Killed in a smiling accident.

Is WAR the Next Big Thing, or just a passing phase (one of my bad days)? I’m still rather enjoying it, and I think I’ll stick with it a while longer yet. It doesn’t do anything wildly revolutionary, claiming it’s created a new genre or something is frankly bonkers; WAR and WoW and LotRO and EQ2 and Age of Conan and their Diku-inspired chums are all ice cream, just some have chocolate swirls, some have raspberry ripple, some have sprinkles on top, some are made by otters in carpet factories. Maybe you don’t really like the sprinkles but you’ll put up with them ‘cos the other varieties don’t have those lovely chocolate chips, or maybe the sprinkles are a showstopper (for every sprinkle I find, I SHALL KILL YOU!) So far, for me, Warhammer’s butter almond ice cream of PvP scenarios with the roasted hazelnuts of public quests and almonds of keep taking in the white fudge shell of World RvR are enough to compensate for the fairly average praline pecans of PvE. I’d better step away from the ice cream a moment before I get too hungry…

It’s the mix of options that really make WAR. If there’s nothing else particularly on, I gravitate towards scenarios. Hop on, hit the “Join Scenario” button, roam around doing anything else you fancy while waiting, then it’s off to a fearsome life or death struggle with XP and renown rewards at the end of it. Oddly enough this is very similar to how I played WoW for a while, queue up for a battleground, fly off and quest for a bit, and into the battleground when it pops. The main difference is that on my old WoW server 10 minutes was usually the minimum queue time, more often 15 minutes for Warsong or Arathi and 30 minutes or more for Alterac, whereas now they’ve added the ability to queue for all scenarios in a tier with a single click, something usually pops within a couple of minutes in WAR. Unless joining with a guild group, though, the increased frequency of PUG scenarios isn’t necessarily a good thing, and can merely speed the screen-punching results of repeated losses in wildly unbalanced teams (10 ranged DPS, 1 melee DPS and a tank, let’s go!) full of bozos, but that’s PUGs for you. Tier 2 was going fairly well, I think I had a winning record overall, but Tier 3 is a bit painful so far, possibly due to being comparatively under-level for now, and not helped by Tor Anroc being the most frequently popping scenario, in which Destruction manage to be The Dude With The Thing every single time.

Outside scenarios, world RvR has been quite fun too. It’s a bit hit and miss, obviously depending on who happens to be around, but our guild have stormed around en masse a few times taking a bunch of keeps in the process, and a few spontaneous rucks have developed around battlefield objectives. More often, though, it seems that large warbands eschew direct confrontation; a substantial number of human defenders make taking a keep a very difficult proposition, far easier, if you can manage to point everyone in generally the same direction, is to fly off to another zone and quickly storm an undefended keep; the attackers just need to shout “everyone to (zone name)!” in warband chat, and unless the other side has a pretty organised intelligence and communication network, they’ll have taken the keep before any serious opposition can be massed.

Public quests do seem to be suffering slightly from the popularity of scenarios, but I don’t think it’s because scenarios give better rewards necessarily (though the combination of renown points, experience points, and even money and loot from other players is a nice package), just that they’re much easier to get into. If the situation was reversed (ignoring the fact that it wouldn’t really work), if public quests were off in their own instances that you could queue for with the click of a button, and there were a couple of locations on the map you physically had to travel to for specific scenarios, I think more people would be in public quests much of the time. Scenarios only need to be slightly more popular for a positive feedback loop to kick in, you go to a public quest location, nobody else is there, so you join a scenario queue while plinking away at a few of the Stage 1 mobs; you get into a scenario, somebody else turns up for the public quest, nobody is there, they join a scenario queue… On the plus side, once you do get a group together, they still work very well; a guild group ran through all nine Elf public quests in chapters 10 - 12 last night, and had a rather splendid time.

Also in PvE-world are dungeons. I’ve only seen Gunbad, heading there a couple of times, and… it’s a dungeon. It’s not awful by any stretch, but it didn’t exactly leap out and perform an “I’m an amazing dungeon” tap dance while handing out free tickets to the wedding of its son. Perfectly functional, mosey on through taking on groups-of-three-Champion-mobs, a bit like yer bog standard WoW-type instance (one of the less interesting ones). Having public quests as you go is quite a nice touch, and it’s something to do as a group, nice for a bit of a change but not something I’d be queuing up for on a daily basis.

Finally, there’s general questing. Quests are the glue that binds everything together, and unfortunately for WAR, it’s more Pritt Stick than superglue. It starts off so very promisingly in your first zone, you have plenty of lovely quests. Quests to use siege weaponry so you get the hang of that, quests that reward you for taking part in a scenario, quests that overlap with public quests to nudge you gently in that direction, quests to kill mobs, quests to kill players, quests to scout the objectives in World RvR zones that encourage people in there for a bit of a rumble, quests that introduce you to and reward you for just about every aspect of the game. By Tier 2, though, and especially Tier 3, things start to come a little unstuck. M’colleague points out the problems in no uncertain terms, most fundamentally that the quest log (the otherwise concentratedly awesome Tome of Knowledge) is limited to 20 quests. The quests keep coming, and indeed multiply; you get quests that send you to the other racial zones, wherein there are more quests. There are quests to go to the Gunbad dungeon, and quests within the Gunbad dungeon, quests to capture Keeps…

Let’s say I’m merrily wandering around Empire lands, quest log stuffed to the gunwales with lovely quests in that zone, and I join a group for Gunbad. Flying over to the Marshes of Madness, I wonder if there might be some quests in the offing, and sure enough bright green “quest available” icons abound, the local Dwarfs more than keen to offload their petty chores onto you, what with being nailed to the floor and unable to move and everything. I start to grab them, but wait, quest log full, so I drop anything back in Empire lands (hoping I wasn’t halfway through anything particularly difficult to complete). A couple of the quests involve going to Gunbad, huzzah, and off we ride to the caves, where, in the pre-dungeon bar and grill (”would sir care for apéritif before plunging into the hellishly troll-infested bowels of the cave?”) a couple of the quests are completed, and another bunch are available, necessitating further quest dropping to fit them all in.

After a light and refreshing jaunt around pestilent nurglings and gaseous squigs, we finish a few quests, never get around to some others, pick up a couple of follow-up quests and call it a night. Next day is Guild Keep Storming Day, so we form up, and go and look for a Destruction keep or two to reclaim for the Emperor. Now a couple of weeks back I’d remembered to pick up the three quests to reclaim keeps, only Destruction weren’t playing that day, and everything was already in Order hands, so I’d since dropped those quests to fit others in, only tonight of course *everything* is in Destruction hands, but by the time I remember there’s a potential quest available it’s a bit late, I think it might be bad form to shout “wait, wait, I forgot the quest! Everybody stand on the ground floor, don’t worry Mr Keep Lord Sir, we’ll be up in a moment, I just need to nip back to Altdorf first…” (tanks stand around whistling, Witch Hunters adjust their hats for maximum jauntiness, the Bright Wizards stand on their own in a corner having a chat about the best way to treat burns and occasionally exploding).

Day three and a bunch of us decide to blast through some public quests, most of the others are over in the Elf zone so I fly and join them, and of course there’s another stackload of available quests, some of which probably overlap with the public quests and would provide nice bonus XP, cash and/or items, but it’s just too much of a pain to try and juggle everything.

Now this isn’t a terrible problem, it’s not something that makes me furious to the point of unsubscribing, but as Melmoth suggests, why do you need to talk to someone to start a quest? Just stick everything in the Tome of Knowledge automatically, tweak the interface a smidge so quests are divided up by zone, default view being the zone you’re in, track ‘em all on the map with the nice red splodges, make the on-screen tracker a little more intelligent to only show relevant immediately local quests, and Bob is your proverbial uncle. Does it make sense? How would you know that Neville T. Arbitrary really needed a box of vital supplies that had been on a wagon that lost a wheel in a rogue hamster attack somewhere in the north east? You’ve already got “Wanted” posters in games that give kill-quests, is it such a stretch that villages extend the system with lost and found, domestic help wanted and assorted other small ads? One click on the notice board, you jot everything relevant down in the Tome of Knowledge (three good leads for quests, one opportunity to make easy £££ at home and a possible bargain if the L-reg Ford Fiesta really is in running condition), and from there it’s hardly a huge leap to just *assume* the click, and automagically populate the Tome as you wander around the world, it’s no more immersion-breaking than joining scenario queues and randomly teleporting off to fight them. Granted if you did that for *everything* it would rather take the mystery out of it, you wouldn’t want to totally eliminate fun for Explorers by labelling everything with a big red arrow, so leave a good sprinkling of conventional quests and items to find around the world (as WAR does, with various tome unlocks for mobs and items all around the place), but the basic nuts n’ bolts “do this scenario, scout this objective, go to this place” stuff, there’s just no need for it. The supreme irony in all this, of course, is that somebody has effectively pointed this out before. Some “Paul Barnett” bloke, something like that? He really ought to implement those ideas in a game, it’d be great[1]…

[1] This is irony, by the way. Kill Collectors are in the game, and they do work, but there’s one of them standing next to seventeen other people with glowing green “git yer lovely quests here” icons, which if anything makes it all the more annoying when one of *those* is to kill ten of something you’ve just been mowing through.

A month in to an MMO, the question is usually “do I want to start subscribing now?”; for Warhammer, though, I don’t really have to decide for the best part of another month (not that it’s stopped me, look out for a State of the WAR Nation soon). Thanks to the headstart, grace periods and bonus days, I seem to have a subscription until early November, and as the EU billing system has only just become available I haven’t needed to hand over any credit card details to be playing. I doubt we’ll get any detailed official figures, much less broken down by region, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this caused a higher than average drop in EU subscribers as the month-with-the-box draws to an end just from impetus, you have to go all the way to the account page and type stuff into boxes to keep playing, whereas usually you’d have to go all the way there and click a couple of boxes to unsubscribe. Even if it’s not outright laziness, it’s all too easy for it to be one of those “oh yeah, must remember to…” jobs that have a habit of slipping through the gaps, and if your timing’s slightly off you end up subscribed to Age of Conan for an extra month. I had a quick look at the account screen, just to check it was up and running and see how long I had left before having to hand over some cash, and something else that struck me was a little tick box labelled something like “Recurring subscription?” (or similar); without actually trying the process, I presume the default option is that you just pay for your 1/3/6 months, rather than the usual set-up (in every other MMO I can think of) of “we’ll keep taking money until you tell us to stop”. I’m not sure if this is a laudably ethical decision or some legal requirement, but again it seems like the path of least resistance might be to stop playing, rather than keep paying. Or perhaps I’m massively overestimating the number of people for whom going to a web page and clicking a couple of links is a bit too much effort.

Phoenix Gate is a “capture the flag” scenario. The goal is to “capture” a “flag”; as you spring down from the starting location you may see an unguarded flag right in front of you, and think “well that doesn’t present much of a challenge in the capturing department”, but there’s a twist. There are *two* flags, and you have to capture the *other* one. Off you go!

You wanted more, huh? Oh, all right. If you’re a highly trained elite MMOG-squad with voice comms and codenames and you shout stuff like “ECHO TWO TO RED SECTOR”, I’ve got nothing for you I’m afraid. I’m assuming you’re solo or in a casual group, got bored of Mourkain Temple and figured your side have a marginally better chance of working out what “capture the flag” means as opposed to “run up the big hill in the middle pick up the thing at the top and take it to the three shield-y things around the map”. Advice on group make up and team tactics is therefore pointless, though you’re very welcome to try and co-ordinate your side. Perhaps offer a suggestion in scenario chat like “follow me let’s get their flag”, though bear in mind people will pay about as much attention to you as to a politician saying “honestly, the banks are fine, please don’t take all your money out of savings accounts and shove it in an old sock”.

So, on your own there are two useful things you can do in Phoenix Gate: stand by your flag, or run towards the enemy flag. See how this list does not include “wander around the middle of the map attacking the enemy”? Is there a loading screen tip that says “In Phoenix Gate, why not wander around the middle of the map attacking the enemy?” Did everyone else on the server get a memo about putting cover sheets on TPS reports, oh, and by the way, wander around the middle of the map attacking the enemy? If you want a big old ruck, head in to Mourkain Temple (and follow this strategy guide), if you’re in Phoenix Gate, head for one flag or the other. You’ll get more renown, the respect of your peers, and chocolate biscuits. Except for the biscuits. And sometimes the other two.

Standing by your flag, then, or to use the technical jargon: “defending”. A striking feature of Phoenix Gate is the socking great wall in front of your flag, with a fairly narrow gap. In front of this wall are siege weapons. Clearly what you should do is bombard the enemy from afar with these siege weapons, then fall back behind the wall in good order as they approach, blockading the gap with your tanks and visiting much carnage upon the enemy as they struggle to get past you to seize your flag, right? Wrong, I’m afraid. Press “M” and have a quick look at the map. If you’re a military history buff, think of the wall as the Maginot Line, with an undefended Ardennes either side of it. If you’re not a military history buff, think of the wall as a really impressive and formidable wall, with a big gap either side of it. My first time in Phoenix Gate, I was down by the wall doing my best Sir Ian, Sir Ian, Sir Ian, action, wizard “You shall not pass!” impression when a message popped up that an enemy player had taken our flag. Slightly baffled, I turned around and saw said player making a run for it, gave chase, but was too late to do anything except watch them vanish around the side of the wall. This taught me a valuable lesson: there are gaps either side of the wall. Can you see a theme at all? When defending, you really need to stay back by your flag, in case the dastardly and underhanded enemy don’t just run straight down the middle of the map. Also watch out if, while dutifully standing near your flag, a lone opponent tries to lure you and any fellow defenders away, there might well be a Witch Hunter/Witch Elf cunningly concealed, waiting to nab the flag and leg it as soon as your back is turned.

If you don’t feel like standing near your flag, run towards the enemy flag (or “attack”, to slip back into argot). Unless the enemy are fiendishly cunning, or have read this guide, chances are they’re wandering around the middle of the map attacking people, or possibly defending the gap in the wall in front of their flag, so don’t dash up the middle and hope for the best, take a little detour around the edges of the wall. Personally I prefer working around the right hand side (as you run towards it); the enemy spawn on the left hand side, so there’s less chance you’ll bump into someone. If you’re very lucky, there won’t be an enemy player anywhere near, in which case grab the flag and leg it. If you’re quite lucky, there’ll be a guard or two intently watching the gap in the wall; grab the flag and leg it a bit quicker as they’ll probably notice the really big message telling them you stole the flag and give chase. If you’re slightly unlucky, there’ll be a solitary guard at the flag itself; kill ‘em if you can, otherwise wait for reinforcements, or throw yourself to a futile but heroic death. If you’re really unlucky and they’re guarding the flag in force, you’re in trouble. A diversion might pull people away long enough for a sneaky Witch Hunter/Elf to nab the flag itself, or if you’re an Elf try taking your clothes off (if a Dark Elf, put a load of clothes on), and saunter up to the flag saying “hi guys, I’m on your side definitely don’t worry about that coloured name thing over my head, and the boss says I should take this flag somewhere safe, OK?” Though as you can’t speak directly to the other side, you’ll have to try and convey it through the medium of interpretive emoting. Good luck with that. Should you happen to grab the flag, head back the way you came, and hope you make it back to your own flag without being nobbled from behind (painful, that). If by some miracle the other side haven’t captured your flag, interact with the interact-able thing slightly behind the flag to get the capture (not your own flag, as in many other games; thanks to whoever it was that pointed that out the first time I was carrying the enemy flag and desperately trying to interact with our own).

There’s the basics, then. Stand by your flag, or run towards the enemy flag. Now on to the advanced stage: what about if you, or one of your heroic band, have picked up the enemy flag *and* they’ve picked up yours? Well, what you should do is… stand by your flag carrier, or run towards the enemy flag carrier. See the difference there? If you have their flag, I recommend standing somewhere around your own base, close to potentially respawning reinforcements and your flag area so you can swiftly get the capture once your flag is returned. I don’t recommend pelting off up the map in a desperate bid to get killed and hand the flag back to the enemy as soon as possible in the charge of the ADHD brigade. If one of your team has the flag, either stand near them and guard/heal them for all you’re worth (check the map if you’re not sure; chances are, the dot moving as rapidly as possible away from their base and towards your base is the flag carrier), or head off to find the enemy flag carrier and kill ‘em, ideally in an epic and magnificent fashion.

So please, please don’t just run around the middle of the map attacking people. That’s what Mourkain Temple is for, or world RvR. Or chucking out time outside nightclubs.

All WAR and no carjacking make Jack a dull sociopath, as the old saying goes. Actually, on reflection, additional carjacking doesn’t really help there, it just exacerbates the problem if anything. Old sayings, huh? What are they good for? Anyway, splendid as Warhammer is, and much as I’m still enjoying it, I’m not so mono-game-ous that my head isn’t turned by forthcoming releases swanking down the street in their brightly coloured zoot suits, snapping their fingers to the crazy jazz sounds coming from the coffee houses where love is frothy and milk is free.

The prospect of a Blogospheric outing to the Eurogamer Expo and recent Rock, Paper, Shotgun and PC Gamer podcasts have unleashed a veritable maelstrom of gaming possibility, so I’m going to peer into the far distant future starting with the time known as “the end of the month”, when flying cars and jetpacks will surely be commonplace, then going further still into what futurologists are calling “early 2009″, when surely there will be no more mistreatment of elephants (possibly because there will be no elephants). From these crazy distant times, a quick rundown of Games What I’m Looking Forward To In The Distant Future Approximately Ordered By Chronological Release Date That Coincidentally Happens To Be Order Of Sequel-osity Too, or GWILFTITDFAOBCRDTCHTBOOST as I’ll never refer to it in the future:

Kicking off with something wildly original, not at all sequel-y and apparently coming Soon, World of Goo. Despite Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s lukewarm reception of this, I might pick it up anyway. I haven’t tried any WiiWare yet, and this looks like rather a good place to start, though there’s a suggestion that the European Wii release will be as a retail box instead, I can’t seem to find any concrete details one way or the other.

Having enjoyed the original Far Cry (especially before the Trigens) and Crysis (especially before the aliens), I’m looking forward to trying Far Cry 2 at the Eurogamer Expo. Though if you start encountering robo-gazelles and cyborg hippos about halfway through, it might be slightly annoying. Or possibly brilliant.

Stepping up the sequel count, Fallout 3, due at the end of October and also displaying at the Expo. Now I may be about to commit heresy but… I never played Fallout, and couldn’t get into Fallout 2. After reading widespread adulation for the series, I picked up Fallout 2 cheap a few years after its release, got killed a lot in early combat, and gave up on it. As a result I don’t have a particular attachment to the setting, but I liked the Elder Scroll series (even if I’d run out of motivation for the main plots about halfway through), and I think the first person style could work well in a post-apocalyptic setting.

Up to the Fourquels, I’d missed that Grand Theft Auto IV has got an offical PC release date of November 21st, so huzzah! for that, though it does look like it might clash with the fourth Guitar Hero game, Guitar Hero World Tour (now with extra drums and vocals). Rockstar game vs rock star impersonation game, which to play first?

Finally, out to 2009: Empire: Total War, the fifth in the series. All the fun of the previous games, but more muskets, ships, rakes and gentlemen. What’s not to like? Though Medieval 2 was good, it did tend to bog down into an awful lot of sieges that weren’t really as fun as open battles, so a bit more gunpowder should help there. The 1700 - 1800 time period also just overlaps with the latter parts of Neal Stephenson’s peerless Baroque Cycle, a fine excuse to go back and re-read that (also reminds me that his latest, Anathem, is just out, must keep an eye out for the paperback release).

On top of all those, City of Heroes Issue 13 is due before too long, with Issue 14 hopefully in early 2009, and I’ve still got a bunch of games on the “must get around to sometime” list, headed up by Call of Duty 4, STALKER: Clear Skies (sounds like recent patches have fixed some pretty major bugs in that, so it’s not just MMOs that benefit from the three month rule) and the “Enhanced” edition of The Witcher. There’s just not enough hours in our day…

Catching up on a bit of a feed backlog, I came across an interesting piece from Spinks on Book of Grudges: “Sexism and Swordmasters”. Making a mental note to wander over and post a stiumulating and intellectual comment (or possibly just to shout “bloke in a dress!” a la Eddie Izzard), I carried on down the feeds to Rock, Paper, Shotgun’s Sunday Papers roundup, which linked off to another piece touching on robe-wearing tanks, “MetaBalance or ‘The Cool Factor’”, and there’s a comment there from Harvey Smith linking back to a talk of his on game avatars. Slightly linktastic I know, but all Quite Interesting, honestly. Go and read them. GO ON! You may drink your weak lemon drink as you read, or save it for later. I shall drink mine now.

Stimulating and intellectual commentary is rendered somewhat void by that lot, I’m still digesting the multi-layered construct of in-game identity even without getting into gender security, so I’ll just ramble a bit about WAR instead.

Destruction certainly don’t lack for Chosen and Black Orcs, but Order don’t seem critically short of tanks, on my server at least. Nordenwatch could be a nightmare for the Empire at low levels due to a combination of less movement between racial areas in Tier 1 and limited power availability; standard procedure was for your group of 8 Bright Wizards, 3 Witch Hunters and a Warrior Priest to seize the first objective, run towards the fortress, see a wave of Chosen and Marauders pouring up the hill backed up by a couple of Zealots and a Magus, cast your one DoT and start on a fireball, die horribly, repeat. By Tier 2, though, with a slightly wider range of abilities including shackles and a decent mix of races showing up in scenarios I’ve been winning more than losing, on one occasion feeling slightly sorry for the lone Zealot trying to keep 8 tanks and a couple of DPS classes alive… “Too many tanks will cause you scenario problems, just as sure as none at all”, as I think Oscar Wilde said on his posthumously released album.

I also got to wondering if the Big Scaryness of the Destruction tanks might actually work against them on occasion. With my extensive PvP training I’ve evolved a highly strategic and incredibly complex targeting mechanism, a closely guarded trade secret that depends on the health percentages of all participants in the combat, their relative positions, timing on global cooldowns, phase of the moon and whether the day has a “y” in its name, but which can very generally be summed up as: “Not the tank, NOT THE TANK!” It needs repeating at higher volume, for just as in Team Fortress 2 your first instinct is to shoot the huge bloke with the really big gun when you should actually be taking out the medic standing behind him, so when a socking great Orc or spiky Chaos chap is pelting towards you it needs a bit of discipline to ignore him and go for the healers. Once you’ve got over the initial panic of “AAAAAHHHH, get ‘im, hit him with a broom, ruffle his hair up, hit him with a bucket, AAAAHHHHH”, though, the contrast between the Destruction tanks and their other classes does make picking targets quite easy. A quick Order Guide To Attacking Stuff That Isn’t A Tank:
1) Greenskins. The big one is the tank, kill the little ones first. Really kill anything with a staff who shoots green beams.
2) Dark Elves. No tanks here. Kill them all, Khaine will know his own. If they’re not wearing clothes and standing next to you (or you can’t see them), they’re melee DPS. If they’re not wearing clothes and standing far away, they’re ranged DPS. If they’re wearing something that covers more skin than two flannels and some dental floss, they’re a healer. (For any Strictly Come Dancing fans, the healers are dressed for ballroom, DPS for latin. Apparently. I wouldn’t know myself.) Watch out for sneaky healers who’ve taken their clothes off to masquerade as DPS.
3) Chaos. Big blokes with big swords or shields are tanks. Ignore them. About the only class on the Destruction side you might get confused for tanks in a mass ruck are Chaos melee DPS, but look out for the weird arms. Ranged DPS, the standing-on-a-floating-disc business is a dead giveaway, which by process of elimination leaves healers as the weird looking ones who aren’t on a floating disc and not running towards you going “GRRR I’M QUITE CROSS AND CHAOTIC”.

So there we go, all very easy. For Destruction, I guess it isn’t quite so straightforward; it’s not rocket surgery or anything, but the three Dwarf classes are at least the same height rather than Ironbreakers drawing extra attention to themselves by strapping on a pair of stilts, and non-Shadow Warrior Elves do look a bit similar in their robes (unless they’ve taken their clothes off to try and blend in with the Dark Elves). The Empire have The One With The Sword And Gun And Hat With A Buckle On It, The Fiery One On Fire and The Other One With The Hammer, but as none of them are tanks anyway it doesn’t matter so much.

I guess I’m just an old DPSer at heart. After being a Blaster (ranged DPS) in City of Heroes and a Rogue (melee DPS) in World of Warcraft, I tried branching out with classes like a Captain (melee Buff/Healer/Tank/DPS/Pet/Coffee Maker/Floor Wax) in Lord of the Rings Online and a Conqueror (melee Tank(ish)/DPS/Buff/Egg Slicer) in Age of Conan, but they didn’t really click. Maybe they were too radical a departure; much as you should make the transition from accountancy to lion taming via easy steps, starting with, say, insurance, I did rather enjoy the Tempest of Set in Age of Conan, nominally a “Priest” class but really a lightning-packing ball of electrical death with a couple of heals you might like to use, if you remember them. I’ve also been enjoying playing a couple of Corruptors in City of Villains, Kinetics and Radiation, packing the same main attacks as a Blaster but with a variety of buffs, debuffs and heals as a secondary powerset instead of “yet more attacks just in case all those other attacks weren’t attack-y enough”.

“In times of trouble, go with what you know”, though, as tanks would randomly say in Scorched Earth (a really nifty old artillery-type game), so for Warhammer Online I decided to head back to the comfy old sofa of DF^HPS. Ranged or melee, though? With the RvR-centric nature of Warhammer, I thought about how similar situations worked in WoW. Back in day, after they introduced “honour” and rewards for PvP kills, but before battlegrounds, if you weren’t on a PvP server and wanted to boost your rank you’d head for Tarren Mill. There the Massed Pipes & Drums of Her Majesty’s Royal Alliance would line up in the vague area of a horde of the, er, Horde, and both sides would glare menacingly at each other, lofting an occasional arrow or spell at anyone foolish enough to step a bit too close, until a melee class snapped and went charging over the top, to be inevitably mown down by the machine gun of the Harrow fullback (or the combined spells, arrows and bullets of the other side). Stay far enough away, though, and you were safe as houses (or the titular elephant). As a stealthily sneaky type, the opportunity would occasionally present itself to creep around and pick off an incautious loner, but after one or two of those everybody would bunch up, making surprise attacks an exercise in insta-death (for the attacker, not their intended victim). If you got bored of the standoff, and could persuade one of your own mages or priests to wander around on their own like Penelope Pitstop shouting “hey-ulp, hey-ulp, poor l’il ol’ me is lost”, then when a Horde Rogue, unable to resist such a temptingly cloth-armoured morsel, attacked from stealth for an easy kill, you could turn the tables by leaping out and stunning them in a cunning reverse-gank. Course you had to be careful in case there was a second stealthed enemy Rogue waiting to pull off the double-reverse-gank, unless you in turn were accompanied by a Druid friend for the double-reverse-gank with cat-druid twist, though they in turn might have had an extra Druid… Anyway, generally it wasn’t a whole heap o’ fun for melee. Battlegrounds and small group action were much better; if the 40-a-side Alterac Valley battleground bogged down into a massed PvP ruck somewhere in the middle it would all go a bit Tarren Mill, but that seldom happened as the two sides rushed past each other for the NPC bosses. Having looked around at some of the Warhammer details massed general PvP looked a distinct possibility, which was a strong contributory factor in choosing a ranged DPS class, and setting fire to stuff is always good so Bright Wizard was a natural choice.

It’s still early days, but the choice has been vindicated so far. I’ve been doing fairly well in scenarios, not getting obliterated quite as quickly as I feared (though, in common with most Bright Wizards I suspect, occasional self-detonations don’t help on that score), and last night I got involved in my first major world RvR rumble. After a splendid bit of Corrupting with the League of Evil in CoV, I just popped in to WAR for ten minutes to fill the last smidgen of a chapter’s influence bar to claim a wizard’s staff (with a knob on the end), and after reporting back to the Rally Master I had a quick look at the map and noticed a couple of quest objectives in the vicinity, so while I was there… One was the usual “go scout this World RvR objective”, which in previous zones I’d fulfilled by legging it to the general vicinity of the objective hoping to avoid other players, regardless of who was controlling it, and running away again (particularly quickly if it was a bit red). Getting closer to this one, though, a terrifying wall of red players suddenly hove into view, and facing off against them, a similar sized group of Order. Looked like we’d gotten bored of Destruction usually holding the Ostland keeps, and saddled us up a posse. Signing up with an open warband, I took my place in the battle lines, and found Tarren Mill-esque fights work much better with a range of flaming doom to fling. With somewhere from 50-100 players involved lag started playing a part too, never cripplingly bad, but it would certainly have added to the frustrations of a melee class. Me, I just went with “if in doubt, mash ‘target closest’ then ‘fireball’ a lot”. Weight of numbers drove Destruction back, we claimed the objective, I got a good chunk of a renown rank and the quest done, not a bad night’s work!

For a while now I’ve been marking items in Google Reader thinking “ooh, must come back and check that out properly”. What I’ve neglected to do is ever actually go back and check them out again, so I’ve resolved, most firmly, to maybe have a quick look now and again to at least de-star slightly more than I star, otherwise by 2017 I’ll have roughly six billion articles I really, really must read. And a good thing too, when one of the first things I get back to is an RPS article about Music Catch, a most excellent game of music. And catching. Vaguely along the lines of Audiosurf and stuff of that ilk, in the sense that it involves music and waving a mouse around, the online version features some nice, calming piano that’ll be just the ticket for winding down after running around setting fire to a bunch of stuff. Lovely.

Warhammer is all very well for violence, conflict, life-or-death struggle and light raffia work, but sometimes you just want to sit back, have a nice cup of tea and KICK OUT THE JAMS, PERSON WHO ENGAGES IN INAPPROPRIATE MATRIARCHAL RELATIONS!

[This post has been classified as ‘12′ by the BBFC for mild satirical references to the edited versions of songs in Guitar Hero games]

Though some of you foreign types have been Rocking in a Band since somewhere around the early 14th century (using game-time, “last year” if you prefer conventional chronology), and are even now Rocking in a Band 2 if you’re of the XBoxier persuasion, the Wii version of the first Rock Band has only just come out here in the UK. Bollocks to that, if you’ll forgive my Sex Pistols, but salvation is to hand with Guitar Hero World Tour only a couple of months away, and they’ve just released the full song list. Plenty of lovely rock there, including a re-recording of the the titular MC5 classic, just leaving the ever so slightly Herculean task of persuading my wife that a plastic drum kit would be a lovely accessory in the living room…

A couple of weeks back I was bemoaning the problems of getting together with people in Massively Difficult To Group Up Multiplayer Games, a subject Van Hemlock and Jon covered in their most excellent podcast. The silver lining of that particular cloud was finding a great bunch of people to go Warhammer-ing with, and initial grouping experiences have gone rather well.

A problem with a quest-focused game is that once you get a group of people on the same server, playing the same faction, of vaguely comparable levels, in the same (in-game) location, you need to work out what to do. With a couple of people it’s not so bad, but when you’re up to five or six…
“Let’s do a quest!”
“OK… which one?”
“Have you got ‘Tweaking the Ogre’s Nose’?”
“Yes!”
“No!”
“Can you share it?”
“Sharing… you’re out of range, Geoff, come here… you’re not eligible, Steve… you’ve already done it, Kev”
“What was the pre-req?”
“I can’t remember, maybe ‘Stealing the Vampire’s Biscuits’?”
“No, I haven’t done that but I’ve got the first quest”
“Well let’s go and kill boars for ‘Yet Another Example Of Villagers Being Too Lazy To Go Hunting Themselves’”
“Done that, I need slightly angrier boars for ‘They’ve Got More Boar Meat Than They Can Ever Eat They’re Just Setting These Quests Out Of Porcinephobic Spite Now’”
“Well we’ll set off that way anyway and get onto your bit of the quest next”
“Hey, look over there, the body of a missing village, I need that for ‘It’s Either Going To Be A Corpse Somewhere Or An Escort Mission’”
“Me too!”
“And me!”
“Me as well!”
*Geoff clicks on the corpse, completes the mission, it despawns*
“Huh…”

Warhammer has no shortage of the usual go there, take a message to her, find him, kill ten of them quests, more than enough to fill up a quest log, but crucially, in a group, there are two much easier alternatives. Firstly public quests, covered in bags of detail elsewhere, essentially allow anyone in the vague vicinity to pile in and contribute towards something, and don’t require much co-ordination past “everyone to the burning windmill!” Better still, though, are scenarios. Lower levels get a boost, so pretty much anyone of any level can join up. You can join a queue for a scenario from anywhere in a zone, and when the scenario is finished, you end up back where you started. Anybody can sign their entire party up for a scenario, regardless of where everybody else is, so you can give a shout on guild chat to see if anybody fancies a few scenarios, invite pretty much anyone that replies, and click the “join scenario” button. The awesome burden of party leadership is lifted from your shoulders:
“What level do I need to be?”
“Doesn’t matter!”
“Where do I need to go?”
“Anywhere you like, just click ‘Ready’ when the scenario box pops up!”
While queueing, everyone can carry on doing regular quests, training, shopping, anything else they fancy, then hop in for a fearsome Order versus Destruction clash when you get to the front of the queue, then back to whatever else you were up to. Last night we had a party covering all the races, so after a couple of rounds of Nordenwatch, for a bit of a change an Elf signed us up for their scenario, and it was off to the Altar of Khaine, without even needing to fly to another zone. The one area of leadership I might need to slightly work on is tactics within the scenarios, I’m not sure “Err, just run around and kill stuff!” features prominently in Sun Tzu’s Art of War. Still, everyone was laid back enough that I don’t think they minded not being a highly drilled platoon of fearsome death, and even without totally crushing the forces of Destruction under our heels a fun time was had by all.

So the European Warhammer Online beta didn’t quite go entirely to plan, as covered in far more detail elsewhere (particularly Book of Grudges, doing a splendid job with news and updates, plus cute skunks). It’s a bit of shame, I’d rather hoped to have a bit of a potter around on Sunday afternoon, but such is life.

On the plus side, I got to catch up with a few other things, so some brief reviewlets:

UFO: Enemy Unknown was my main gaming diversion, having just picked it up via Steam, still a wonderful game. No server problems or anything either, though the “fifteen year rule” is possibly a slightly extreme extension of the “three month rule”. I briefly fired up XCom: Apocalypse, but where the gameplay of UFO is somehow engraved in my brain I couldn’t quite remember what all the Apocalypse buttons did, so I’ll leave that until I can be bothered to dig out the PDF of the manual (or possibly the original paper manual, if I still have it in my Pile O’ Manuals).

Doctor Who: Logopolis, recorded from a SciFi Doctor Who weekend a while back. What in the name of buggery sod was that all about? Block Transfer Computation, mumbling weirdos holding back entropy to save the universe, a vital component being a replica of an earth computer circa 1981? Baffling, though enjoyably Doctor-Who-y.

Runaways by Brian K. Vaughn. I still have a big list of comics from the past ten years to catch up on, and somewhere around the top is “everything by Brian K. Vaughn”. Finally got around to the first volume of Runaways, and it was great. The story of a group of teenagers who discover their parents are supervillains, I’d been slightly hesitant about picking it up in case it was a bit Marvel: The Hollyoaks Years, and I really wasn’t sure I’d warm to the characters at first, but a few issues in I was hooked. Really effective ending as well, I’m looking forward to borrowing the second volume to see where they take it.