Warhammer Online: Worth stopping WoW for

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.

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.

The Public Quest system is another example of how Mythic has refined and improved, rather than revolutionised traditional MMO questing. While there are bog standard quests for you to complete, usually doable solo and picked up from NPCs, we much prefer the PQs, as they’re known in game. When you enter into an area where a PQ is going on you’ll be notified in the HUD and the PQ’s objectives will display. From here you can chose to either engage in the PQ with the players who are also doing it (no matter what stage the PQ is at you’ll be able to join) or ignore it. If you do decide to get stuck in, you’ll earn contribution points. At the end of the PQ, usually after a boss has been killed (one early PQ in the Empire starting zone sees a giant with a huge club fell trees on its way towards the group), your contribution points will be added to a roll. That score will determine your reward. So, if you’re in the PQ from the start, you’ll obviously have more contribution points to add on to your roll, and have a greater chance of getting some hot loot. Jump in at the end and hit the boss a couple of times and you’ll probably finish somewhere at the bottom.

The brilliance of the PQ system is that it avoids the difficulty of having to find a group of players in order to tackle a difficult boss. Right now, with the servers packed with wide eyed fans, there are players aplenty tacking the PQs, which is great. For players, though, there’s more in it than mere loot and experience. Completing PQs will contribute to your influence with certain NPCs, which then allows you access to certain loot. This, combined with the Renown and your normal experience bar, means you can have up to three aspects of your character levelling up at the same time. And the game feels as if it wants to help you, and not hinder you, as you progress along those paths.

For us, the RvR and the PQ system are brilliant refinements of gameplay mechanics that have perhaps grown stale over the last few years. They’re not rewriting the MMO rule book, but they do make the game incredibly fun to play, which is essential considering the levelling up is markedly slower than in WoW, for example.

It’s worth noting the Tome of Knowledge, too. Essentially a record of all your actions in the game (completed quests, story text and the like), the ToK also awards its own set of achievements. So, for example, you’ll get a Tome unlock for killing a certain number of Chaos players, or Greenskins. But the best ones are the unexpected. The Ow My Eye achievement is awarded when you’ve clicked on your avatar 100 times. You get The Pawner achievement when you’ve made a single gold. Small things, but they combine to reinforce the lore and sense of being in a fantasy universe unlike any MMO we’ve played.

There are still many questions unanswered. The end game, and City Sieges and Keep combat, are a far off mystery. Dungeon running is something we’re particularly looking forward to (we haven’t had the opportunity to run any PvE instances yet). And we’ve yet to fully explore the crafting system either. But everything we have explored suggests a wonderful effort from Mythic, and one that is certainly in keeping with the developer’s promises about the game.

At the end of the day, however, we’ve seen little that won’t be instantly familiar to other MMO players. The mechanics of the combat (I stand here hitting you and you stand there hitting me until our hit points run out) are just as they are in WoW (Age of Conan’s combat remains the best we’ve played in an MMO). And the classes, on the whole, fall somewhat disappointingly into the four classic archetype holes (tank, melee DPS, ranged DPS and healer) carved out decades ago. It’s Orks versus Elves all over again, but when it’s this much fun, and feels this fluid, it’s hard to resist.

Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is out now for PC.