Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning [PC]

The greatest thing about these competitive game areas is that they become available very early on. Where many games reserve RVR combat purely for the highest and most advanced segment of their player community, Warhammer Online puts it right up front and gets players involved in cooperating and competing with each other right from the get go. It's even more impressive that you never really feel like you're being thrown to the sharks before you're ready to swim.

Of course, if you don't want to take part in this type of gameplay, you're missing out on a lot what makes this game unique. Still, there's a lot of good PVE content and compelling story elements around every corner. Sure, a lot of it follows the same predictable MMO conventions: go deliver a package to a distant outpost, rescue a lost traveler and escort him home, recover a stolen crate of booze, and of course, go out into the countryside and kill the crap out of dozens of wolves, raiders, fairies, skeletons, dinosaurs, et al. Fortunately, though, Warhammer Online keeps the quest story short and to the point and injects a sizable dose of humor into the mix. It's true that there aren't a lot of story elements that play out beyond the confines of the quest giver's text box, and the few that do bring up some distracting quest options during particularly dangerous moments, but the overall effect of the quest story has an immediate and direct sort of relevance to the overall war between the various races and that helps to set the stage for the bigger rewards of PVP and RVR gameplay.

Mythic has always promoted their Tome of Knowledge as a truly revolutionary feature that uses information about the world and data about your performance as a major component of gameplay. We freely admit that years of listening to developers overemphasize the importance of peripheral features left us feeling a bit cynical about these claims for the Tome of Knowledge, but a few week's play has convinced us that the Tome is every bit as compelling and unique as Mythic has claimed.

The Tome of Knowledge is basically what it says it is -- a large compendium of information about the game world and your activities. At the most basic level, it tells you where you've been and what you've accomplished. That's huge enough by itself, not simply for the way it feeds your vanity over the number of beastmen you've killed, but also for the way it points you towards specific objectives that you haven't yet obtained. And since completing objectives gives you real, practical rewards, in the form of extra experience or cash, there's a strong draw to seek them out. It's particularly useful that it tracks your influence rewards for each area, so you know where to go to reap the most rewards.

Even when cruising through familiar lands and fighting old fights, we still found that the Tome had more to offer us, from new titles based on the quality and quantity of our trades with merchants, to new experience rewards based on the number of times we've killed or been killed by particular monsters, to the entertaining bits of lore and story found by venturing off the beaten path and finding new NPCs.

The Tome is always available at the very top of your screen, and you'll be alerted when you've unlocked new entries. Better still, when you open the Tome, you can flip right to a page that lists all your latest achievements. From there you can dial down to specific pages to see how you're doing against certain monsters, or track your progress in key public quests, or read up on the history and current events of the areas you've visited. As a framework for the content and an incentive to discover more about the world, the Tome does an amazing job.

Yes, we are, like most players, a little tired of fantasy MMOs but the setting in Warhammer Online is skewed just enough to seem fresh. The real appeal here, though, is the interesting intersection of PVE, PVP, and RVR gameplay and the way that the Tome of Knowledge rewards players for their accomplishments. There are still plenty of unknowns here, particularly with regard to class balance and the lack of differentiation among characters of the same class, but only time will tell how those issues affect the overall experience. In the meantime, the appeal of the beta is as strong as ever.

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