Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (PC)

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WAR has been delayed to add polish. Will it shape up?

"They asked me if I wanted some open beta keys for our staff," says the Games Workshop representative as the mass of European games journalists, GOA T-shirt-wearing helpers and hangers-on mill into the main hall of a Paris museum. "But I told them that I didn't want them. I didn't want any of them. Can you imagine the damage they would do? Our staff wouldn't do any work!"

He's right, I think, as I wait for EA Mythic to hit the stage and deliver a presentation on the hotly anticipated Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. MMOs are like that. They're life-draining, relationship-destroying, health-sapping games. And no doubt when WAR is finally released, some time in Fall 2008, for many thousands of people - there have been over 600,000 open beta applications - it will be the be all and end all of their gaming lives. Hell, for some, it will be the be all and end all of their lives.

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But I also find myself thinking something else - the same thing I think whenever I sit down to try out a new MMO: why should I stop playing World of Warcraft and start playing this, another class-based fantasy role-playing MMO with orks, elves, and humans at war? As senior producer Jeff Hickman and associate producer Josh Dresher take to the stage, I whisper to them: "Go on, convince me. I want you to."

I do strongly believe that there is a desire from millions of lapsed WoW subscribers - the ones who keep paying Blizzard but don't actually play the game - for a viable alternative. Plenty of publishers have chucked cash at developers to try and come up with that viable alternative since WoW "opened up the market" three years ago. The harsh reality is most of them have failed.

Perhaps most appealing is the Tome of Knowledge, which feels a bit like Mass Effect's codex on steroids.

And so I beg EA Mythic to convince me to stop playing WoW and start playing WAR. Over the course of the presentation I'm told things, and I see things, that go a long way to satisfying my desire. Perhaps most appealing is the Tome of Knowledge, which feels a bit like Mass Effect's codex on steroids. It acts as a record of your past achievements in the game, gives you background on the present and teases on your future. You have the ability to track current quests and work out why, exactly, you need to kill 30 Squigs, but you can also have a look at quests you've completed. More interestingly, the Tome provides an evolving, in-depth background to the lore of Warhammer. Click on an orc for the first time, or a noteworthy individual, and a small pop-up will appear in the top-middle of the screen indicating a Tome unlock. Click through and the Tome will open, turning to the page with a short essay on the green-skinned race or the VIP.

Nice enough so far, but the Tome has one final trick up its sleeve which could make it a game breaker - it's a meta game in of itself, with its own set of Tome quests, unlockable achievements and character-enhancing Tome tactics. For example, you'll unlock an achievement for looting corpses, or killing tonnes of a certain type of enemy, or even for completely random things like climbing to the top of a mountain in some obscure area of the map, or for using the Tell command 50 times, or for killing a chicken as a chicken. Really.

EA Mythic has incorporated lessons learned from Dark Age of Camelot

We're shown a Tome quest in action - an NPC appears, one which only pops up between the hours of 12 and 1pm every other day. You follow him into a tent and overhear a conversation revealing him as an Empire traitor. He intends to meet a traitor Wizard in the Wizard's Tower, a building you would never normally be able to access. You kill the man and loot the Wizard Tower key, transporting you inside. There you kill the traitorous magic-wielder and complete the Tome quest.

The idea behind Tome unlocks isn't that they should encourage a grind-fest. The idea is that they should be a cool surprise, an unexpected reward for simply being observant and curious. They grant titles that help differentiate you from other players - where WoW players inspect gear, in WAR the intention is that players will inspect your gear as well as your Tome unlocks. And that's the key. But don't expect all the achievements to be desirable - die 100,000 times and you'll get a title that will mock you (don't worry, you can turn the titles off).

The Tome will no doubt be of great interest to WAR junkies, those who play the table-top game and love it. But it should also be of great interest to fantasy role-playing fans of all descriptions. The Tome could help players engage with the world of WAR on a much deeper level than any MMO so far released. As it's described to me by Carrie Gouskos, associate producer in charge of the Tome, "it's designed to ruin your social life".

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