Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning [PC]

Then there are scenarios, which are team arena battles of a sort. These take place in an instance area, so you're transported to the battlefield, and the goal is to score 500 points, or achieve the highest score in 15 minutes. What's fun is that there are control points on the battlefield, and if you can control them all, you get a giant horn sounding before they explode into huge fireballs. You can recognize all the veterans because they scatter immediately upon hearing the horn, but newcomers stand idly looking a bit confused. When they do see the fireball expanding and they start running away (it's far too late), it's just a tad bit hilarious.

One thing that I really like thus far is the Tome of Knowledge. It's sort of like the guide in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy; it's a dynamic repository of everything that you do and see in the game, and it's useful for referring over your quests, keeping track of your titles and accomplishments, and going over the lore. And this being Warhammer, the lore is fairly elaborate, with lots of flowery language. The Tome is a big part of another thing I like about Warhammer thus far; it's very user-friendly. Information is presented to you constantly, but it doesn't feel overwhelming. The interface lays out everything nicely.

Visually, Warhammer Online is not as graphically demanding as Age of Conan (this year's other major MMO), but that should translate into decent performance on a wider variety of machines. I have noticed a small bug or two, but nothing that's game breaking. One of these bugs involved getting a quest offered again and again, even though I had accomplished it twice. No biggie, I just ignored it the third time. Another bug had some NPCs falling through some stairs, but it wasn't critical; these were just background NPCs.

The server performance seemed fine and there was no detectable lag for the most part, but since the vast majority of players haven't even started playing yet, we'll have to wait and see what performance is like on launch day. I must admit that there were some annoying wait queues on Sunday for some of the more popular realms; at one point I had to play Call of Duty for an hour while waiting for the line in front of me to get to zero, but Mythic put up a lot more servers on Monday, and I'm not seeing any wait queues at the moment. Again, though, we'll have to see what the situation is like on Thursday.

After about six or seven hours of gameplay my high elf character is at class (or level) 7, and the level progression seems to slow down quickly after level 5 or so. I'm still sort of in the starting area, but I'm moving south and encountering bigger towns and a lot more missions; before, I'd have about five or six missions in my quest log; now I've got about 12 or more. The foes are getting tougher; they just introduced the orcs, and things are definitely getting more complicated.

At least I'm starting to score some nifty armor and weapons, and another thing that I like about the game is that there are a lot of rewards, both in terms of loot but also in terms of achievements. Kill 25 of one enemy type and you get rewarded, or get X number of critical hits and you get a title. The designers seem to recognize the hallmark of all great games in that if you offer up a series of easily achievable rewards, the player will get hooked getting one reward after another.

I'll keep plugging away at Warhammer for further updates this week. The next big goal is to hit level 10 or so, that's when I can start delving into the character specialization. I'm also interested in really testing this realm-versus-realm system, which the game is based upon. Basically, Order and Destruction are battling one another for supremacy.

©2008-09-15, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved