Zander Rajeev Nattam

Meet the newest Nattam! Congrats Praveen, Jen, and Kaiden!



With a bad-ass name like that, this kid gonna be a super hero.

WAAAAAGHH!

Yo Ho fellow net pirates!

So ARZ is taking a backseat for a little bit. Since Too Human crapped out on me a LOT sooner then I was hoping. The original plan was get Too Human, ride it out till Dead Space, then ride Dead Space and Fallout 3 into the sunset. Since, as I mentioned, did not go as planned, I needed a subsitute. I had been interested in Warhammer Online (WAR) for awhile since I've been a huge Warhammer fan for about 6 years. I finally heard about Public Quests (which I'll get into later) and was sold on the concept. Ryan goated me online to get it and I finally gave in and bought it yesterday and sat down in the evening only to realized that it was 1 am and I needed to get to bed.

So what makes WAR the most compelling to me is the way it approaches PvE. They have created what they call Public Quests and I think these guys need to patent this idea. So here is how they break down: scattered throughougt the game are these set areas where a PQ is occuring. The moment you walk into that area, you are involved in the PQ. So what these are are an on-going event with several stages (usually 3). As soon as you step in, you are prompted about what stage the event is in and what is needed to move on to the next stage. So far, this has been divided into 1) Kill X low level creatures, 2) Kill X "elite" creatures, 3) Kill a boss. This is super simple but the great part is that you do not have to group or accept a quest or any crap like that. Just walk in, hit something, and then choose to stick around or leave and do somethign else. The awesome part is finding lots of people there and just jumping in and helping. Within a few moments of joining my first PQ, I ended up in a group of about 15 people. Now to be clear, we were not all grouped in the traditional sense. I had to rely on scanning my mates to see their condition. On top of that, a lot of people were more then happy to listen but refused to talk to acknowledge. What happnened next blew my mind. After a few trials, this random assortment of people eventually formed a working group. I along with another player ended up leading the group and getting them to fall back and press forward at the same time. When the elites came up, we quickly reorganized and focused on single targets. Being a Warrior Priest, my job was to stay on the main target but keep everyone else alive. Being a medic is something I greatly enjoy but it was nice to actually be up in the front wielding a huge hammer and "kicking ars for the lord!"

After that first PQ, I moved onto another one which only involved about 4 of us. This PQ scaled down for us and eventually we got to stage 3. This involved taking out two elites. One of my teammates went forward and held the attention of both while I kept her alive and did a little damage. So in basically 2 hours, I participated in what felt like two instances in WoW. The fights required strategy and teamwork but were formed more naturally then a crazy raid with practice runs that last all week.

A long time ago, my friend Doug and I were discussing how we wanted more fights in WoW to be all out battles with tons of minions just coming out and players relying more on "impromtu strategy" then fully planned out hard-core tactics. So far, WAR seems to provide this experience and I got to say, I'm in love with it.