WAR - Land of the Dead Continued

21 May 2009 at 17:59:34 by Tim McDonald

But enough of the data: this is a hands-on. Rolling Rank 40 characters in ridiculously good gear, three other journos, two European community managers and I rode into the sands to check out some of the new PQs and areas on display.

The first we saw asked us to gather jars on a pedestal, which were sufficiently heavy that the carrier was slowed. Snakes constantly appeared and attacked those holding the jars, so half of our group set to taking them, while half protected them. Once we got ten of those in, we suffered another attack – this time, creatures trying to steal the jars, which meant that killing them quickly and taking the jars back to the pedestal was the order of the day. And then, er, a boss spawned and killed us all. Oops.

What was immediately obvious was that the Egyptian theme works well. The enemies here are new, the vistas in the desert are wide open and spectacular, and there are plenty of lovely graphical touches, with fallen pillars partially covered in sand contrasting nicely to the gigantic pyramid that dominates the west of the area.

Of the other PQs we saw, a few stood out. One, which we actually won, involved a staggeringly large bone giant, with plenty of knockback attacks that defined our tactics. Another had to be completed while dodging lasers that fired out of an obelisk and blasted across the terrain, which did negligible damage in the first phase, but were almost instant-kills by the third, which could be a worry for those with latency issues. (“I love this PQ,” joked Magnus Aalto, one of our community manager guides. “It lets us say that the Land of the Dead has lasers.”)

The most interesting to me, though, was one we didn't fully see. This was set in the Library of Zandri, with the second phase of the PQ revolving around portals going into books – literally. If the book is about yetis, then the portal will transport the player who enters to a winter wonderland full of the hairy beasts. Each portal is a very short one-man instance, and as soon as player enters, every undead creature left in the Library rushes to attack the portal, so it's all about that one player completing the instance (which shouldn't take more than two or three minutes, we suspect) while everyone else in the group defends it as hard as they can.

There's a lot of imagination and a lot of mechanics that feel genuinely new in this area, and I can't help but think that it might give WAR a bit of a boost in player numbers. Once it's sharpened up and the remaining bugs are polished off, there's going to be a lot of innovative gameplay here, and the ability to access it at level 25 means that the majority of players can find a reason to head here.

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