WAR's Battle Royal

On Friday night, a PTS Event was held for WAR called the Battle Royal. Originally it was supposed to be Thursday night, but it was delayed. The purpose of the event was to test the new ramps that were added to tier 4 keeps.


The event moved from zone to zone testing out every keep. Each realm would defend and attack the keep. It was organized by Mythic personnel and turned out to be pretty fun. After each zone, they handed out a special mount at random.


A lot more people showed up than I thought would. The estimates I heard put the total at 220+. The performance was actually pretty good. I had to go down to the Balanced graphic setting, but it was playable. There was some lag though.


I think that the added ramps will be both good and bad for the game. On the positive side, they will make large battles much more fun. There is more room to move around which will add an element of strategy. Sure, the 2nd ramp does not make much sense if you look at it from a real world perspective. This is a game though and sometimes things must be done for gameplay reasons.


The downside is that I think this will make defending the keep much more difficult for smaller groups. Prior to the added ramp, a smaller (but still large) group could field a tank wall and hold off a larger force. Now that same force would no longer be able to use that same tactic.

Players are very creative. I would not be surprised if smaller groups are able to use the multiple ramps to their advantage. I've been on fortress raids which were wiped by much smaller groups because they dropped off the ledge and attacked us from behind. This type of strategy may work here as well.

You should expect this change (and the city siege changes) to go live pretty soon, as the pre-patch has been up for download. It should be interesting as keep and city sieges will be quite a bit different.

Posted in: PTS,WAR