Alongside the January issue of their newsletter, EA Mythic tossed out a link to a video clip that demonstrates the hectic realm vs realm combat a heavily scripted combat scenario in Warhammer Online, which looks awfully familiar.
The scripted scene depicts a small-scale battle between Warhammer’s characters, and makes good use of the game’s particle effects, spell effects and animations.
In addition, it gives viewers a peak at the level of detail in the backgrounds. Certainly it’s no Crysis, but the texture work and shading does look quite intricate.
While the video does look nice, I’m honor-bound to point out two issues with it: it’s heavily scripted and it looks so very similar to World of Warcraft.
I can forgive the scripting — this isn’t a finished game, after all — but I’d be hard pressed to tell WAR’s RvR (the realm vs realm combat that this scripted scene was mimicking) apart from WoW‘s Battleground combat if YouTube added just a few more instances of graphical artifacts.
Of course, I realize the Warcraft universe is functionally lifted wholesale from the Warhammer universe and I also realize it’s an excellent idea to mimic the current market leader when creating a new MMO, but I’m just incredibly struck by how similar the two games look.
Then again, with the number of people WoW has seduced, maybe having a similar look is the only way to create a successful MMO anymore.
On a seperate note, if you’d like to see a version of the video with higher resolution and a more complimentary aspect ratio, take a trip over to Mythic’s site.
