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 Darkshaunz Warhammer Online Review Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (affectionately known as WAR) is a solid, exciting and promising MMORPG title developed by Mythic studios. Given the positive reviews across the board, it may seem like it is smooth-sailing for the title in it's launch stages. Mythic reports 750,000 subscriptions just three weeks into launch, whilst impressive, does not really give new players or candidates an idea as to how the game truly operates. This article will hopefully give readers more insight as to how the game performs in both the early and endgame stages of both PvE (Player vs. Environment) and RvR (Realm vs. Realm/Player vs. Player). This will all be done via the perspective of a tier 4, rank 32 Dark Elf Sorceress which I currently play with.  Lore and Setting Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is based on Games Workshop's rich and established tabletop game, Warhammer (surprised?). With over 25 years of strong, lush and descriptive lore and stories, characters and locales to base their world on, Mythic had chosen a very strong base to work with. Each racial zone exhibits the telltale architecture, the theme and ambience of their house and/or breed. To give you an example, the Dark Elf zones are constantly in combat with the High Elves, and so you will see spiked warcamps and battlements dotted across the campaign landscape. Dark Elvish architecture is very sinister, and grim - with a heavy emphasis on pointed ends and sharp edges, accompanied by all hues of purple and navy blue. On the other hand, High Elvish architecture is more refined, with the High Elves favouring the white gloss of marble and the proud banner of the blazing phoenix on both their combat uniforms and buildings. The boorish Greenskins on the other hand, have makeshift huts and rudimentary housings made for their habitat, and the servants of Chaos have mutations on all their buildings, from tentacles coming out of towers, to massive flaming Tzeentch eyeballs keeping ever vigilant over their countless minions. The game does all that it can to immerse you in the Warhammer world, convince you that you are fighting an epic war which spans many different landscapes, and thoroughly succeeds.  Tome of Knowledge The tome of knowledge is a great addition to the MMORPG scene (similar to LOTRO's book of deeds), and was an immediate hit with all WAR players. The tome of knowledge is not just an accessible place for you to learn about important NPCs, locations and quests (keeping in mind it does all of those things well), but it is also a personal tracker of all your major and minor achievements in the Warhammer world. If you ever wanted to know how many dwarves you killed in your WAR career, the tome will tell you that. Not only will it tell you the number of dwarves killed, but will even break down the type of dwarves you killed. The tome is also where you access cool stuff like unlockable titles, secret items, trophy tokens and a variety of other miscellaneous unlocks and information of note. The tome essentially rewards the "Explorer" type of player, the player that isn't in a rush to level up, but wants to learn and travel across the map to find every secret of the world in which they work in. Indeed, certain items like hidden cloaks and special trinkets are only obtainable in the game via these specific tome unlocks. The NPCs you must interact or slay are often hidden away to those that do not have the drive or motivation to find them, do not lose out on all those cool secrets if you play WAR!  Combat and Questing Depending on individual playstyles, combat is either drawn out or quick. If you like to tank and roll a Chosen for example, then be prepared to take some damage whilst you kill your target. It will take you longer to kill something, but you are also very resilient due to your high armour. However, if you are a glass cannon type of player, you would roll a Brightwizard or a Dark Elf Sorceress. Both are specialists in extreme burst damage and high DPS. You will kill your target quickly, but you are also extremely vulnerable to any sort of attack due to a low armour rating. Hybrid players can roll in either ranged classes such as the High Elf shadow warrior or Goblin Squig Herder, there are also hybrid options for melee: High Elf White Lion or Chaos Marauder. If you love healing, then combat will take even longer, but dying is never a concern for you because of a variety of Heal over time spells available in your arsenal. Players who are natural healers should consider Dwarven runepriests or Chaos zealots. Whatever class you roll, there will be a need for you always, there are occassions where healers and tanks are needed more, however. Questing in WAR works very much the same way other MMORPGs work. You will kill x mobs or collect y items and return them to your quest giver, most of it is self-explanatory. However, WAR has a special quest system called "Public Quests", which should not be overlooked. Public Quests work in a way that anyone can just enter a zone and participate in whatever stage the PQ is operating in (there are usually three stages). For example, if you stayed in the PQ since stage 1 of the 3 stages, you get a higher contribution score which is added on to a "random roll" at the end for a loot prize. However, if you only killed a couple of mobs, you would have a much lower contribution score added to your roll. The best way to score loot is to participate and help out as much as you can for as long as you can. There are some problems however, some PQs in Tier 4 are bugged and sometimes you will lose out on loot even though you had the highest contribution - because your random roll let you down. These can be a source of frustration, but you never go home empty-handed, as all players receive influence and experience for participating. If you accumulate enough influence, then you can redeem free loot!  Itemization and Loot! Let's face it, we work hard in MMORPGs because we do what we can to make our characters look cool and badass. WAR will reward players for working hard and exploring the various facets in the game. Obviously not just with EXP, INF (influence points) and cool unlocks, but with awesome armour and weapons for you to chop the bad guys with (or good guys, if you are Destruction). Every mob in the game drops money for you to loot, yes, even animal monsters will drop money for you. The game gives you every opportunity to accumulate wealth and accrue all kinds of mad looking armour. Black Orks will look big, bulky and intimidating as they progress in level, whereas Shadow Warriors will start looking like a Ninja/Legolas hybrids in no time. There are all kinds of weapons too, from simple staves to monstrous spellstaffs, from simple daggers to intricate shortswords, there is an impressive array of weapons with different stats for different playtypes. In addition, WAR allows you to dye your armour at the merchants for a reasonable price, further allowing you to customize your fashion sense, or lack thereof. Forget about grinding 100,000 gold pieces for a mount, by the time you hit level 20 (mount level), you will have enough to buy a mount and or two for your character.  Realm vs. Realm Where WAR really shines is the player versus player combat experience. If you love PvP and killing other players, you will love the different instanced battlegrounds and countless open world PvP skirmishes which spring up like brushfires across the world map. To enhance the experience, there are many different locales in which you can do battle in, and with different objectives to complete. In a Tier 2 scenario called Phoenix gate, opposing teams must capture each others' flags and in a Tier 3 scenario called Tor Anroc, both teams must try to hold the artifact without swimming in the map's numerous lava pits (a feat not so easily achieved). The game is not restricted purely to instanced fights, but keep sieges premier as the title's strong point in world PvP. As a faction, you and your guild or warband must fight to defend battlefield objectives and castles in your zone. There are bonuses for maintaining and defending your area's PvP objectives, and penalties if you fail to do so. Keep sieges are very awesome and fun, I especially have fond memories and experiences defending keeps in the Chaos Tier 3 zones, which sees a lot of fighting on my server. Nothing beats the sight of a Dark Elf ram beating down the gates of a keep, and Chaos Hellfire cannons eating up the defenders. Both instanced RvR and open RvR gives you EXP and Renown points, which you use to unlock different PvP gear sets.  Guild System I know a lot of people reading this are long-time MMORPG players, and so you guys know the importance of guilds or clans in these kinds of games. WAR also recognizes the importance of community in their game, and have developed a unique guild level-up system for the game. The guild isn't just an excuse to have guild chat or have the name <Chuck Norris Rulz> displaying below your character's name, but it is in essence, a living entity which levels up with your members and their activities. As you rank up your guild by being active in the world RvR, instanced RvR, questing and just generally playing with your guildmates, your guildmaster will unlock special rewards for your community of players. Guild rewards are not limited to guild cloaks, tactics for your standard (which can be held by a guild standard bearer, giving everyone around him unique buffs) and even access to a special guild tavern and a leader's hall for all the bigwigs in your guild to meet up and come up with battleplans. It's rewarding to level up your guild, for example, my guild is level 15 and we have access to a guild cloak - which displays our standard pattern on our in-game cloaks. That way, every guild can show off their progress visually as well as maintaining a sense of clan pride.  Technical Considerations Graphics in WAR can be set to either High Quality, Balanced, or Fastest Framerate. High Quality looks absolutely brilliant if you run a high-end machine and can afford to squeeze every bit of performance out of your rig. This is not to say that "Balanced" or "Fastest Framerate" look terrible either, Balanced sacrifices some of the fancier filtering and shadow effects (some spell effects too), and Fastest Framerate sacrifices most of the non-critical graphical cues like draw distance, shadows and most shading effects. I personally run a AMD 4400, 2 Gig RAM, 256MB ATI system, which is admittedly, quite dated for today's gaming needs. I can get away with "Balanced", but that causes some stuttering and graphical lag during epic keep sieges and scenarios. Like a lot of individuals, I opt for Fastest Framerate as my default setting. Sure, the game doesn't look as graphically stunning, but this takes away any FPS issues I had to start with and allows me to play competitively in RvR and quest stress-free. The game performance will depend on your computer and it's specifications. WAR does suffer from some Crash-to-Desktop (CTD) issues right now with some players, but they are addressing CTDs and stuttering in the version 1.1 patch which is to be released soon.  Personal Reflection For what it aims to do, Warhammer Online executes all of it's primary goals with exceeding grace and polish. I'd like to remark here that WAR is not a WoW-killer, which a lot of people have been quipping at. Mythic never aimed to undermine the success of WoW, on the contrary, they paid homage to WoW in some respects with their game mechanics and ultimately built an entirely different experience from Warcraft. If you love doing PvE, there is enough content in WAR to keep you busy - there are a lot of quests and public quests. But if you want to raid in PvE (doing an instance with more than 40 people), I suggest shopping somewhere else for now. If you love PvP, there is no excuse for you not to try WAR, the PvP in this game is absolutely no nonsense and brutal. You will be punished by the opposing team for not working with yours (I've often yelled at my screen when my party healer was too busy doing damage and not healing us!). I should also warn that the game starts to become just slightly more play-time intensive at around mid of Tier 2 (say around level 25), that is - you might experience some slowdown in leveling at this rate if you play casually. Importantly, the game rewards you even if you are a casual player. You can still make some semblance of progress even if you played for just 1 or 2 hours in WAR. Needless to say, if you love grinding in a MMORPG, WAR will also reward you. You are the king of your play experience, so I recommend joining up with a group of friends from school or university and get out there to kick some butt. 
Overall Score
8.5 / 10 Excellent - could be better with more patches. Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is the fastest selling MMORPG in the market right now, for a good reason. By differentiating itself from other MMORPGs on the market like World of Warcraft, Mythic has succeeded in filling the PvP gap left by other similar genre titles in the industry. Despite being a great title, it is still far from perfection, until the latest patch is released, players will have to deal with buggy quests and CTDs for the time being (which is never fun for anyone). It has a great potential to grow, but that is all in the hands of Mythic - so far, they have done a stellar job responding to player feedback. Let us hope they keep it up! Some sites of note http://www.warhammeronline.com - Official site for WAR. http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums - Unofficial forums of WAR. Has plenty of comprehensive guides, tips and hints for new and existing WAR players. http://www.imtwelve.com/forum - Forums for <Twelve> guild, an Oceanic community based in Darklands, where I play my rank 32 sorc. Global players are always welcome, why not start your WAR experience with a friendly and active group of players? Have an online game you want to recommend or have me check out? Do not hesitate to email me: darkshaunz[at]hotmail.com |
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