Friday, March 28, 2008

News from the WAR front

Oh I'm so clever with my post titles.

Anyway, two big points of information on Warhammer Online, one of them bad and one of them good.

First I'll start with the Bad News: Mark Jacobs announced that WAR has been delayed to a potential release date of Q3 2008. This is disappointing, but altogether not unexpected, news to me. While obviously I was hoping to enjoy WAR sooner rather than later, I really didn't expect it to get released in Q2. As we were coming into the new year, all the information coming out of Beta on WAR's progress made it seem like a Q2 release date was unlikely. Though, with the rate they've been progressing, I believe a Q3 release date is possible, but even if it gets pushed back to Q4, that's fine. I'd rather have a good game later than a bad game now.

Then there's the Good News: Collector's Edition is now available for Preorder! Okay, first off we'll touch on what we get for just getting the Collector's Edition. There's the usual gamut of stuff, like Art books and little pretty things like figurines and whatnot. Then there's the interesting stuff... the in-game stuff:
  • Twelve unique heads available to CE people only. Two for each race... one male and one female except Greenskins who are all male, so it'll probably be a unique Orc head and a unique Goblin head.
  • The Libram of Insight: An item that you can use that has three charges. Each time you use a charge you get a 10% bonus modifier to XP gained, and each charge lasts for an hour.
  • The final bonus is really the icing on the cake that ensured that I would get the CE: Twelve unique quests only available to those who have the Collector's Edition. One PvE and One PvP quest per race (though available to anyone on that faction). I expect these quests to be low level, so the rewards don't have a huge impact on endgame. Either way, each quest comes with a title that will be unique to those who have the CE. Honestly, even if these quests had no rewards or titles, it would still be enough for me to want it just for more quests!
Now, all this would have been more than enough (hell a non-combat pet is enough for me to get the WoW CEs). But that's not enough for EA Mythic. They are also giving you, if you preorder it:
  • Guaranteed access to the Open Beta for WAR.
  • A "Live game head start". They don't really clarify how this will work. Either you will be able to keep your Open Beta Characters or you will be able to start playing WAR on the normal servers a few days early. Either way, it's pretty damn sweet.
Finally two more in-game items:
  • The "Rittenbach's Portable Camp" which allows you to "Rest your weary soul and heal your wounds between battles" whatever the hell that means.
  • One of three "Bands" (rings?) with different names and effects depending on which store you preorder the CE from. They will all "increase your stats" and give you a buff that gives you a chance to do a certain type of damage. The catch is all these bands are only usable in PvE. Sounds fine by me.
Anyway, I'm totally sold on this. Not that I wasn't already, but now I really am! WOOO WAR!

1 comment:

Vanifae said...

I pre-ordered this as well, I am still on he fence about the game, but many of my friends are interested in trying it out so I will give it a chance. I really want to see what the Blackguard will be like...