Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning -- Beta Impressions
Aug 22, 2008A massively multiplayer online game like Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is huge. That's a truism, of course, one that's inherent in the very name of the genre. The result of their sheer size, though, makes most people focus on smaller portions of them when trying to get a handle on how good they are. There's much discussion of the PvE aspects, or how good the PvP is or the class balance or the graphics or any number of other features. We did that ourselves in our week-long
Now that the open beta has well and truly begun (starting with a free preview weekend), though, we though it appropriate to take a step back and try to appreciate Warhammer Online for what seems to make it work and what might keep it from achieving the greatness it's reaching for.
A Wide World to Explore
The development team at Mythic took as their goal to build a game around the Realm vs. Realm combat that marked the best part of their previous game, Dark Age of Camelot. Rather than forcing players to go through a PvE leveling process that ultimately ends up being meaningless as everyone rushes toward the endgame, they wanted to create an MMO that was essentially "all endgame." Taking as their guide the Warhammer mantra that "War is everywhere," one of the biggest innovations in Warhammer Online is simply the level of integration between the various gameplay systems. PvE, PvP, RvR -- they all contribute to the ultimate end game of raiding and looting the enemy cities.
Everything begins as soon as players logs in to his or her level 1 character. The level 1-2 experience is the now-common 10-minute World of Warcraft-style tutorial in which the player is given a simple quest to kill some nearby mobs. Once players hit level 2, though, things start to change. Rather than being guided on a strictly linear path through a PvE the newbie zone, level two suddenly offers the player a half-dozen quests to perform in a much wider area. Some are indoors and some outdoors. Some require the player to utilize stand-alone gun emplacements, some require the player to explore and others are simply fast moving killing quests. The key is that the Warhammer Online experience almost immediately gets broader, not deeper. From their first few levels, players are educated in the fact that there's always somewhere to go and something interesting to do, no matter where they are.
This is reinforced through the rapid introduction of three more gameplay elements -- the Tome of Knowledge, Public Quests and Scenario RvR. The player first becomes aware of the Tome when he or she approached the first quest giver. In addition to getting a quest, there's always something in the area that gives players their first Tome unlock. The Empire starting area, for example, gives players entries on "The Empire," "The Plague," and "The Griffin Legion" along with entries on "Chaos," "Chaos Marauders" and several other creatures in the immediate area. Getting a message about them on the screen and seeing the glowing book at the top of the screens encourages the player to explore this vital part of the game.
The Tome of Knowledge
Xbox LIVE's Achievement system proved some time ago what kind of gameplay knots people will put themselves in for a score beside their name and a few virtual medals. This lesson wasn't lost on game developers who have since developed any number of fascinating ways to use Achievements to change the way players play games. The Lord of the Rings Online took that idea and integrated it into gameplay as a sort of substitute talent system called the "Book of Deeds." Warhammer Online's Tome of Knowledge may eclipse them all, though.
Warhammer Online's Tome of Knowledge is absolutely huge. There's virtually no aspect of gameplay that it doesn't track and record. There's a kill counter for every type of creature (and player) in the game, exploration unlocks for finding specific locations in the game, well-written story snippets as a reward for following the PvE questlines, titles, new skills and much much more. In fact, while playing through the beta it seemed like there was a Tome unlock for almost everything. Clicking on your own character 100 times equals a Tome unlock. Going through a public quest naked merits a Tome unlock. Adding five players to your friends list is an unlock. And so on.
The impact of the Tome of Knowledge on gameplay can't really be underestimated. While it's tied intimately into the rest of the game, the Tome itself is a major piece of game content. There will certainly be a large contingent of players who take as their goal to unlock everything in the Tome. For everyone else, the Tome is a sort of goad for players to experience everything in the game. It's worth playing that PvP Scenario one more time to finish an obscure Tome unlock. It's worth going through low-level PvE quest lines in the other race's areas and doing public quests that one has outleveled just to get the unlocks. One of the key benefits of the Tome is simply to keep the players circulating throughout the world and participating in all of its content.
By the time a player hits level four or five, following the PvE storyline will bring players to their first public quests. The idea of Public Quests is one that's sure to be imitated in other MMOs down the road. The basic idea is simple. Present players with a geographically bounded area where a particular multi-stage storyline is going on and let everyone in the area automatically participate in it. Once the players in the area have finished the quest, drop a chest out of the sky and let players roll for the loot, giving them bonuses based on their contributions. If the players don't win the roll, they'll still get influence points that can be traded in for better equipment.
Public Quests seem to work on several levels. First, they're fun. Our own Fargo wrote extensively about them in our Second, they can be used to teach players specific tactics or steer them toward other areas of the game. A second-tier PQ in the Dwarf/Greenskin lands has the two sides each attempting to kill 100 NPCs of the opposing race. Since it's not in a PvP zone, players can't hit each other and must find nonlethal ways to interfere with each other. The fact that the PQ is located right next to an RvR/PvP zone is no coincidence. All it takes is a few minutes of that quest to get the blood boiling and drive players into realms where they can take out the hated opposition.
There is, however, one big caveat when it comes to public quests. By their very nature they're going to require more than a few players in order to push them past Stage 1. That's no problem now with dozens of players levelling up, looking for equipment and building up influence. As the player base ages, however, that may become an issue as players leave the first three Tiers of content behind. No One wants to feel that they've come to the party late and if Mythic can't find a way to keep the lower tiers of content being used and relevant, they're eventually going to become ghost towns.
Battlegrounds and RvR
Perhaps the biggest irony of the game's PvE and Tome content is that as much as there is of it, it's ultimately a sideshow to the heart of the game -- the PvP and RvR content. It's in this area where Mythic's learned the biggest lessons from their Dark Age of Camelot experience. Scenario-based PvP is available to players from the moment they log in. All a level one character has to do is click on the "join queue" button on the interface anywhere in the world to get in line for a Scenario. When in a scenario, characters will be leveled to the tier mean. They won't be given any extra skills, which means that very low level characters will still be at a slight disadvantage, but the field will be more-or-less even. Newbie players who don't know where the button is will be directed to a Scenario by a PvE quest around level four.
Players will run into their first world-based RvR content around level eight or nine, assuming they're following the PvE storyline. The first RvR area are built around the two opposing sides merely capturing strategic points on the battlefield. As players continue moving through the world, the RvR zones get more elaborate. Tier two adds the first keep sieges in which players must capture three geographically separate fortresses in order to capture the zone. By Tier Three battlefield objectives and capturing keeps become more tied together until players reach Tier Four at which point they'll need to capture and hold the big end keeps in all three racial warfronts to open the enemy's capital city for attack.
It's impossible to describe in the space of a short article all the different varieties of PvP available in Warhammer Online. Scenarios run the gamut from simple timed slaughterfests for points to take-and-hold actions to king-of-the-hill games to capture-the-flag. As players ascend in level, they'll be asked to take part in more elaborate Scenarios that will require more coordination and planning. The beauty of all of this PvP is the way it's all tied together into the ultimate end game of taking the enemy capitol. Low-level players in early areas of the game, PvE players and Scenario players all contribute by opening up zone locks and giving bonuses to higher level players. From level one, players are thrust into a larger "end game" that they can contribute to merely by pursuing their own agenda.
The more we explore in Warhammer Online, the more it seems like there is to see. Little, for example, has been made of the "Living Guild" system that turns guild from mere collections of players with their own tabard into sort of pseudo-characters. Guilds in Warhammer Online have their own levels, Tome unlocks, flags and bonuses as they level up. Guild flags of a certain level, for example, will give a region-wide bonus selected by the guild itself to the players of that side when hung on an RvR keep. Guild banners can also be stolen by rival guilds for equally impressive bonuses. This bring inter-guild politicking and rivalry a whole new dimension as guilds will argue and compete fopr the right to place their banners on keeps and decide what bonuses to impart.
Indeed, if there's a snotling lying in the woodshed, it falls in the area of incomplete implementation of all these systems. As impressed as we are with the basic design of the game, Warhammer Online is an enormously complicated beast and Mythic's clearly got its work cut out for it. Class balance -- the perpetual complaint among MMO gamers -- increases exponentially the more classes there are. Warhammer Online has 20, which makes one's head swim. At this writing, the inter-class sniping has already begun with the current consensus that Warrior Priests are way overpowered while Witch Elves are a joke. No one expects the balance to ever be perfect -- especially not in a beta -- but if the classes aren't a bit closer at launch, it could seriously skew the server populations, something World of Warcraft is still dealing with four years after launch.
We have yet to compete in a Tier Four capital city siege, but if these aren't handled right, they could easily bring the server down. We experienced chugging on our fairly powerful gaming rigs during some lower-level fortress sieges which makes us worry. Then there's the level of coordination required to attack a capital in the first place. Some of the high-level fortresses could use some landscape tweaks to make them more competitive and taking and hold three massive fortresses in three different zones is going to take a lot of players working together and if the guilds and guild system isn't up to handling it, it might never happen. That would be an unmitigated disaster when the whole purpose of fighting is to get to that content. We're also fairly unimpressed by the game's crafting system.
WAR is Everywhere!
Reservations aside, though, we're pretty excited by how Warhammer Online is shaping up. After many years and far too many delays, the clock is ticking down to its early September launch. There's a little more cleanup and a lot more balancing to do, but in terms of achieving what they set out to do, it looks like the Mythic team may have pulled it off. Warhammer Online feels like the next great game of Realm vs. Realm combat and we can't wait for the Waaaagggghhh! to truly get started.
©2008-08-22, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
PQs
Snotlings in the Woodshed