WAR Beta Update 4… no wonder they delayed!

I’m not quite sure how they managed it, but WarMongers posted the War Beta Update #4 even before the War Herald. Talk about precognition! Actually, having checked the properties of one of their hosted images, it would appear he’s linking from http://www.war-europe.com. How come they get their beta updates before us?! Damn you, GMT… You’re always ahead of us in North America!

Anyhow, having read through it myself, I’m no longer really surprised that they pushed back release to Q2 and closed beta for a couple months. Not that I ever really was surprised… MMORPGs in beta = delays 99.999% of the time. There are some major overhauls going on here and even some big, new additions as well:

• Cities - They talk about “Marvels” and the amount of effort that goes into planning out the architecture of a building. “… these interior spaces are not simply places to take screenshots, but places to wage epic battles!”
• Armour Tinting - “Will players be able to dye their armor? Yes. Will players be able to “bleach” or revert dyed armor back to its original color? Yes.”
• Intelligent Item Drops - The item team hints that item drops will likely be more usable to players who either kill the monster or loot them. It will be interesting to see how intelligent the system becomes (e.g. in a group scenario vs. solo).
• Hooking NPCs to mounts - The animation team is experimenting with “hooking” mobs to their mounts as individual skeletal structures rather than one very complex single skeleton. They don’t suggest that there will be mounts or mounted combat, but obviously the technology will apply if they can get it working properly…
• Swimming animations and Sounds (are coming along nicely) - Finally, you can let out a collective sigh of relief!
• Weapon Trails and Hotswapping - They’ve also added some animation trails to weapon strikes and are developing better swapping animations from weapon to weapon.
• UI overhaul - This is a biggie… apparently they’ve overhauled their entire UI from the ground up. Click the above link for details about the more colourful and less brown client…
• Character Customization - They provided a fairly comprehensive overview of how the new Career Mastery (Specialization) system will work. It’s somewhat confusing until you get to the examples and conclusion. Basically, your character can train Base abilities that everyone in your class has access to, which can be improved by increasing/spending your Mastery points (granted at different stages in your career). Once you reach a certain level of Mastery, you’ll unlock several Supplemental abilities which can be purchased with the same points you use to raise Mastery. The point is that you must trade-off your Mastery, which improves all abilities, when purchasing Supplemental abilities. It basically works off the principle of “Jack of all trades, master of none.” Also, you’ll never be given enough points to buy all Supplemental skills, which should allow for character differentiation within a each class. Phew… I hope I understood it properly! Make sure you read the full release for all the details.
• Bring on the Keeps - Apparently “camping the warcamp” has become an issue on the beta servers, so the RvR team has decided to give players more battleground objectives. Their answer? Keeps for the peeps! “Keep warfare, namely protecting your keep and capturing your enemy’s, will play a significant role in open world RvR and the campaign.”
• Siege - I guess they figured you can’t have keeps and leave out sieging, so that’ll be added too but not immediately after beta re-opens.

That’s my quick and dirty overview of the extremely long Beta Update #4. I probably skimmed over some of the items of lesser impact, so feel free to hop on over to WarMongers for the full scoop. I’m sure you’ll probably agree that there’s no way this game could have been released in Q1 2008 if these are the items they’re still implementing and testing. I don’t want to make it sound as if I think they’re being slow or lazy, but it would seem as if they’re definitely behind schedule from original projections.

I’m sure these items will help for a much stronger launch, which they’ll need if they want to make a dent in WoW’s juggernaut. I really like the whole class customization feature. They could have played it safe and copied several other systems of specialization, but this one appears to be really cool, dynamic, and unique (at least, to me!).

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