Thursday, December 08, 2011

Wrath of Biscuit

 Is it a good sign for your game when a well-liked and respected game previewist like TotalBiscuit calls it no fun at all, disgusting and disgraceful?

Probably not. Those aren't things you put in quotations on a movie poster. Well, maybe if you film episodes of 'Bang Bus' or something. But my point remains. I'm going to assume Mr. Biscuit thought there was room for improvement in WOH.

Now, to be completely honest, this isn't the first time I've seen someone playing a Mythic game and sound like they were having their testicles forcibly stomped upon. That exasperated exhale of disdain you hear in that video was like the soundtrack of my guild many nights while playing WAR.

But here's the weird twist - even with my general lack of faith in the competence of the studio at this point and my painful burnout from the game after playing beta from day 1 - the things he brutally slams the game for are the things I, and a really good hunk of WAR PvP'ers, specifically want out of a game.


There's a few obvious things to note here.
One, this isn't a game for TotalBiscuit. Obviously. It's not a game for a lot of people. To quote myself:

 It is a lobby game with instanced PvP -- if you liked to queue up for battlegrounds and scenarios in other games, that's all this game is. I'm sure some people may find that notion repellent, but I think it's a beautiful thing.

 TB dismisses the game as 'microwave pvp', a game that you play at lunch, like it's the worst idea he's ever heard. Like that idea killed his whole family, and now he will stop at nothing to destroy that idea with fire.

The irony is, that's exactly what I, and a lot of guildies, are looking for in a game. I don't want to play a "quick" 55 minute game of keepaway capture the flag. I don't want to farm an entire continent of salamanders before I can even think about becoming a burden to my friends. Quoting myself again:
The nice thing about it is that you can just log-in for 15 minutes, a half-hour, whatever, play with your buddies and have some fun and not have to grind 500 hours to hit rank XX or do 8 hour raid runs that require homework. That's really all I want out of the game at this point. The strategy will never be about using a small handful of abilities, it's about synergy as a group and figuring out what the other 2 groups are doing. And killing them.

He was quite right that this game is in bad shape right now -- it does really reinforce the idea that it's not a game of nuance and teamwork when he literally finishes at the top of leaderboard in his second match after doing nothing but randomly key-press a kill streak on the Black Orc.



It is hard to like a game that's literally all about trying to be the become the best on the battlefield when, as TB pointed out, anyone with the most hazy understanding of MMO games can let his cat prance around on his keyboard and somehow get a gold star for being Match MVP.

That's a legitimate concern, people were screaming at Mythic to bring faceroll characters and shallow, skill-less abilities in line. Now a problem they should have seen miles away has been excruciatingly highlighted by one of the most popular game reviewers berating their game to 200k+ views already. There's just no real rhyme or reason to playing if characters buttonmash through matches like that.

And, again, it wasn't hard to figure out there was a problem there.

That said, I still really think, even as I've become more and more jaded with recent iterations, that WOH is a game with promise for many of you guys that read this. TotalBiscuit can malign the game for not having skillshots, but if there was a system of Morale ability skillshots and CC breaks implemented in a coming patch (like I've been fucking asking for) does that suddenly transform the game from being a disgrace to being a legitimate pro e-sport?

Probably not, but there are people who want different 'jump in and fight' arena PvP games like this.

TB laughed at the idea of boys and girls who just want to kill / crit / dmg / pwn, but I'm really not ashamed in taking pleasure in that, and I'm not against people that don't want to grind or quest or jungle or lane or deal with tiny cartoon blobs in wizard hats in games that look far worse than WOH.

It's not a sparkling product by any stretch of the imagination in its current state, but I really do want the best for Mythic and WOH.

"[T]he next version will build on the strengths of the game, address some concerns and introduce a new progression system." It also will also introduce at least one new hero, a man named Tobias.

No, that's David Cross in Arrested Development.

No, that's Beecher from Oz.

I'm going to guess that 'Tobias' is a Witch Hunter. It would be cool if he was a Never Nude or a cracked-up prison inmate, but Witch Hunter would be OK.

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