As mentioned in my last post, I installed a new “fresh” copy of the Warhammer client off the retail disks. Before nuking the old one I took a quick glance at the two side by side, and here’s some of what I found. This isn’t a complete list; I did drill into every directory to compare things.

New directories in the retail client are GDF and Support. GDF looks to have something to do with patching, and Support contains a bunch of Help HTML files. Worth looking at if you’re having trouble.

The old Beta server has one directory and a few files that retail doesn’t. *Presumably* these are no longer needed, but of course I take no responsibility if you delete them and it totally fubars your install. The directory is audio and holds, unsurprisingly, a bunch of mp3 files with names like Music-Test_Fanfare_Chaos08.mp3. I’ll be holding on to these!

Now we get to the file level and again I’m not going to list everything. 3 directxfiles, d3dx9_30.dll, d3dx9_34.dll and d3dx9d_34.dll are in the beta client but not retail. These aren’t very big though. dev_zones.myp is huge, though, a bit over 3 gigs. .myp seems to be the basic data file ‘bundle’ extension for Warhammer Online. There are also some Player_Guide files that you d/led for beta.

On the retail side, there’s a world.myp which presumably takes the place of dev_zones.myp, though its a bit smaller, about 2.8 gigs. And there’s the opening video (I assume) video.myp, which is a 1.5 gigs or so. I wonder if we could nuke that to save space once we’ve watched it?

In my next post I’m going to talk about what some of the other directories are far.

So the open beta for Warhammer Online starts on Sunday (the 7th), but for some percentage of pre-orders, it apparently started today as a second preview weekend? Honestly I haven’t been paying attention. My gaze is firmly fixed on September 14th, when Headstart Access opens for Collector’s Edition pre-orders.

My only fear is that my guild is playing in the betas, getting to know each other, forming friendships, and I’m not a part of that. Hopefully I’ll be able to ’socially catch-up’ when the time comes. I just am really afraid of ‘burning out’ on the early levels if I run through them yet again before launch.

I’m awfully excited about the launch of Warhammer though.

In other news, I canceled my Spore pre-order….or tried to at least. I called Gamestop too late to prevent it from being shipped, but I’ll return the game to a local store when it arrives. I’m still playing LOTRO pretty heavily, I have Warhammer incoming in 9 days, and I’m not a fan of Spore’s SecurROM copy protection.

I haven’t seen this officially on the NA Warhammer sites, but the European site says that the Warhammer Online Headstart Program starts on Sept. 14th for Collector’s Edition pre-orders, and Sept. 15th for standard orders. Note that the 14th is a Sunday, so (most) CE pre-orders have a full day of headstart over standard buyers.

But this means that Open Beta is at most 7 days. I guess that’s enough time for some stress testing, but I’m not sure its enough time for many fixes to be developed, tested and deployed.

So much fuss is being made in the Warhammer Online fan community about a post at a site called Virgin Worlds. I’d never heard of the site but I’m sure the author had never heard of me, either. But the Warhammer bloggers seem riled up by this fellow. Anyway you can read his rant here.

I’m tired of responding to the post in the comments at 101 different Warhammer blogs so I’ll just respond to it here.

I guess it depends a lot on what you enjoy about these games. This Brent dude is clearly sick of MMORPGs as we have come to know them. He wants *something else*. But how is that Warhammer’s fault?

Personally, I don’t want *something else*. Games like The Agency look interesting but I don’t really want an action-MMORPG. I want a stat-based game. I like stat-based games.

Current MMORPGs to me are like the old Avalon Hill or SPI wargames. I didn’t need totally new game mechanics to buy a new wargame. In fact, I didn’t *want* new mechanics that I’d have to learn all over again. What I wanted was a new game covering different subject matter, with a few “Special Rules” to make it slightly different.

Brent even acknowledges that it is “OK” for strategy games to work that way. Also its OK for puzzle games and FPS to maintain the same basic mechanics. But he has deemed that this is not Good Enough for MMORPGs, then he “jumps the shark” and says MMORPGs won’t be good enough “until we have environments nearing or exceeding those described in Snowcrash”. When I read that my eyes rolled so hard I was dizzy.

I’m thinking Brent just likes the attention, and hey, it’s working for him. It got me to his site for the first time. But slagging Warhammer Online for being exactly what it has promised to be is pointless. It’s like saying “I hate football and I hate sports games, and Madden ‘09 is NO FUN.” Well of course if you’re playing a game-type that you don’t like, it isn’t going to be any fun. Duh.

If Mythic had been claiming that Warhammer Online was going to be some revolutionary virtual-reality game to rival Snowcrash, then Brent would be justified. I must have missed that press release.

So the NDA is lifted, huzzah!

A million war bloggers are posting a billion beta posts, great walls of text that will numb your mind.

Not me.

I’m going to tell you that my time in the Warhammer Beta has been a hell of a lot of fun. But character wipes have been frequent which is why I’ve backed away from it for now. Each ‘faction’ (3 per side) has its own starting area and starting quests, but still I’ve played them all a couple of times now and I just don’t want launch day to start with a sigh and a mutter of “OK, let’s get through this again.”

So the further Warhammer Online buzz today is that the NDA is expected to be lifted tomorrow, and comes with a big reveal as to why its been in place for so long. We’ll see.

Unlike a lot of bloggers, I don’t have a bunch of beta impression posts written and ready to roll out. Honestly there’s been so much Warhammer Online coverage around I should think we’re about at capacity. I will write up a quick post of my general impressions I suppose, just so I can go all fanboy for a while.

Other news is that the “Preview Weekend” is this coming weekend plus some, August 22nd - August 25th. This is an “invite-only” event, and it looks to me like you have to have pre-ordered to get invited. I suppose if you’re invited you’ve already got the email and if you weren’t, then you probably don’t care about the event!

As I mentioned, I haven’t been *playing* the Warhammer Online beta for quite some time. I’d jump in and do testing as directed by the devs, but it’s been a long time since I just logged in and played the game as if it was in release and I was just playing for my own pleasure.

It’d been a rough week this past week, though, with very little gaming time to be found, aside from the odd quick Pixel Junk Eden fix (wonderful game, btw). So last night when I finally had some time, rather than playing LOTRO and being social with the semi-new guild (they probably think I’m dead by this point) I rolled a level 1 Warhammer Character and started playing.

I’ve mentioned ‘beta burnout’ and this is a good time to explain what I mean. With any MMO, if you’re an alt-aholic, you know the feeling you get with those first 5-10 levels after a while, where every class plays pretty similarly and every quest is burned into your brain and requires no thought and really it just becomes drudgery to get through them. I *really* don’t want to be feeling like that when War launches. The nature of beta (particularly one as long as the War beta; it was going strong when I got in it and I’ve been in it for 6 months) is that you get your characters wiped pretty often and that kind of forces the alt-aholic lifestyle on you. I absolutely love the game and really want it to feel as ‘fresh’ as possible on launch day.

The point of all that is, I decided to pick the 1 race/class profession that appealed to me that absolute least, because I figured there’s no way I’ll be playing that combo in release. I plan on my release main being Order, so I’d roll Destruction. I never like playing small races, so I figured one of the Goblin classes. Healers are always pretty helpful so there’s an outside chance I’ll roll one of those in release, so didn’t want to go that route, which left Squig Herder.

Here the gag of NDA starts to cut off what I can say. I’ve linked to the official page and its a bit out of date. I’ll add my cry to all the “Mythic, please drop the NDA!” pleas I’ve been reading.

Anyway this turned out to be an excellent acid test of the game for me. So I picked the single least appealing class/race combo I could find and started playing, and it was about 3 am by the time I finally pulled myself away. I did traditional quests, of course. I unlocked Achievements. I played through Public Quests and won shiny loot in various ways. Inspired by Rick I jumped into RvR scenarios, something I’ve quite frankly avoided (I’ve done ‘open world’ RvR but the scenarios have always felt a bit intimidating to me). I had an absolute blast, never really hit a ‘boring’ spot, found a few bugs to report (nothing major, the game is in great shape, but finding them made me feel like I was ‘doing my job’) and now the only problem I have is that I *really* enjoyed the Squig Herder. Dammit, another Alt in my future!

It’s going to be a long month, waiting for release…

Thanks to Grishnar over at theBrasse.com for bringing this to everyone’s attention.

At some point today you’ll be able to enter your beta and headstart codes into the Mythic Beta Center. There’s really no rush if you pre-ordered the CE, but the first 50,000 ’standard’ pre-orders to enter their codes will get an invite into the upcoming Preview Weekend. So keep checking! (I just checked at 8:15 am ET and my Head Start code was still flagged as ‘invalid’).

More details from the source:
http://herald.warhammeronline.com/warherald/NewsOverview.war