Massively's write-up on the recently announced expansion for Warhammer Online, Land of the Dead, sounds exciting. Based on their description at least, it sparks an interest in returning to Warhammer Online. Not for the new classes. I don’t care about new classes. I liked my Warrior Priest and Bright Wizard just fine. What I didn’t like was the PVE temptation without the player-bodies to fulfill the desire. I was constantly faced with either going to do PVE (Public Quest) where ever they were being done, regardless of the ones I actually needed at the time or wanted to do.
From day one, I was excited about and drooling to be in T4 so that I could do PQs in Praag. I loved the look of the zone. It was my racial zone. As a Lowbie Misfit I’d defended keeps in that zone. I was excited about being able to quest and PQ running around in that beautiful zone. The whole time I was in T4, I didn’t get to do a single grouped PQ in Praag. Not ever! Not one! The ones I did were solo which meant all I could do was grind Stage I. It was that experience that finally broke my spirit to play WAR. At level 35.5, I quit.
If Lands of the Dead (LOTD) will be a mega zone open to a wide range of player levels and interweaves PVE with the constant threat of PVP that sounds exciting. If it will be well populated, provide XP and some mechanic for earning gear rewards fabulous. If LOTD provides populated activity most any time of the day, that would be spectacular. How this does or doesn’t tie into the overarching zone conflict I don’t really care. Keeps flip too easily. There’s little value in maintaining them as a guild so I could really care less. And from all that I’ve read, there’s still a lag problem with massive battles. End game city sieges seem to require a large gear grind exercise/cock-block so I wouldn’t be bothered doing that anyway.
My question and concern would become that with the issues currently plaguing other areas of the game, what happens to the rest of WAR if LOTD is as good as it sounds? What happens to the rest of the game content if Mythic strikes lightening twice and reproduces a brilliant Age of Camelot Darkness Falls within in Warhammer? Doesn’t this potentially empty out the rest of the world? Wouldn’t it have the same affect as the Scenarios and become Scenarios Only Part II? I could see players going into LOTD and queuing Scenarios to pop back and forth between the two, while the rest of the world goes ever more silent. Mythic is between such a rock-and-a-hard-place with WAR. Any false move can further offset the fragile balance of content usage.
Scenarios were great fun but I didn’t want to do that all of the time. Realm-vs.-Realm is fun. However, it gets less fun defending the same keeps repeatedly. It’s not so much fun riding back and forth and flying this-way-n-that for skirmishes. Public Quests were fun IF you could get a group for the chapters you needed. The content in WAR when considered independently were all fun. My problem was the spotty, awkward and run-thither-and-yon required to engage in any sort of SUSTAINABLE fun. Finding 15 to 30 minutes of engaging entertainment in WAR was easy. Unfortunately, stretching the fun into a couple of hours and across a few days of playing time, was extremely problematic.
If LOTD comes in and balls it all the best aspects of WAR into a single zone, so be it. It might be enough for me to re-subscribe and check it out. But if it’s that good and that successful, WTF happens to the rest of that game?
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