Mythic flings wide the gates of the Warhammer Online open beta

by Griffin McElroy { Sep 7th 2008 at 12:00PM }

We know that most of you had some fairly important decisions to make this morning -- for instance, the mind-plaguing decision between coffee or tea, or the equally perplexing choice of cereal or pancakes. Perhaps you spent an hour in front of your dresser, trying to decide between boxers or briefs -- or, for our Alaskan friends, which color long johns best suited your mood. However, a select few of you will be making an even more complex decision today, likely in the next few hours: High Elves or Greenskins?

This race-rolling dilemma will be cordially presented to you by Mythic's Warhammer Online -- the open beta for which launched earlier this morning. Members of the previous stages of the closed beta and those who have pre-ordered the title at "select retail partners" can now download the client and let loose the dogs of WAR (though we've heard a number of complaints from frenzied pre-orderers who have had trouble accessing the beta). Fear not, unwashed masses -- your Age of Reckoning will begin in a little over a week.

Tags: beta, ea, mythic, open-beta, warhammer-online

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

offday @ Sep 7th 2008 12:13PM

Too busy with WoW. I barely have enough time to play that, let alone two MMORPGS.

RankHypocrisy @ Sep 8th 2008 9:56AM

I'm reply to the first post so that more people will see this --

You guys don't have to download the client from Fileplanet. Use the torrent --
http://torrent2.eamythic.com/WarBeta.torrent

You will still have to endure the lengthy patching process, though.

AlwaysOn @ Sep 7th 2008 12:31PM

GOA fucks it up AGAIN! Why did Mythic gave GOA a sencond chance after DAoC?! Seriously now you can't even access your account because the service is "momentarily unavilibe" retards.....

Nihiloz @ Sep 7th 2008 12:56PM

I started to try and download the client last night around 6 and had to wait in a queue of around 2000 people and "413 minutes". However, this time never changed and about 3 hours into waiting to just download the thing my neighborhood lost power thanks to a thunderstorm!

So I stayed up til about 5AM when we got power back and just paid 6.95 to File Planet just so I didn't have to wait in line. Of course when I woke up at 11 I needed to patch the file which has taken 1 hour 20 minutes so far and is only 80% complete :(

I'm getting there!

SeanC @ Sep 7th 2008 1:59PM

Thats where I am right now, I've had the patcher running for an hour and I'm at 47% complete. I really wish they had let us patch the game last night.

quraid @ Sep 7th 2008 12:48PM

Nope, Open Beta started only for NA folks. EU people are still at GOA's mercy. out of over 250,000 people who have been trying to get into an Open Beta for over 10 hours now, only 5154 have made it.
Even AOC had the courtesy to allow people to start playing after 4 hours of queue downtime.

dark_inchworm @ Sep 7th 2008 1:12PM

"Members of the previous stages of the closed beta and those who have pre-ordered the title at 'select retail partners' can now download the client"

"Open" beta my ass...

devian @ Sep 7th 2008 6:13PM

Yeah, god forbid you spend that $1 at Target to get in.

dark_inchworm @ Sep 8th 2008 2:46AM

Feel free to give me that dollar, but I'm not paying for the privilege of beta testing. Already did it once with Hellgate (zing!).

You may think otherwise, but from the sidelines, the WAR beta process seems abnormally sloppy to me - and I live with a guy who's had the game on preorder for months, so it's not like I'm completely oblivious to what's going on. Really, how many open betas a) basically require you to pay for them, and b) start a whopping 11 days before the game launches? Does that seem telling to anyone else?

I don't plan on getting into the game anyway - seems too blatant of a WoW ripoff to me. Ironic, given that Warcraft was initially a big Warhammer rip...

IanC @ Sep 7th 2008 1:25PM

Im at around 20% of downloading the beta client, after around 12 hours or so. I've pretty much given up tbh....

Corbin @ Sep 7th 2008 1:33PM

You could have downloaded the client last week instead of waiting until the last minute and getting bogged down by the masses. However I'm still waiting for the patch, 62%.

Jeremy White @ Sep 7th 2008 1:55PM

I'm still waiting for the patch also. 50%, probably about an hour and a half to two hours of waiting by now. It's only 917MB, that's the sad part. I just don't understand why no one was allowed to download the patch until the minute open beta 'opened'.

dongalos @ Sep 7th 2008 2:27PM

Fileplanet sucks!

I managed to get a free key lastnight at the websites handing them out and i'm waiting in line at fileplanet 115 minutes it says then as hours go by my waiting in the QUE goes up... 256 minutes, 384 minutes, 515 minutes

WTF fileplanet?

I'm not going to pay you just to download something

now looking for torrents

Jeremy White @ Sep 7th 2008 3:06PM

There are plenty of places with the same thing hosted at FilePlanet, but they are unpatched, so you'll still be waiting.

As far as I see it, there is still plenty of time to get into the open beta, though I am still irked about waiting to let preorderers patch the game until today just so that Preview Weekend+ users didn't experience any lag. I doubt many of them were playing during the wee hours of Sunday morning, plus most of them were probably Open Beta players who were going to get instant access to the game regardless due to the fact they're already patched up. Oh well.

offday @ Sep 7th 2008 3:11PM

FilePlanet is a big worthless piece of crap. Charging people for crap that you didn't even create, and other sites let you get for free has to be the lowest form of humanity. I don't know how it's not illegal.

Anyway, what are the specs like for this game?

RanWitScissorz @ Sep 7th 2008 3:12PM

Ah the joys of being in closed beta and already having the client downloaded and patched.

Haggard @ Sep 7th 2008 4:00PM

The gates of the beta have indeed been flung wide! It's just that those gates happen to be two feet wide and there's a queue of about a hundred thousand people stood in front of them.

Highcharity @ Sep 7th 2008 4:44PM

I have been playing since last night and I disapointed. Nothing compared to what my expectations were. Fuck this I am going back to Spore.

zuburi @ Sep 7th 2008 6:04PM

I thought you were talking ABOUT Spore.

Highcharity @ Sep 7th 2008 6:21PM

Sorry I didn"t explain myself correctly. I'll restate: I have been playing Warhammer since the beta opened last night, it has not lived up to my expectations. Fuck Warhammer I am heading back to spore.

Lol but seriously warhammer is one of the dullest MMOS I have ever played. I was so excited for this. Fail MYTHIC! You have ruined my love for MMOS.

zuburi @ Sep 7th 2008 9:52PM

I understood you, I was just making a joke. The way you described WAR is the same way I feel about Spore. I was super disappointed with it. I am a big Warhammer fan (I have an army of 10 night goblin figures in front of me as I type this), so I'm still looking forward to trying the game.

Though what I'm REALLY excited for is the 40k MMO. I like the setting and lore of 40k much better.

My ultimate nerdgasm would come from a 4th edition Shadowrun MMO, though.

chispito @ Sep 7th 2008 5:10PM

Does the entire game look as brown and lifeless as that screenshot?

Gel214th @ Sep 7th 2008 5:26PM

I was all excited about getting a free key from MMORPG.com . However, I have yet to actually download the client.

FilePlanet's 'Download Manager ' was going at the blazingly fast rate of 20-80KB/s over the night. Torrents weren't going much faster either, averaging at about 64KB/s. The Torrent Tracker reported that hte average rate was 136KB/s. The number of people pulling the file has held steady in the 5000+ figure since last night.

This was a woefully poor way to distribute this title, especially realising the sudden influx of people when you distribute 7000+ keys the day before the Open Beta launches.I find it hard to understand that a company which purports to have spent 'just south of 100 million' on this title's development could not have found a better way to provide Direct Downloads.

Really, I hope that the logistics and the organisation of the other aspects of the game are better than this.

zuburi @ Sep 7th 2008 5:51PM

I really wonder why companies still go with Fileplanet. It seems like they're pretty universally despised.

SuckItTrebek @ Sep 7th 2008 8:26PM

For the same reason many gamer despised money makers continue-gamers just don't have the balls to say no and go without. It doesn't cost the companies any money when a player whines WHILE jumping through the hoops.

zuburi @ Sep 7th 2008 9:47PM

Yeah, I'm guessing that most of their subscribers are people that see the 12-hour queue in front of them, get pissed, and subscribe - all while bitching about Fileplanet.

MegaSnort @ Sep 7th 2008 10:02PM

I had fun today at least =)

I'd still be playing but I can't bear the thought of devoting too much time into a character that's getting wiped in a week. Also, gotta lvl up my guardian in LOTRO for Mines of Moria.

jynxycat @ Sep 8th 2008 12:29AM

Ah the joys of being in the preview weekend, and then the preview weekend plus.

Either way, the NA version has had zero server crashes all day, and basically zero lag.

Now to sort out the fact that Order is getting hosed on my server -_-;;

MastrCake @ Sep 8th 2008 2:36AM

Well, it has been around 4 hours since I started waiting in line, and I have moved up just around 500-700 spots. The line appears to go faster as time goes on, probably due to people being impatient, their computers going into sleep mode, power outages, Vista crashes etc. (not that my copy of vista hasn't BSODed a few times in a short while).

As for the beta I can't wait! I hate how some people take for granted that the real purpose of a beta is to find bugs. They just want to play early, be cheerful, and not give a damn. But what really sets me off is when people find a bug and tell the whole world rather than the dev team.

I, on the other hand, want to play early, be cheerful, and give a damn while I'm at it. I like to submit bug reports as I find bugs. I'm not going to hunt them down, just let them find me instead.

Just some advice for fellow testers out there...

zuburi @ Sep 8th 2008 3:47AM

You know... any Joystiq readers interested in playing together?

phobic99 @ Sep 8th 2008 8:02AM

I've been in beta for quite some time but the addition of all the open beta people really adds more fun for me. My warrior priest has never been so deadly. It's quite fun to run into a group of 3-4 destruction players and have them all wonder why you aren't dying yet. I'm loving the game more than I ever thought I did, since I initially wrote it off as a "It looks like WoW 2.0" game.

nightshade2541 @ Sep 8th 2008 10:40AM

Most epic launchfail in quite a while..

how can you use a completely flashbased site for something (anything) that more than 10 users will use at any given time?

"ouch, where did all that users come from?" - "dunno, but they cant do anything at our site for the next 48 hrs" - "yeah, sounds good. wait didnt we launch something today or so?" - "nah dont sweat it, noone will care, so why should we have been prepared at all?"

RankHypocrisy @ Sep 8th 2008 9:54AM

You guys don't have to download the client from Fileplanet. Use the torrent --
http://torrent2.eamythic.com/WarBeta.torrent

You will still have to endure the lengthy patching process, though.

Kweli @ Sep 8th 2008 11:18AM

Please Remember:
This is BETA testing, they are testing stuff..

Why did you expect a perfect launch?

nightshade2541 @ Sep 8th 2008 6:59PM

there is a difference between a "perfect launch" and a major screwup, no?

Having to take off half to three quarters of the service (account login/account pages/registration) just to calculate all the code-validations (which could have been validated days before) is telling me that they did invest about half my monthly wage in hardware that is dedicated to these processes.

do it either way - good or not at all.
this should have been their "trust us, we are good at what we do and are not AoC" moment. This is as much a marketing moment as a "selftest" for them.
And they just did an epic oops in both regards.

I cant understand that - a swbug that takes a while to fix is one thing, and one that i would not loose one word over. admitting on the page that they cant calculate hardwareneeds is quite another thing (and outlook? hope not.)

Im by no means saying that the launch experience has to be the same or anywhere near this, but not calling this an epic fail (technical and marketing) would be a lie.