The eternal question, when will WAR release? E-Commerce type sites seem to say late September or early October, so that is what I am going by for now. EA-Mythic has been pretty tight lipped regarding any specifics, but they do release some information which give some idea of their progress.
WAR is set to have an Open Beta. In order for Open Beta to be useful, it would probable need to be at least 3 to 4 weeks long. Shorter then that, players do not really get a chance to advance. In an ideal world, Open Beta would feature a complete game and be just about Balancing. I am in an idealistic mood, so they would need to have the game complete by September. That leaves us a little over 2 months.
Periodically, Mythic will release 'News from the Front', among other things, they write about what happened in this months closed beta. Lets looks at the previous 3 beta reports:
April:
- High Elves vs Dark Eleves
- Blighted Isle (Tier 1)
- Eight careers open, with Career Mastery
- Empire, Tier 3 and Tier 4
- Twelve careers open
- Altdorf (peaceful)
- Greenskin and Dawrf, Tier 1, 2 and 3
- High Elf and Dark Elf, Tier 1, 2 and 3
- 18 careers open
- Inevitable City (peaceful)
- Gunbad Dungeon
From the given information, we can see they have improved a good amount each month. I would expect the next beta report to have all careers and races open, and explore some Tier 4 areas.
More troubling is the lack of previous Tier 4 testing, capital cities and dungeons. All of this is likely content that is seen in high levels, but as i mentioned before I would like to see this actually in the game for open beta. That is just me though :)
I think it will be tight but there is a real chance of a late September release.
So what do you think, can they make it?
3 comments:
I'll breathe a lot easier when I see them testing all the capital cities -- until then, that's a significant barrier to release.
Yea, they still have not really talked about 4 of the cities. The 2 they have mentioned, have just been peaceful.
They may be of the mind that people will not be able to fight in the cities until a month after release. I hope that is not the case. I would hope Open beta would see some testing of them.
I recall a lot of stuff not being tested until late with WoW and we all know that the game was still rather polished (if the servers were buggy) at launch.
Things like the Hunter not even being in until just before Open Beta.
I expect that we're actually very well on track for a late September, early October release. I think they'll be wanting to drop before Lich King does to grab some people before the pull of Blizzard's name brand draws some folks away.
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