Some Concerns about WAR’s Capitol City Rotation

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Mythic recently dropped the bomb about the content that will not be available at launch. They’ve talked about several options for mitigating the removed capitol cities but the option that concerns me most is the idea of rotating the capitol cities.

I’m not sure how this would resolve people’s concerns about RvR. Let’s examine some of the issues.

How will the Mythic rotate the cities?

I was talking to my brother about how we thought Mythic would rotate the cities. He feels the cities will rotate clockwise, but I really feel like they will rotate counterclockwise. Neither of us would back down and we almost got in a fight.

And then I was talking to my wife today and she really threw out a curve ball — what if they rotate, like, upside-down? This would certainly make melee DPS and tanks less useful, perhaps Mythic is planning the rotation to counteract the removal of some of those classes.

But this brings up even more issues. Are the city 72v72 scenarios balanced for “capsized” play? How about the Public Quests, will they still work? This just brings up a ton of issues and it seems like it will take Mythic longer to properly implement the rotating cities than it would be just to fix them in the first place.

Issues with Lore

I’m not an expert on Warhammer lore but I also think it would be difficult to incorporate spinning cities into the rich Warhammer lore. There are very, very few revolving cities in Warhammer, certainly none that are planned for the game right now. Did Mythic speak with Games Workshop about the change? Sometimes I feel like Games Workshop is really selling out — I’m prepared to play a Warhammer game without Space Marines (although it’s a stretch, they’re my favorite race) but twirling cities are really going to make me feel un-immersed and dizzy.

Motion Sickness

There’s no doubt that revolving capitol cities will cause more player vomiting than many of the alternatives. But Mythic can do a lot to mitigate this, I think. If the cities rotate more slowly (I’d suggest no faster than one revolution per minute) this will alleviate the issue but not eliminate it. The problem is that a slow rotation would mean players would have to wait longer for the exit to come around so they can leave the city. I guess there needs to be a happy medium between puking and delaying travel.

Conclusion

I think that Mythic faced a tough problem and came up with a very risky but extremely unique solution. Hopefully the NDA will lift soon so we can all see how our new rotating capitol cities look.