Warhammer Online: Worth stopping WoW for

We sharpen our swords and join the WAR to bring you our impressions of the first 10 levels.

WAR is here!

When we interviewed Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning creative director Paul Barnett last week, he told us that early reviews of MMOs are impossible, and instead recommended video game publications do a preview of the 'out of the box' game and save a proper review for when the world, and its players, have settled down a bit. Well, you asked for it Paul...

Warhammer Online feels like Mythic's answer to the problematic question posed by Blizzard's World of Warcraft. Every virtual sinew of it screams 'our game is better and here's why'. From the player versus player combat to the questing, the game is full of nice refinements that feel as if they've been borne out of a frustration the design team has experienced when playing WoW.

For this reason we reckon WAR is going to have a much tougher time bringing new players into the MMO genre than WoW did when it was first released a few years ago. Sure, there will be fans of the Warhammer universe, perhaps players of the popular table-top game, who are sure to enter the fold. But WAR Online is, after all is said and done, unashamedly hardcore and, by its very nature baffling to anyone who's never played an MMO. Instead, we reckon Mythic's focus is to steal players from Blizzard's virtual world. This is something we can see it doing in spades.

This being our early impressions of the game (we've levelled up a few characters to 10), we can't speak for the end game, or indeed the mid game. But we can confidently say that the early game suggests an incredibly polished, fun and fresh-feeling MMORPG, and, if you're a WoW player, one well worth dabbling in while you wait for Wrath of the Lich King to come out.

WAR is a brilliant refinement of the MMORPG genre, but it's no revolution.

For us, the brilliance of the game lies in how Mythic has improved conventional MMORPG game elements, refined them and made them more streamlined. Take, for example, Realm versus Realm (RvR) play, which is Mythic's term for the overarching player versus player combat pioneered in its previous MMO, Dark Age of Camelot. WAR categorises the game's various races into two factions - Order (Empire, High Elves and Dwarves) and Destruction (Greenskins, Chaos and Dark Elves) - who are constantly at, er, war. If you want, you can start a character and from level one, queue up for one of the game's Scenarios (Battlegrounds in WoW) and level up just from PvP all the way to the 40 cap. You simply join the queue for an available Scenario, teleport in when it's ready, and, when it's finished, say 10 or 15 minutes later, you'll continue from the exact place you left off in the game world. It's easy to go about your business and fit in any number of Scenarios as you're doing it. Or, if you've only got half an hour to play, feel like you're doing something worthwhile for your time.

RvR doesn't end there. There are Battlefields - areas of the game world where player versus player combat is taking place for specific objectives - that are just as seamless to engage in. You'll pick a quest from an NPC that'll send you into one of these areas and all of a sudden you're slap bang in the middle of a battle against other real players.

RvR is perhaps the best thing about WAR, not just because it's so quick and easy to get into (PvP in other MMOs can be intimidating), but because you always feel like you're gaining personally from it, and contributing to a greater good. For WoW's Honour system, see WAR's Renown - like a secondary experience level - which actually goes all the way up to 80. You'll get Renown specific rewards, too, as you level up. And you'll be contributing to your faction's campaign against the other, too, which is what WAR is all about. In each zone you can see a slider which details how Order is doing against Destruction, and all this feeds into how the two factions are doing against each other across the entire server.