Thursday, January 29, 2009

Call to Arms and Bitter Rivals

UPDATE

Winged Nazgul, in the comments, gives us this. If this is true, it should be a very interesting spring/summer.

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In a recent Herald news story about Comic Con, there was a hidden nugget of information:

"lots of new info about Call to Arms, Bitter Rivals, and the new careers"

We pretty much knew about the new careers, but what are these other 2 systems mentioned? Today is the announcement day, so it seems like a perfect time for some good old speculation to pass the time.

Call to Arms. To me, this sounds like a RvR information system. A while back, Mark mentioned they did want to add ways for players to get a better view of where the war was taking place. This is one of the features I have wanted for a while. My game time is limited, so I don't want to mess around looking for fights.

One piece I hope Call to Arms includes is a way to get to keeps in order to defend them. Information is great, but it is of limited use if they already have the keep surrounded. The link provides some more information on my thoughts.

Bitter Rivals. I am going to guess this will allow you to set opposing players or guilds as rivals. Anytime you defeat them in battle you will get a bonus of some sort. Perhaps this ties into the Fame system Mark mentioned a while back? While bonuses are nice, I hope the Tome of Knowledge is heavily involved in tracking information about your fights with rivals.

I would also predict there will be a cooldown on setting your rival list, as some smart add-on will just change it to whomever you are fighting. It should also not apply to scenarios, as everyone dies in scenarios many times.

Both systems sound promising just due to their names and I am looking forward to actual information soon.

What do you think Call to Arms and Bitter Rivals will be?

8 comments:

The subtitles of the next couple Infinity Ward games. ~.^

Call to arms could be somewhat more literal, allowing you to invite people to instantly travel to zones where the keep is under attack, that you were already in. Or it could be a way of temporarily beefing up a fortress' defenses with NPCs. Even more left field, it could be an increase in guild size, a method of buffing group xp when grouped with guildies, etc...

Bitter rivals... could be racial pairings giving better xp to their counterpart on death. Or, even better, the ability for a guild to set another guild as their rivals and gain extra guild xp from killing them.

Of course all of this is my talking out of thin air just from the titles of the systems.

I think Bitter Rivals is going to be the Choppa/Slayer intro event!

Hmm, I had not thought of the travel angle or the intro event... both are quite possible.

Eurogamer sez:


GOA has announced that a great big "Call to Arms" update for Warhammer Online will go live from March.

Top of the bill are re-instated classes Orc Choppa and Dwarf Slayer. Both are mirrors of one another: berserk, up-close brawlers with little regard for their own safety.

These will be introduced properly in March, but players can get a head start with the new classes by completing a live Bitter Rivals event slightly earlier. This event opens a Chaos-themed Twisting Tower RvR battleground, too.

The other big feature will be a Land of the Dead zone, home to an enormous new Tomb Kings dungeon that Mythic claims to be the spiritual successor to Darkness Falls from previous MMO Dark Age of Camelot. Here, remember, all factions fought openly - albeit after starting from separate corners of the immense underground chasm.

There were also tokens to collect from hellish enemies that could be spent on equipment sold by imps. And the further down players descended the much more difficult life became, culminating in an enormous boss encounter with the Legion - a screen-filling monster made up from thousands of corpses.

The Land of the Dead will be openly contested, then, and whoever controls the area will unlock the numerous public quests and instances associated with the zone.

The Land of the Dead opens fully in June, but realms will need to complete two previous live events for access. The first, Beyond the Sands, has yet to be detailed, but will happen in April.

The second event, Rise of the Tomb Kings, unlocks the Land of the Dead for each faction, and takes place in May.

On top of all this, Mythic will be finally implementing official Warhammer Online forums, adding extra Realm Wars functionality to the website, and offering a free trial versions of the game.

Plus, this Call to Arms update is just the first of the "live expansions" planned for Warhammer Online.

The previous was copy/pasted from a non-WAR forum I frequent so its validity is still to be determined. Originally from:

http://www.scrapheap-challenge.com/viewtopic.php?p=729083#729083

Here is the real link: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/goa-unveils-enormous-war-update

Sounds awesome and could be legit :)

It sounds very reasonable. If it's not legit, I hope the real announcement is just as good!

Confirmed.

http://www.warhammeronline.com/call_to_arms/index.php
http://www.warhammeronline.com/pressreleases/20090129.php

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