My late start...

So I finally got in the game today (after a particularly hectic week) and wow, what a rush. I haven't played an MMORPG since Dark Age of Camelot (coincidentally, also made by Mythic Entertainment, the same developers of WAR) and after logging six hours today, I was reminded of why I've avoided these games for the past six years. I actually got the game running on my own laptop pretty smoothly, which is both convenient and oh so horrible for my time management. That being said, let me try and detail a little of what I noticed tonight.

I ran through the early quests around the starting area of Nordland pretty quickly, having already completed many of the quests during my first (although now moot, since the server change) foray into the game last week. Plus, at this point I was playing on Brendan's computer at Tiltfactor, so he was showing me all the quests I overlooked. I made it to level 5 pretty quickly and took a break to tend to my normal life. When I logged back on in my room, things started to get interesting. Ventrilo initially crashed my computer with the forever classic Blue Screen of Death, but I was able to get it up and working and tapped into the voice conversation. I met up with Brendan and his friend (Nick, I believe? Whatever, his character's name is Gunthrax...) and met some of the Destruction players in an RvR-flagged zone. It wasn't an official scenario, but just a zone that both sides can access and is player combat enabled. We had some fun jumping around and dancing with our "enemies," and all was peachy until some Destruction baddies crashed the party. I'm not sure if they just didn't notice what was going on, if they noticed and didn't care, or if they noticed, but were just too drawn by the possibility of free experience points from the slaughter of our peace-loving crew. Unfortunately, we weren't able to speak to them (the game just says that the opposing characters say something in a language we cannot understand) but the members of our team on Destruction were also protesting the violence in a language they could understand, to no avail. A few more respawns, a few more slaughters, and we decided this wasn't the best way to go about approaching this peace protest idea.

Enter the RvR scenario. The game allows you to access scenarios (basically a capture the flag type-deal with 3 fortresses to capture) through a special scenario-searching queue. However, with there being as many players online as there were, and with no location restrictions (anyone can join the scenario queue from any place on the map), there are scenarios being run constantly. We'd all wait til one party was eligible to join a scenario and see if everyone else got the same invitation. This was difficult. In fact, so difficult that I missed the boat on one of them. Only I didn't realize it, and when the other TiLt members in the scenario were talking over Vent about meeting at "Peace Island" in the northwest corner of the map, I figured they meant in the actual game-world and not the much smaller scenario map. So I ran. And I swam. And next thing I knew, here I was:


Some island, all by myself, surrounded by a bunch of boats. It took ten minutes to swim there. There was a whole lot of peace there, but not much else. Although, my little soul-searching journey got me thinking. There is a LOT of square footage that is not being taken advantage of in this game. This game is in its youth, and either they got lazy when developing, or they have big plans. No monsters in the water, not even any vegetation on the island. And all these boats! Just floating there, useless. Maybe they're planning to add some kind of quest to this place? Time will tell, but the room for expansion is most definitely there.

Anyway, their scenario ended and I eventually did end up joining the rest of the crew. And we actually all (Order and Destruction) got into the same scenario instance, which was pretty cool. I finally got to see the real Peace Island, from which our team members of each affiliation danced and waved and jumped, etc. We even took to posting in our scenario-specific chat boxes, encouraging others to join. We were met with pretty harsh words, to which Brendan deftly responded with some blog advertising. One Destruction member actually approached the island to see what all the fuss was about, but decided to back off before getting close enough to join in the festivities. On Order, our team members were overly concerned that we were ruining the RvR experience, and that Destruction would take advantage of our being a few characters down. We told them that Destruction was partying on Peace Island too, but they didn't seem to care. Anyway, here's the real Peace Island:


Look at it, in all its splendor. It even has its own finger-shaped rock formation pointing at us, as if to say, "You guys are awesome."

It's not all butterflies and birthday cakes, though. Look at this guy:


That's Charlie. And to think, we were so baffled as to why more people weren't joining us on Peace Island.

I'm sure I'll be back on tomorrow. I'm psyched! When we get up a little higher in level, I'm going to start floating the bounty hunting service to people and gauge the reactions I get. As for now, I'm thrilled my first group experience was as successful as it was!