Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Early Start Hands-on

Sep 15, 2008

Although it doesn't "officially" launch until later this week, EA and Mythic Entertainment on Sunday opened the doors to Warhammer Online for those customers who had pre-ordered the collector's edition of the game. On Tuesday, those who pre-ordered the regular edition will be allowed early entry, and on Thursday, the game officially hits store shelves and the servers will open to everyone who buys it then. I was in the first group, so I installed the game on Friday evening so that, on Sunday, I could begin playing the game for the review.

You'll note that this isn't our official review of the game. That's because massively multiplayer online role-playing games such as Warhammer Online require a lot of playing time, far more than games in other genres. It's almost impossible to gauge such a game with only a week of playing time, let alone a few days. And it's difficult to gauge an MMO until players arrive in bulk. So this is the first of a number of hands-on impressions that we'll post until we are ready to review the game in the coming weeks.

Now Warhammer Online will undoubtedly be compared to World of Warcraft; both are conventional fantasy style games that feature humans and dwarves and orcs and elves. Call me crazy, but they even share a slight aesthetic, though Warhammer does come off as more graphically detailed. (No surprise there, WoW hails back to 2004, after all.) So what does Mythic have to offer? Well, though I'm not much of a Warhammer universe fan, I find myself being drawn into the intricate lore, and there are definitely some cool ideas at play in this game.

When creating a character, you can choose from Order and Destruction factions. The former consists of the Empire (humans, mostly), Dwarfs, and High Elves. The latter are the more evil factions: the Dark Elves, Chaos (humans, mostly), and Greenskins (orcs, goblins, etc.) If you play as Destruction character on one server, you can only create Destruction characters on that server, and vice versa. And servers come in three varieties. Core servers use the core rule-set and are recommended for all players. Open RVR/Role-Playing servers are for those who like player-versus-player combat all the time. (RVR stands for realm-versus-realm.) Then there are role-playing servers, which is for those who like to be "in-character" all of the time.

I originally rolled a high elf swordmaster, but after getting in the game I realized that I wanted to look like and play a more traditional elf character; think of an elf clad in leather armor and armed with longsword and longbow. So I rerolled a high elf shadow warrior, which is a ranged combat specialist. What I like about the shadow warrior is that it's possible to switch between ranged and sword combat instantly, so I can loose three or four arrows at a target, then easily transition to melee combat when they charge at me. One last note on character creation: I'd definitely like to see more options when it comes to things such as hair styles and such; as it is, you run the danger of everyone having similar heads and hair styles. Customization and variation could certainly be improved in this regard.

The high elves' starting area is set against an invasion by the dark elves. The gigantic Black Arks of the dark elves are unleashing an invading force, and the high elves are scrambling to defend their homeland. As such, many of the early quests revolve around this idea of killing a certain number of invaders; six dark sprites here or six witch elves there. If you're an MMO veteran, you'll recognize the quest types. Go find so-and-so and talk to them in one quest, or recover three crystal shards in another. At least these quests are fast and simple, so you feel like you're doing a lot. Then there are the public quests, which I find myself really enjoying, especially since I didn't expect so many of them. Public quests are these big, multi-stage battles that anyone can join; all you have to do is enter the public quest area and jump into the public quest in progress or wait for it to reset. The more people, the better, but it also means that your risk of reward is lower at the end.

An example of a public quest is that you might enter a burning wood and discover it's crawling with enemies. Stage one is to kill, say, 75 of those enemies. There's no time limit on this, but as soon as the players in the public quest have achieved the objective, the public quest advances to stage two. This is often a timed challenge where you have to kill a smaller number of tougher foes, like three archmages and four beastmasters. If you can accomplish that task, you get to the third and final stage, which is a timed boss battle against a very tough boss, like a giant hydra. You need to work together to take it down. When you win, the game calculates your contribution and you get to select a reward; the better you did, the better quality your reward. Public quests are a great way to get an impromptu big-scale experience without the hassle of organizing a group, and I encountered about six or seven public quests in the early going, most of which revolving around this theme of invasion.

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.