become the norm in this type of game.
Endgame content in WAR is all about PvP, but it's not as daunting as it sounds. It's realm vs realm combat with a variety of different sized arenas and objectives and, as I've touched on above, all classes are viable in PvP. Healing classes all have an effective offensive arsenal and collision detection ensures that the oft-mailigned tank is actually extremely useful, physically standing between the enemy and his squishy allies, blocking blows and line of sight for ranged attacks.
Another area that has people really excited is the Public Questing system. Basically, there are many special quests in the game with objectives that require a number of players to achieve, be it defending against a large horde of attackers, raiding an encampment or attacking a small number of very powerful foes. Anyone picking up the quest automatically joins in the fight with everyone else and once the objective is complete, a small number of high quality loot items are distributed amongst the group. The game does this by making a random roll for every player who participated in the PQ, which is modified by how effective they were (how much damage inflicted, healing done, damage absorbed, objective points collected etc) in the quest. The top player is then presented with a bag of items, from which they can select one before the bag is passed on to the next player. The system is working very well in the beta, with loot being mixed around very well while the best players still get loot the most often. It cuts out all the arguing, ninja looting and DKP management and might just be the future of PvE raiding.
MMOs are notoriously hard to review; you can't assess a game people will be playing for years on the basis of one week of playtime. To partially address this, Ars Technica are running weekly reports on the WAR beta and they are really informative. Here are the first two weeks:
Week One: On Combat and WAAAAGH!
Week Two: Public Quests
