Warhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes Preview

GameSpot offers a piece entitled “Warhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes detailed” in which they recap the new details about the f2p MMO from BioWare Mythic that emerged from PAX Prime. Here’s a generous sampling:

The team also briefly addressed Wrath of Heroes’ free-to-play nature, which is to say, how they plan to make money off of the game. Namely, there will be a roster of playable heroes that rotate in and out. However, players can purchase permanent access to the character that they prefer to play as with real-world money.

Moving on to Wrath of Heroes’ particulars, the team began with how they go about creating heroes. This process can be divided into two questions: What is needed? and What would be fun?

To the first question, they gave the example of Korith Deathbringer. The character operates as ranged damage dealer that specializes in single-target sniper abilities. In early play-testing, they found that Korith was vastly overpowered, so they introduced the dark elf Korelei. Her specialty is close-range, fast combat, with armor piercing abilities and high damage avoidance, and she effectively countered Korith.

Less was said about characters introduced to be fun. However, the team did mention a troll and dryad hero, with the first being able to rain vomit and the second that had changing foliage.

On to art, the team said that the base of any hero’s appearance is its character model. They first start with what a character looks like naked, and then they layer on the armor and weapons. Barnett noted that his core creative direction to his team has been, “Let’s get to the cool s*** really quick.” As such, the focus has been on cutting out any equipment that doesn’t have a vivid, interesting look and style.

Abilities are designed in tandem with the hero’s look. The team decided to go with only five abilities so as to get away from the MMORPG way of incremental upgrades to skills. Instead, they are hoping to give the game a deathmatch feel akin to something from the first-person shooter genre, where everyone has the same weapons and it comes down to player skill to determine the victor.