Catching up on my daily news, and I read on Scott’s blog that Mark Jacobs is asserting that leveling through PvP & open world PvP are hallmarks of Warhammer that no one else has done yet.
I don’t mean to be a jerk (yes I do), but considering how derivative Warhammer’s gameplay is, it seems like an odd thing to be commenting on. The simple truth is that developers are inspired by ideas from other games they’ve played. We don’t just come up with radically new concepts and drop them in willy-nilly. Warhammer wasn’t the first PvP game to implement open-world PvP. It wasn’t even the first MMO to do so. Meridian 59 had it. UO had it. EQ had it. Even if it wasn’t particularly well supported in any of these games (siege weapons, objectives, etc.), it was still there, and those games were clearly drawn on for DAoC.
Given how long Blizzard iterates on gameplay during their development cycle, it’s pretty blatantly obvious that they’ve been working on the overworld PvP long before Warhammer shipped or even went into beta. Also worth noting are Warcraft’s overland PvP objectives. TBC had overland objectives in Hellfire, Zangarmarsh, and Nagrand (not to mention pre-TBC overland zones with PvP objectives like Western Plaguelands & Silithus). At launch, Blizzard was spouting off about siege weapons – and it’s a little odd how it’s convenient for that to be forgotten now, but I’m sure it would have been fine to ‘remember’ it when talking about features left out of the game’s launch.
And leveling through PvP? Really? That’s a feature someone’s going to lay claim to? Now? Uh huh. There have been plenty of games which allow you to level through PvP. EQII’s one of them, and I’m certainly not going to be a guy to claim that it’s a unique feature that we had before Warhammer.
We need less people arguing about ‘firsts’ and more people taking ‘good’ features and making them better. Like, you know, Public Quests.