Despite Torn Banner Studio''s first-person hack and slash, the newly announced Warlander has a very different meaning. Unlike other games, it lets you control your warriors in third-person, and its more colorful visuals enable for a player to gain control of their position without appearing completely over the top. As the game approaches its first open beta today, September 12, I went on a brief demo build to see what was going on.
In my preview session, two teams of 20 players tried and destroyed each other''s bases. There''s also a 5-Army Battle mode, which I didn''t get to see during my session, but will include up to 100 players all duking it out on the same map. For the 2-Army mode, however, each castle was all located along various routes on the way toward the enemy keep, and you''ll need to capture and defend these before the match.
While in the 2-Army mode, each team was divided into five squads of four, and before the match ended properly, we all had to vote on what our overall strategy was going to be (Assault, Balanced, or Defensive), and how many teams we were all going to play in the fight ahead. Both the second and the latter give you, as the name implies, a roughly-splintered number of three.
During the pre-match preparation, Commanders will have access to ''Diplomacy Cards'', which they can assign to others for a limited period of time.
Despite our 2-Army retreat, I''m sure some of us paid much attention to our respective roles, thus why I was building a catapult on my lonesome. Depending on how many towers you may spawn, you may quickly pick them out from the rest of the team if you lose track of them. If your commander wants you elsewhere, you may be able to spawn from these as many as possible.
In our session, you will get a big beefy warrior, a healing cleric and a magic-hurling mage, and you may choose a new one to take into the game each time you die and respawn. Technically, you have five characters to choose from, depending on your playstyle, or you may have a more balanced team to choose from instead. Each warrior will earn their own own XP that goes towards increasing their Valor rank, which in turn will result in a greater pool of
I like the idea of starting your own team in this larger multiplayer skirmish, although the ease with which you''re able to level them all up and create a squad you like will no doubt be the line where Warlander lives and dies. This means that you must earn enough courage as well as their ability to participate in your team goals before spawning big guns. However, a mix of low-level characters you can play immediately and beefier ones to pull out in situations of need is going to be critical for a
I''m optimistic that newcomers will not be one-shotted by more experienced players they come across online - as often as in multiplayer shooters and the like. Plus, despite being free-to-play, Plaion have insisted that its microtransactions will be limited to cosmetics, which should further increase the playing field.
"It will have a number of battle pass to start," Plaion said during our session. "We will have a free version, we will have, for lack of a better word, a "normal" version, and we''ll have an elite version, which will allow you to spend a bit more on things, for example when it comes to paints, emblems, and even emotes. These will also be things that will be expanded over time and potentially available in the store. We are very
After a 15-minute battle, you do earn bits of loot that you can then equip on your favourite warriors, but the sheer variety of available slots in the customisation menus here was daunting, for the least. I counted six different basic equipment slots that can have their appearance altered using the in-game currency as well as two different drop-downs for Weapon and Skills, and another for Traits. While the combat was not particularly as arduous, my frantic mouse and keyboard flops nonetheless resulte
I see Warlander as a fun game to play with a bunch of buddies, but I suspect you have a commander who knows what they''re doing, as we did in our Plaion-led session, but it will also face the same challenge that every large multiplayer game is going through right now, and that''s ''Do I have the gosh-darned time to invest in another huge multiplayer game?''
You may join in the open beta of Warlander on Steam starting today. I will be keeping an eye on the sidelines.
