Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning [PC]

Repeatedly participating in these quests eventually fills the influence bar, allowing you to select from a number of rewards from the NPC I mentioned. At the start, the chapter one challenges, these rewards are pretty basic, but by chapter six you're getting some valuable loot, making the public quests entirely worthwhile. Once the bar is totally maxed out, you can't reset it, so you only get to pick your influence rewards once. You can, however, still earn experience and participate in the loot rolls in public or you can move onto the next chapter of public quests elsewhere. If you've participated in the same public quest numerous times and received several green bags, as I did, you'll notice the rewards tend to be the same each time. So if you are going to grind public quests for better items, it seems like the best idea is to move between questing zones for a chance at some different gear.

Doing these kinds of quests, which I've been obsessively completing over the last few days, maxing out all my chapter influence bars, is a nice break from standard questing, especially when there's a large group of players with the initiative to form groups to spread out the experience and influence point totals. There are also the scenarios, though, which should be familiar to any seasoned MMO player at this point, and they work well.

Basically a scenario is an arena PvP battle. Depending on what level you are, you participate in different contests of various capture and hold-type or flag-carrier challenges. You sometimes get quests to go into these, which add to the experience and renown point bonuses you get for killing others and performing well in the scenario.

The best part apart scenarios is that you get a lot of experience points for competing in them. You're able to queue up at any time, and after a while the game will offer you the option of entering in. You hit accept and you're whisked away to the battlefield to smash on the other team and hopefully come away with a victory. Provided you're any good, you'll see your experience total quickly rise as you wipe out the opposition balancing scenario play with regular questing and public quests turns out to be great for rapidly moving up the level curve, gaining new items, money, and abilities, and keeping things from getting stale.

The other nice thing about PvP is that the renown points you get for participation and kills bump up your realm rank which can eventually be used to purchase new kinds of abilities. I've got one slotted on my Bright Wizard right now that boosts the experience I gain from PvP which, considering my goal is to level right now, is pretty useful. You can also loot dead enemy players on the battlefield, which has yielded some nice items so far.

There's also the whole open-world PvP (or I guess I should be saying RvR for realm versus realm) element of the game, which involves another kind of control point capture gameplay, but I haven't really gotten into that yet.

Anyway, the whole point of me describing all this is to convey how much there is to do in the game aside from simple questing. I suppose it also helps that I'm enjoying my class right now, the Bright Wizard, who's mainly a ranged damage dealer. Though he starts off with a single-target fireball, he soon learns a few kinds of area of effect attacks that really help for bringing in influence and renown point bonuses on crowded battlefields. A fire cage ability that can hold targets in place seems to be pretty useful in PvP so far. The drawback of all his firepower is that he'll actually damage himself with some attacks, meaning keeping range or having a healer pay close attention to your health bar is essential to staying alive.

That's about it for now, but if you're still on the fence about whether WAR is a worthwhile investment, I'd say early signs point to yes. The graphics aren't particularly sharp and don't seem to perform all that well even on my near high-end rig at the office, but I can get over that with enjoyable gameplay. And now I'm off to explore more... or wait in a server queue....

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