Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning

Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Reviews

This review is of Beta and of the first 2 days of release, there are some fine reviews further down and I suggest you check them out!
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Let me start out this review saying I am addicted to MMO’s.I was in beta for Ultima Onlina, Everquest, Anarchy Online, SWG and WoW. I then went on to play each MMO for several hundred hours if not days. I played WoW for at least 20-40 hours per week for 4 years. My characters averaged 40 days played. That being said (not to brag but to say I know WoW), here is my review of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning.

If there were any times that you played an MMO and thought that, something was missing… I am sure that the folks over at Mythic Entertainment thought the very same things. As the torchbearers for RVR or Realm vs Realm battle they understand how to do an MMO right from the beginning. What Mythic did was to build a game where the player vs player was not an afterthought to keep high levels occupied, instead it IS the game. After you are slightly acquainted with the interface you are then thrown head-long into battle. War is all around and they mean it. This game is about fantasy WAR and not about phat lewt, (although there is that sorta, more on this later).

Another feature that is built in is the amazing Tome of Knowledge. If you ever downloaded addons for WoW for use as a record keeper then you will know how this feature works. The really cool part is that this tome is utilized as a bragging tool and it also unlocks character titles. It keeps a record of the number of mob x you have slain, the number of sales to merchants and so on. You’ll have to see it to completely get the power of this tool.

Another great feature is the open group system. Being I am almost 40 years old and have 2 kids of my own, the last thing I want to do is log in and be begging for groups with pre-teen jerks angry at the world because some girl turned them down for a date…etc. How the open group system works is there are areas you may be running through and need to kill “X” monster. Well just run into that area and do a group lookup. You will see who is there what step they are on and bam! you can join them. You don’t even need to talk to them “omg roxx0rz!”…. As long as you participate in the quest and don’t just stand there then you’ll get the quest done. Which leads me to the final cool feature;

Public Quests (PQ);
Public quests are there to help you complete quests that require a group. Basically same as the open group system except that these quests have several stages and you did not have to have this quest before you came to the area. You can join in at any point in the chain and depending on how much you contribute to the final boss section then the better the loot and experience. So you could walk away with a healing potion or the Sword of 10000 truths. Whatever you get it WILL be usable by you! That’s a huge difference from WoW.

So why all the WoW comparison? Many people will say that this is WoW 2.0. I will have to disagree with that. Let me explain it this way. If you are into playing first person shooters. And say, you are looking over the barrel of your gun. Is Gears of War a Wolfenstein 3D ripoff? Well that viewpoint (looking over the barrel), comes directly from one of the first 3D shooters ever (Wolfenstein 3D). Mythic has the same sort of complaint against it. “It is trying to be like WoW too much”. To be honest WoW took alot from Dark Ages of Camelot which was the MMO pre-wow. The look of the orcs comes directly from Games Workshop which is where Warhammer comes from. If you are playing an MMO would you rather the players playing not have an idea how to play or would you rather everyone could play pretty well on their own. Being that mostly everyone coming to Warhammer has played an MMO before it is a benefit to everyone that Warhammer has a “similar feel” to all other MMO’s that predate it.

The game allows for massive customization of your character. You can customize it internally. Meaning you can get abilities and skills that are more about power on the field of battle and less about the glowing codpiece of doom. The graphics are at this time (just after release) moderate and do use DirectX 10 to some extent. They are scheduling to allow people with ubermachines to ramp the setting up soon. Just realize though when you get 200 people on the field fighting, you may not wish to be able to count the nose hairs on each player, instead blast them first and count nose hairs later.

I am beginning to get the feeling this this is a much more mature players game and less for the kids to show off in. It’s like that Nivia for Men commercial, ” they got to see me, I got to attract them somehow”. Being there isn’t a huge glowing customizable look it may be off-putting to some that feel they NEED to have a glowing sword. The artwork in this game is amazingly real and very beautiful.

Final thoughts, the look of this game is one of realism and is very close to what tabletop Warhammer players would find appealing. You can play greenskins that are crude and really fun to play, or be a serious Von Helsing type character that looks like a swashbuckling hero. Either way you should have no problem finding something you like among the 20 classes.
Mythic knows how to run a successful MMO. They make the big, hard decisions. When class balancing and fun was at stake, they cut four classes in order to both balance the races, but also because the classes weren’t up to snuff. And when all six capital cities were being problematic, they took out four of them and will release them as free content later.

Coming from Dark Age of Camelot, a game that unbearably belongs to the first generation of MMOs, Mythic decided to take the Warhammer lore and craft a game that they know best: realm versus realm. Warhammer Online (WAR) takes everything they tested, tried and made work from DAoC and pushed it forward into a new generation. Writing this review is tricky, because on the surface WAR is like most MMOs out there. But it’s the details and the small things that make it something completely different.

Let’s start with the way the game is set up. From the beginning, PvP is important as one of the first quests you receive will be to complete a scenario. In this way, WAR emphasizes its committment to more than PvE. In fact, a PvP’r could spend his or her time entirely PvPing and level all the way to the endgame. It helps that scenarios are constantly running and chances are you’ll be in one before you know it.

The distinction, though, is that if you don’t really care much about PvP, there are other opportunities. Firstly, literally hundreds of quests are out there, each with rewards that are specific to your class, meaning you won’t be doing a quest for a nice axe that you, a healer, can never use. The zones begin as approximately 80% PvE content, 20% PvP. As you continue through the zones and into different tiers, that percentage will change, but there will always be PvE content.

One complaint I hear all the time is “I don’t like PvP,” which usually means…I don’t like to be ganked by people twenty levels higher than me when doing a quest. Don’t blame you, which is why the PvP system in 90% of the WAR servers is perfect. PvP only occurs on your terms, by entering a designated zone. Stay out of those zones and you won’t have to worry about that pesky Bright Wizard. What about balancing in the zones? I don’t want a level 40 PvP’r heading into a level 1 zone and laying waste to everyone. Don’t worry, if someone enters a PvP zone too low for them, they are turned into a chicken.

Then there are the dungeons, all made to be completed by a small group and not some bloated raid. And with each dungeon being split into wings that should take 1-2ish hours to complete and having armor sets, there’s plenty of fun content to be had.

But that’s not all. Spread throughout the entire game are approximately 300 (according to developers) Public Quests (PQs). These PQs are areas within each zone that are open to everyone of your side to participate in. No matter whether you’re grouping with someone or not, you’ll contribute to the various stages of these areas (stages that range from killing a number of things, fighting a boss like a dragon or destroying urns) and, when the PQ is over you roll on a loot bag. What makes this work even better is that each loot bag will have a piece of equpiment that your class can use, guaranteed.

Additionally, there’s a bar that tracks your story chapter’s PQ progress and awards you three different items (usually a potion or talisman, followed by equipment and then a weapon) as you progress through three tiers.

Awards abound at every turn, even in PvP as you are tracked separately by your PvP level. At certain levels, or renown ranks as they’re called, you’ll have access to not only powerful equipment but also renown skills that will help you in both PvP and PvE. But let’s not stop here; each of the race pairings have zones that are grouped into tiers, with tier four being the high content. Each zone has PvP areas with towers and, as you progress into tier two and beyond, keeps. Both sides (Destruction and Order) can take over a keep and, if your guild is high enough in rank (more on that later), you can capture a keep in your name.

But keeps are also treated like PQ areas, being populated by NPCs and a very strong leader that also supplies equipment. Fighting into a keep can turn into epic encounters, with siege weapons, rams to break down the keep’s walls, boiling oil for the defenders to pour onto wouldbe attackers, places for ranged attackers to unleash devastating spells and arrows…it’s quite a rush to be involved in one, especially as both sides start to get more aggressive, calling in reinforcements to help.

And as the game progresses, these types of battles become more common. Which is a huge difference from the elephant in the room, World of Warcraft. WoW crafts a similar structure, with two side duking it out…but it was never meant to be a truly PvP-centered game in the way WAR is. From the very beginning, you are immersed in this warfare, from the very first level all the way to the end and beyond.

And all of this is before you get into how many bars/levels there are to tackle. Sure, the game is capped at level 40 at launch, but that’s not taking into consideration that each chapter of PQs has a bar with loot associated to it or that there’s 80 renown ranks that will take a lot of PvPing to hit, or that your guild actually levels up to 40 based not on how many members you have in your guild but on their accomplishments, a system that benefits both small and large guilds. Guild ranks are actually important as they provide you with a ton of abilities, from being able to carry benefit-providing standards to having a guild vault to access to guild auctions, crafting vendors, quick flight paths to the dungeons, the ability to take keeps, etc.

There’s just so much here, so many shinies to grab your attention. And it’s all tied into the Tome of Knowledge, a large compendium that tracks everything you do from quests to accomplishments to titles, etc. It’s so indepth that you have to wonder how Mythic pulled it off. And pulled it off, they did. WAR is a monumentous game that feels as relevant and genre-shifting as WoW did when it came.

So, there you have it. A very rambling review that didn’t even touch on half of what the game has to offer (did you really want to be here for another century?), but will have to remain incomplete. Because, here’s the thing. Even when you strip away all the little details, the leveling and all of that junk that I spent forever typing about, what we find is…this game is fun. And diverse. And it’s just what I wanted and needed from a MMO.

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