WAR light

Mythic is setting an admirable pace with modifying Warhammer: Age of Reckoning to the desires of their players. Today they announced their latests surprise: A different version of the client, inofficially called "WAR light". Players were complaining about long load times and the time it took to get into the game past all those splash screens and EULAs and whatnot. And the 12 GB regular client is slow to install, and eats up lots of hard disk space, especially if you want to play on a laptop. But 90% of the game isn't even used by most players most of the time! So the idea for a lighter form of the client was born.

When you log onto WAR light, you don't enter the world of Warhammer Online, but just a series of lobby screens. You select your character on the first screen, and then are presented with a screen listing all the waiting queues for the various scenarios. This is actually an improvement over the regular client, because in WAR light you get the info of how many scenario instances are already running, how many people are queued up, and what the average wait time is. Good idea: You even see the scenarios of the other tiers, not just yours, so you can quickly switch characters if there is more action elsewhere.

Once you are in the scenario, WAR light plays just like regular WAR, only you are limited to low res textures. But honestly, for PvP you wouldn't really want to use high res textures slowing down your PC anyway. But you can't enter any part of the WAR world except for the scenarios. That can get a bit annoying if you got too much loot and your inventory is flowing over, as there is no access to auction house and mail. But the obvious advantage is that the huge amount of data from the open world, all the mobs, and quests, and public quest events, and tome of knowledge aren't needed, which makes the WAR light client far smaller and faster than the regular client.

As you can level up from 1 to 40 in WAR doing nothing but scenarios, and quite a lot of players do so, because it is the fastest method, the WAR light client covers nearly all the needs of the average player. Why install a huge game of which you don't need 90%?

DISCLAIMER: WAR light doesn't exist. It's an utter lie. A bitter parody on the current situation, where people actually play scenarios to the exclusion of everything else, and really don't use 90% of the game. But while WAR light is just fiction, we have to ask ourselves why it, or a game like it, doesn't exist. Apparently lots of people are quite content to speed-level through scenarios, without bothering to explore the huge and rich world of Warhammer Online. So why did Mythic have to bother programming those 90% of the world that only a small minority of players actually uses? They could have done WAR light in half the time and less than half the budget if they had limited themselves to scenarios and the endgame. It seems nobody is interested in the game before the level cap anyway! So why not use that?