Warhammer Online Hands-on - One Week In

Sep 22, 2008

It's been a busy few days for me with Warhammer Online. I'd been away at Austin Game Developers' Conference last week and missed most of the early start program, which let users in before the official launch date and decided I had some catching up to do when I returned to the office. And catch up I did. After rolling a Bright Wizard and joining up with some of the folks over at GameSpy, I proceeded to put in way too many hours over the weekend and bump myself up to rank 14.

So far I've been having a great time with the game. The overall world layout shouldn't be all that surprising. There are NPC towns with skill trainers, vendors, and quest givers. Eventually you exhaust the surrounding area's quests and move to the next, get a quest to talk with a leader in the next town, and so on and so on. The general quests you get aren't anything special at this point, tasking you with kill, scout or fetch objectives for experience, money, and the occasional item.

What is particularly helpful with effectively plowing through these quests are the full-sized maps and mini-maps which paint sections of the map in red to indicate an objective's location. There's a pop-up window that gives you a listing of all the quests active in a particular area, and if you click on it, it brings up your quest log so you can read the full description. In that sense it's really easy to figure out where you need to go and what you need to do in order to continue to earn money and experience.

With most MMOs, there's usually a question of how the game manages to keep the player engaged in and excited about the gameplay without everything turning into a mind-numbing grind. With WAR, Mythic offers two very distinct solutions: variety and accessible player-versus-player combat. While killing standard mobs like bats and boars is going to get boring every time, WAR's public quests, scenario PvP contests, and open-world territorial control PvP have, at least so far, kept things interesting.

First up are the public quests, which are quests in which any player in a zone can participate provided they're in the right area. In each zone you'll notice a "chapter" bar right under the experience bar at the screen's top. It's cut up into three segments, which when filled give you "influence rewards" that can be picked up from NPCs in towns. Public quest are separated into chapters specific to a zone. So in the starting zones you do chapter 1, then when you move to the next town you'll be on chapter 2, and so on. The public questing areas are scatted all over each zone, some of which are located right next to towns and some of which you need to explore to find. Once in a public questing zone, you'll see a quest progress tracker pop up near the top of the screen, giving you an indication of the public quest's progression.

Each public quest that I've seen so far proceeds in three stages. In the first, you have to kill a certain number of weak mobs, which gives you influence (fills the "chapter" bar) as well as experience for each kill and for completing the stage. In stage two, "champion" mobs spawn that take significantly more damage than the previous guys, and you'll have to either kill a certain number of them or smash apart other objects they're protecting. Again, you gain influence and experience for contributing here, and get a bonus at the stage's completion. In the final stage, a large boss mob will spawn that takes a hell of a lot more damage to bring down than anything else, and you get experience for killing him and a final bonus for completing the stage.

Then there's the big payoff: a giant treasure chest. The catch is you don't always get to look inside. In order to better your chances, you'll need to try and do as much damage as possible during the course of the public quest's three stages, as it ranks participants that way and assigns higher point bonuses to those who finish closer to the top. You also get a bonus if you missed out on winning something from the treasure chest previously. But really it all comes down to a dice roll, which happens a few seconds after stage three is completed. The game then picks a number of loot bags of varying shades of color to put in the treasure chest. If it's a green bag, you'll get a decent item out of it. If it's a gold bag, you'll get a wealth of items to choose from, including some rarer ones. While everyone's taking their loot bags from the chest and selecting which items they want, a timer counts down that resets the public quest when it reaches zero, starting the process over again.

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....