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Gamesradar.com have provided an interesting glimpse into three of the dungeons coming with Warhammer Online which are Mount Gunbad, Bastion Stair and Lost Vale. WAR is generating lots of interest for its PvP content, but it hasn’t omitted the classic dungeon-run, albeit with some differences. For instance, while some dungeons are open-world and some instanced, they are all divided into three ‘wings’, each ‘wing’ taking roughly one and a half hours to run, and able to be completed on different occasions. This means that a group can break up the venture into separate excursions, Task Force being broken up over multiple nights of play. You can even subtitute party members between runs.

The dungeon will only limit 6 maximum people, making this content deliciously accessible: ‘Even if the dungeon crawl itself isn’t several hours, the process of getting 40 people together can be a multi-hour experience, and we just didn’t feel our game needed that.‘ Another time-saver is the default respawn in the dungeon itself if you die. The article also gives several examples of boss fights, and how they are balanced.

Firstly, in Mount Gunbad dungeon, each wing of a dungeon has a boss at the end, and at the final stage of the dungeon, you will enter a room and encounter the six-man final boss. In Mount Gunbad, this is a giant squig (a big fleshy ball with two gigantic mouths crammed with super-sharp teeth); he happens to have a Morcane artifact nearby that powers him up. That Morcane artifact also provides you with the boss battle’s main challenge: if you let the squig stay too close to it he’ll become empowered to erupt projectile vomit and other equally lovely substances, but keep him away too long and he becomes enraged, upping his damage-dealing level. It requires a careful balancing act to finally take him out.

Next, Bastion Stair which is an open-world dungeon targeted for levels 33 through 40. Warhammer lore is deep and plentiful - so deep and plentiful that providing the full backstory behind Bastion Stair would take more space than we have here. The very short version: A rift has opened in the fabric of the universe, thanks to Khorne, who is basically the god of murder and battle. In addition to facing off against Khorne’s henchmen, we’ll also be battling soldiers from the Empire of Order who came here to rescue an artifact and then became corrupted. Bastion Stairs’ setting is a blood-hued ancestral hall filled with members of Khorne’s bloodherd. In the first wing, we’re battling against ungor (evil dudes with small devil horns), gor (bigger evil dudes with bigger ram’s horns), and tuskgors (their pets, which look like warthogs with a dozen tusks sticking out of their faces).

The Lost Vale dungeon, which is the final one in the game, is an enormous and lovingly crafted piece, demonstrating the developers’ desire to flesh out the endgame as much as the early game. Lost Vale is a green, lush outdoor area that was the home of the Everqueen, leader of the High Elves; however, Dark Elves have made their way in and have now enslaved the Everqueen. Since it’s the highest player-versus-environment instance in the game, Lost Vale is larger than the average dungeon - each wing here will take about two hours to finish, and in addition to the wing bosses and final end-boss, there are also three sub-bosses in each level.

If you were asking “Is there a PVE endgame raid content in WAR?”. The answer is “A lot, it’s more in-depth, and yes.” The last PvE encounters, the highest level in the game, are the King encounters. In the case of Order, their king is Emperor Karl Franz, while in the case of Destruction, their king is Warlord Tchar’zanek. That’s gated by very epic RvR encounters all the way up, that said, once those encounters are unlocked there’s nothing stopping a player who prefers PvE from queuing up, entering a contested city (because he’ll be safe in the contested city) and taking on the King encounter with his buddies.

‘Often, in other MMOs, the company will spend a lot of time making sure the beginning of the game is wonderful, but the rest of it can sort of peter off. But we haven’t done that with Warhammer.’ We found this especially reminiscent of Age of Conan, which has come in for criticism because the Tortage levels are felt by some to be the best content, while the later game doesn’t meet the standards set by the early stages.

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