Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning
Sep 18, 2008Editor's Note: It's
We've been following the development of Mythic Entertainment's Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning for several years now. Mythic's dream was to take the well-loved Warhammer Fantasy and translate its "War is Everywhere" ethos into a dynamic game filled with the realm vs. realm-style combat system it had honed over many years with Dark Age of Camelot. Add to this a full track of PvE content, plenty of different PvP styles to experiment with and innovative new content like the Tome of Knowledge and Public Quests and
Interesting Places to See
If there's one thing that the Mythos team got absolutely right, it's their loving recreation of the Warhammer Fantasy universe. Warhammer began as a tabletop strategy game built around a particularly savage and frightening version of the standard-issue elves-and-orcs fantasy world. The Warhammer world is one in which war is omnipresent between a variety of competing factions that have grudges and ancient slights so deep that peace is an absolute impossibility. In this world the "Destruction" faction of orcs, dark elves and the forces of Chaos aren't "misunderstood" or "have a different point of view." They're out-and-out evil. They take great joy in actions and lifestyles that would make the Marquis de Sade throw up and do it all with a smile and a sense of moral clarity that Mother Theresa would envy.
The game's graphics are doing a great job in bringing the world of Warhammer to life in ways both gross and subtle. The game's opening zones are filled with atmospheric details that throw you into the Warhammer mindset immediately. The Empire opening area, for example, takes place during a full-fledged Chaos assault on a small town. As the player works his or her way through the opening quests explosions are going on, buildings are burning and Chaos and Empire NPCs are constantly battling with one another all across the landscape.
As players travel through the world, small details constantly keep up the pressure. World of Warcraft players may notice a similarity in basic art style (conveniently ignoring that it was Warcraft that borrowed heavily from Warhammer, not the other way around). The main difference is that where World of Warcraft goes for broad, colorful and exaggerated, Warhammer Online is dark, dirty and profoundly battle-scarred. The ground in Warhammer Online, for example, is slightly rust-colored and occasionally shows a protruding bone fragment -- a legacy of thousands of years of blood and non-stop warfare. Dwarf fortresses are filled with elaborate filigree, the Empire city of Praag sports cobblestones similar to the streets of the real Prague and the walls of Chaos' Inevitable City have insane graffiti and segments built in wildly different architectural styles based on which of the four Chaos gods they're devoted to.
Interesting People to Kill
Warhammer Online's play experience is built around two basic tracks, the PvE and PvP experience. Of the two, the PvP experience -- especially the Realm vs. Realm combat system -- is clearly where the developers' hearts were. All of Warhammer Online's PvP experiences are built around PvP "lakes" situated in the center of PvE questing zones divided in half. The two opposing sides can then face off with each other, each attempting to dominate the zone either indirectly by contributing "victory points" garnered in PvE questing and instanced PvP scenarios or more directly by battling against opposing players to capture various static objectives such as keeps littered about the landscape.
As players who enjoy PvP but aren't fans of random, purposeless "ganking," we're really getting a kick out of this sort of rule-driven purposeful and balanced PvP. While we haven't experienced much more then the second Tier of RvR gameplay, we can already say that we're big fans of what the Mythic team has put together. In just a few days of playing, we've already accumulated a whole host of "war stories" detailing fun battles, last stands, dirty tricks and other exciting events generated spontaneously by Warhammer Online's collision detection system, siege-engine gameplay, and a varied skillset that gives players combat effects like knockback that contribute to a variety of battle strategies.
We're also really enjoying the game's variety of classes. Making 20 different classes interesting can't have been an easy challenge (four classes were actually dropped prior to beta) but the developers at Mythic appear to have pulled it off. Class balance, of course, remains an open question since no one has yet reached max level nor tested them in Tier IV combat. Even when that happens MMO players will be screaming "nerf this, buff that!" until the sun grows cold. More fundamentally, though, each of the game's 20 classes seems to be distinct and fun in its own way. Whether it's the Magus' magic surfboard or the White Lion's animal companion or the Black Orc's combo system or the Witch Hunter's hat, every class seems to have a "hook" that makes it enjoyable to play and there is no shortage of player champions for any of them.
Gobbos in the Gears
Naturally it wouldn't be an MMO launch without at least some technical problems and Warhammer Online is no exception. Happily, the game seems to have vaulted over the issue of server stability, the most frightening issue any new MMO has to face. As of this writing all servers are up and have (with a limited exception) been running steadily since the game's "Head Start" launch on September 15th. The expected influx of retail consumers has started signing up, selecting servers and getting online mostly without a hitch and as servers rapidly fill up, the developers at Mythic are bringing new ones online to keep up with demand.
The biggest technical headache so far has been player queues forming to log in to the game as a result of too many players selecting one server. Potentially more serious in the long run (and contrary to our earlier assessment), there now seems to be a pronounced player predilection for Destruction. To its credit, the Mythic team is doing everything they can to alleviate both problems. Players selecting servers for new characters will be hit with pop-ups telling them where they should go and which side to choose to fill in underpopulated servers. The team has also begun taking down overcrowded servers for four-hour stretches in order to completely duplicate the current state of the world on a new server. That means that once completed, players can log in to a new, less-crowded server without losing any time invested in their current character. It remains to be seen how this will shake out and whether population imbalance will become a long-term problem.
The World at WAR
There's much more to explore, of course. There's a beautiful sense of progression in Warhammer Online, where the game slowly adds new levels of depth and richness and strategy to the play experience. We've only recently, for example, begun to delve into the world of tactics and morale abilities. The Tome of Knowledge is a whole book of empty pages waiting to be filled with our in-game achievements ranging from the number of mobs we kill to the amount of money we loot to the inaccessible places we discover. What we are sure of is that we've fought enough to get a sense of where Warhammer Online is going, and blood, guts and mindless screaming violence notwithstanding, we think we like the destination. Check back in a few days for our final verdict on Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning.
©2008-09-18, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
The PvE content so far has not been as impressive. Some of it, like the PvE Public Quest system (where players in a particular geographic area can all contribute to a local area event for a chance at loot prizes) has been brilliant. PQs are also one of the few genuinely original MMO ideas of recent times and we expect to see them copied in other MMOs in short order. Outside of the PQ system, though, we've seen very few PvE quests that break out of the standard "bring me the heads of eight foozles" model. There are some happy exceptions to be sure -- we particularly enjoyed one early series of quests that had us undermining an Empire town through skullduggery while also contributing to a PQ. And the text for the Orc zones is hilarious. But for most of the PvE quests, Mythic was at least kind enough to keep the number counts low and give a 100% drop rate.
We've also spotted more than a few in-game bugs. Many of them are small glitches such as bugged mobs or a weird bug that can lock an avatar into a particular animation cycle (one of our Magus characters spent much of yesterday tying and re-tying an invisible package). Others are more serious, such as lag and missed animation frames that cause pets and combat mobs to teleport around the landscape. We've also experienced chugging on less powerful systems in crowded combat situations. Fortunately none of this has made the game unplayable, though it may become a problem as players move into Tier IV combat where huge battles with dozens of players are the rule, not the exception.