PvE and Public Quests
So, we've focused on PvP, which is shaping up to be something that should really be intense, but like any MMO, WAR isn't a one-trick pony and there's also the PvE experience to get your teeth stuck into.There's a fair amount of PvE in the game. According to Warhammer wiki it states that:
'Tier 1 zones will contain approximately 80% PvE content to 20% RvR content, whereas tier 4 zones will be split 20% PvE to 80% RvR, with the emphasis of the endgame being on the RvR campaign to capture the capital cities of the enemy realm.
Much of the PvE that we experience was reminiscent of a thousand and one other MMOs, where you need to kill a certain amount of mobs, meet someone, fetch something, rescue someone, and so on. For example, we picked up a quest from an NPC who told us to go and kill 6 Dark Elf Infiltrators that were stalking through Moonrise forest and once we returned we got some loot; the choice between gloves or shoulder pads to bulk up our armour. As a solo experience, we're unsure just exciting the solo PvE side of things will be, we didn't really get very excited at all, we just went on the hunt for any PvP quests we could find. However, EA Mythic do have another trick up its sleeve to make things more interesting. This comes in the form of public quests.
WAR is far more about the social interaction and doing things together. You can reach the top levels by purely doing PvE on your own, but our guess is that it will be pretty boring. It's far more fun hooking up with friends to carry out PvE quests together.
Click for larger image
Click for larger imageIn these quests you can still contribute to the overall Realm vs. Realm play as well as gaining EXP and leveling up points that can be spent in areas such as tactics and abilities. These quests are not instanced and you can choose to walk over and join them in specific areas on the map or go about your business as normal. The example we saw involved stages where you had to kill enemy guards and then take out a giant hydra. The team fights together with one goal in mind to defeat the monster and in turn they get awarded with some loot and points for their realm.
There will be around 300 public quests in the game all of which follow a similar formula. When we asked EA Mythic about the repetitive nature of these tasks they replied:
Each public quest really is different and although there's usually a big baddie, they'll react in different ways. For example, when you fight the Great Demon of Khorne you send it back to warp instead of simply killing it. We're trying to make them as interesting as possible. One of our favourite ones at the moment, which we are polishing up, takes place in the Chaos waste, where you've got these necromancers floating on stones above the ground.
You think it's going to be a case of simply killing them, but one thing we do in WAR is mess with your expectations. In this case, a bone giant comes out of the ground and starts pummelling you. Of course, there's a formula to them, but we try and shake them up to make them interesting. We try and make all the public quests as fun as possible. At the moment we're looking at all the average PQs we have in the game and striving to make them better before launch.
Sounds promising...
