MMO Gamers

     The more I hear about Warhammer’s collision detection the more excited I get.  Imagine a line of tanks filling a breached door while the wizzies rain down lightning and fireballs.  Or a circle of tanks protecting a caster or healer safely tucked away in the centre.  I used to run through unsuspecting tanks with my celt champion in Dark Age of Camelot (DAoC), hit autoface, and stun them from behind, only to run through them again as they turned, hit autoface, and stun them from behind.  Certainly effective, but fair?  Realistic?  Immersive?  A legal “tactic” or an exploit?

     With the inclusion of collision detection we also have the exclusion of a couple of things which I’m really pleased about.  There’ll be no stealth units.  No assassins, scouts, rangers.  No one to sneak up behind you unawares and take you out then vanishing into the surrounding wilderness.  While I did play a scout in DAoC and enjoyed playing him, I only rolled a scout because I was so sick of my characters getting filled with arrows all the time.  Stealth units are great for those that like playing them, but terrible for their victims.

     The other thing Mythic has promised us we won’t see, and one that often went hand in hand with the assassins and the like, is the buffbot.  For those that don’t know what a buffbot is, it’s a healer that a player has on a second account used solely for the purpose of buffing up his main to increase it’s stats.  In DAoC you could spec your healers to be either smite, heal, or buff specialists, or a combination of any of the three.  DAoC seemed to have an awful lot of buff specced healers which made them not very good at healing, but then they were never meant to heal.  They would just sit in a safe location in the battlegrounds, their only purpose to buff the main before he went out in search of victims.  Players with buffbots had an unfair advantage and you had two choices; deal with it, or get a buffbot.

     I hope Warhammer turns out to be everything I could hope for.  It’s not possible for Mythic to please everyone and I expect the game will have features that I don’t like but others might.  I’m still left with the dilemma of which game to play though, Warhammer or Age of Conan.