Picking Apart Carrie’s Mind

Well I’m back! Unbeknown to many I was actually gone this past week and had an elf secretly posting my posts daily =) Yeah… I wrote them ahead of time. I was out hiking in Yosemite for four days and a day at Mono Lake. With about 45 miles under my boots and 620 pictures of varying quality – I’m back and ready to smash face!

So upon returning and going over the sites, I stumbled upon many juicy factoid releases which may or may not give us hope. So first things first, we have our July Producer’s Letter! The first half is a pat on the back  for the Euro server transfer and the Bioware forums – which if you haven’t read aren’t going so well among the Warhammer Community. A lot of players just don’t like them and oddly enough a new breath of life has been given to the warhammeralliance.com forums. The second part of the letter goes on to talk about 1.3.6 on the PTS and the live event – now if the patch is released at the time of the live event, then we wont expect 1.3.6 to go live until the end of August which is when the live event happens. Only juicy tid-bit from this letter is the 6v6 scenario – The Eternal Citadel (which I’m sure has destro pouting over why the scenario is in their city). The only question is will it only be available during the city fight or always? Seems like a terribly odd choice to have it always open as a scenario… All in all the letter gave no real indication for the future, but go figure, it never does.

Now if we want some serious juicy hypothetical extraction going on we turn to Carrie’s interview with buffed.de – lovingly translated by Google. In the second question we are told that fortresses will be in the game again in the future – but no clue as to when. Question four cites that Mythic is indeed working on new content but the answer was brushed away and pointed to waiting until Gamescom in Cologne Aug 18-22, so again more waiting until an announcement. The Warhammer Community had hopes that during E3 some announcement would be made but alas we got nothing, now we are again deferred to Gamescom in 18 days… The next question says that new challenges are being worked on – going back to my post on a new dungeon, I can only hope that this new challenge isn’t a Skaven dungeon or something like that which drops Warlord/Sovereign equivalent gear. The sixth question does indicate that Carrie has a surprise for us at Gamescom but again… one can hope it’s what the players are asking for. When further specifically asked about Bretonnia and the Vampire Counts Carrie (laughs) and says coyly ‘maybe yes, maybe no’ as if she was being asked out on a date, and then she tells us to read the patches over summer… well Ms. Carrie summer is a dwindling with autumn technically starting September 23rd and at the rate Mythic pumps out patches we’ve only got one to read… To put the final nail in the coffin of the Hypothetical Expansion regarding the remaining capitals… Carrie states “To be quite honest, it is increasingly unlikely that cities have to create this game. We never close things out categorically – but I think we have far more interesting plans for new endgame content than other cities.” I don’t think people wanted the cities as more end gamecontent, they just wanted the cities…  and the rest of the interview is chit-chat which doesn’t really interest me.

Casting my hypothetical eye at the interview and the July Producer’s Letter I deduce a few things:

• The Weekened Warfronts were indeed replacements for Live Events, so instead of making new live events throughout March-August they took out scenarios and recycled them as weekend live events – a poor substitute. We will however be getting an actual live event, The Wild Hunt, but again its a recycled Live Event and its a month away.
• We are getting a new 6v6 scenario, The Eternal Citadel. Will it only be available in the city? Will it be plagued by the horrors the Ironclad had?
• We are made to expect that sometime during the Gamescom in Cologne a ‘surprise’ announcement will be made, and with the 2 year anniversary coming up at the start of September, a ‘surprise’ announcement is indeed expected.
• The other capitals are pretty much out of the equation
• Forts are somewhere in the future, and so are flying cars.
• There are plans for more endgame content, however with the city already dropping three sets of gear in a two hour window, it seems that the only additional end game content is most likely PvE in the flavor of a dungeon.
• We apparently have clues in the patch notes regarding the ‘surprise’… so far we’re being fed rats. Lots of rats. I hope I get to play with my rats and not just kill them.

All in all I feel that much like all the previous Producer’s Letters, we are made to wait until the future for any announcements. Nothing solid. Another month goes by and Carrie continues to tease and say nothing more. To end I give you the Google Translator’s epic quote of the month:

“Currently, many players ergrinden their way to level 40 too early for our taste.  We will also be new and very pregnant XP opponent near the RvR sections to add.”