Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Review

9.2

Format PC

Developer EA Mythic

Publisher

Genre Role Playing

2 Comments

This is one of the first, if not the first, MMOs to truly sit down and make sure that players work together from the start, shedding the ironic selfishness of a genre that's meant to get people playing together in the first place.

It's weird to say it, but until you play Warhammer Online and take part in the war itself - taking battlefield objectives, winning scenarios, and fighting in glorious public quests - you'll look back on how much time you spent soloing in WOW and sob. The backstory is that the Age of Reckoning has finally been reached, and the armies of Destruction have decided to lay waste to everything. The forces of Order are trying to hold back the advance.

Mythic have absolutely taken the Warhammer mythos by the horns, embracing every part of the grim fantasy without pulling any punches. While the mollycoddling is there in the sense of players being eased into the game through a selection of easy quests and hand-holding throughout the first few levels, you will be at war with other players well before level 10, and depending on what side you're on, you're going to do something uniquely Warhammer.

Orcs kick dwarves off of the side of buildings, the Empire has the warhost on its doorstep and watch as its crops burn and people are slaughtered, and the Dark Elves release gigantic dinosaurs to eat people laying flowers at graves. The atmosphere is one of having no safe haven, one that draws you right into the conflict and gives you the drive necessary to slaughter your way through lines of your enemies.

And the real beauty of war is that this isn't all fluff - you're at war, from the off, constantly, and it's fun. PvP (or realm vs realm as it's known in WAR, and the rest of this review) is an integrated, fun-packed and addictive part of the game.

WAR is still an MMO though, and there are core concepts it hasn't shaken off. You control one of 20 careers (classes), split reasonably evenly between the two realms (sides) of Order and Destruction. Choosing a side locks whichever server you join to that side, to stop people from playing cross-realm spy games with each other.

The realm of Order is made up of the Empire, high elf and dwarf armies, and the realm of Destruction holds the Chaos Warhost, dark elf House and the Greenskin Waaagh!. The latter is the only non-racial army - it's made up of orcs and goblins - and will probably end up being flooded by roleplaying types who insist on typing everything like the bovver boy orcs they're playing as. Careers are army specific (see 'Career progression'), split between the archetypes of tanking, healing, ranged damage and up-close melee damage. There's some that overlap, such as the Bright Wizard and the Sorcerer, to keep the lore-monkeys happy without blocking players from their favourite role.

The careers fit reasonably comfortably into the usual class roles, with a few notable differences. Careers are less dependent on the usual pool of mana or energy, and each has a special mechanic they depend on to do the most damage. While abilities use action points, they generally depend on some other source to do the most damage.

For example, the Black Orc, as he uses different attacks, moves towards 'Da Best Plan,' a state that lets him unleash his most damaging attacks. The Bright Wizard builds combustion with each attack, doing more powerful and frequent critical hits, but also damaging himself in the process. There's a degree of micromanagement that requires you to be a little more alert than the average thumping of keys. It's not rocket science, neither is it really doing much to advance the basic mechanics of MMO combat, but it's satisfying, playable, and most importantly it works.

If you've read any of Mythic's press releases, you'll know they've built WAR with the idea of a gigantic battle held firmly in their mind. From the outset, you're introduced to the other side as a marauding force of evil or as your upstart prey. You'll be flung (in the case of the Greenskins, literally, from a catapult) into direct combat with the other side's PvE forces. Yes, it's questing, and yes, you kill five of something, pick up items or activate things to get experience (with 40 ranks/levels to go through), but Mythic have streamlined the process so that you're not doing too many mundane quests.

Everything has a "point" to it, and thankfully, you'll always find the items you need on the monster you kill. If you're getting dwarf skulls, you can bet that each dwarf you kill will drop one, and there's a welcome lack of quests involving the butchery of random wildlife. They're there, and yes, there's a butchery trade skill, but at least there's something approaching a storyline behind them.

There was a danger that Mythic could have made anything PvE-related effectively foreplay for the player vs player environments, as they did with Dark Age of Camelot. But there's a strong marriage between both RvR and PvE content. The most obvious - and arguably the most enjoyable - is the public quest system.

These are essentially walk-in quests that rely on groups of people to complete. You complete objectives to advance the quest through stages (See 'The anatomy of a public quest'), gaining influence and experience as you go, with the biggest contributors (those who do the most damage, buff people the most, heal the most) rolling dice for the biggest rewards from the quest. The influence you gain is specific to the chapter of the game's story you're on, and as you gain more you get access to Basic, Advanced and Elite rewards.

The idea of grouping with strangers usually sends chills down people's spines, but WAR introduces open groups that you can choose to join automatically. As everybody receives the experience and influence from the public quest, and you can't really advance them on your own, PQs grow a spirit of teamwork within even ardent soloists. WAR opens up grouping to those who would not group, and gives them pause to consider doing it in the future.

While there's a lot of good, run-of-the-mill questing to be had, these public quests pervade the entire game, and are rewarding and fun on a scale that trumps almost anything we've seen in WOW. The later ones even have raid-style content, and making a warband
(a raid party) is as simple as right-clicking and selecting "form warband."

Public quests also help tie together the PvE content with RvR. There're some (such as the Kron Komar Gap) where both realms actively complete a public quest in front of each other, with real players killing both each other and AI soldiers to advance their separate quest. The reward for doing so is not only influence, but control of the surrounding area and access to extra facilities and quests. It's a lovely surprise how well integrated and commonplace they become, too. It's so common for MMOs to talk about new hot features, and then fail to integrate them meaningfully into the game, that we were ready for public quests to be a let-down. They aren't.

What's shocking is how thoroughly enjoyable RvR is, even for people who're reluctant to face up to PvP combat. It's introduced very early on, with a selection of quests from a war camp where you're given quests, much like NPC-related ones, but relating to real, live players. You descend into specific RvR areas to capture objectives, which can provide tactical advantages (healing boons and NPC guards) and fight your fellow man. Killing him nets you both your normal experience and "renown," which levels a completely separate pool of 80 Renown Levels, with their own rewards, tactics and morale (see 'Tactics and morale').

As you advance, these objectives become bigger and harder to conquer, ranging from a gun emplacement to a gigantic keep surrounded with soldiers, with rewards to match the scale of the effort. Each time you complete one of these smaller objectives, you bring the current area closer to being under your control. The reward for doing so, apart from accessing more content and annoying the piss out of the enemy, is the huge boost to your renown and experience gains - a controlled territory can give you anywhere up to 20% extra renown and experience.

This keeps the war constantly fresh, as arriving in a zone to find you're not netting those gains gets you fired up to rip somebody's guts out. That, and you get experience and renown for killing them, so the risk versus reward of going after a skilled opponent makes it genuinely tempting.

There's a real synergy between renown and experience. As you gain renown levels, you can buy new equipment that's useful for both questing and RvR. The same goes for quest rewards, which are less rewarding but less time-consuming than your average man-barney, and still manage to gear you up reasonably well. In fact, WAR caters very convincingly to the PvE-aholic, but also leaves a tasty-looking trail of breadcrumbs to the RvR dark side, with experience rewarding quests for getting involved. It's also far less time-intensive than anything in WOW's PvP-circuit, as in a 15-minute game you can run into an RvR battlefield, chop a few heads off, and then bugger off to Tesco. It's a simple, well-designed and brilliantly executed system that oozes with well-realised lore and the necessary atmosphere to draw you into the conflict.

Mythic have used the Warhammer licence well, and created a structurally sound MMO that's actually a multiplayer game, with enticing elements for both the lower and higher-end players. An issue, however, is how much high-end content will be available that caters to large-scale PvE grinders. While there are dungeons and there are raid encounters, it remains to be seen just how much there is in comparison to WOW, Age of Conan and EverQuest II. There isn't, however, any question of the quality. Mythic have done exceedingly well in creating interesting, story-driven quests, and have created the first major advance in the genre - public quests - since content was instanced to avoid players cramming together.

Ironically, that's actually what makes WAR such a joy. The reason that instanced PvP areas in MMOs, like WOW's Battlegrounds, exist are to make it so that progression isn't reliant on static content in areas. Mythic have taken this idea and put it on its head, making it a good thing when an area is crammed with people trying to do the same thing by rewarding everybody for taking part. Even when you're not a top contributor in a public quest, you still receive a bounty of influence and experience. In RvR battlefields, defending Keeps and other areas from assaults still rewards everybody for being in the area. The land even changes as realms take control of different areas, taking away the classic MMO-stodge of static, immovable content.

WAR is the first true push in years to try and make MMOs more, well... multiplayer, and it succeeds because it doesn't forget that games should be fun. By giving players so many options and making everything so cohesive and interesting, Mythic will score many disenfranchised Battleground-lovers, along with a slew of bored PvErs from a multitude of games with broken promises. Ultimately, their ongoing support and the amount of people that play WAR will be what makes or breaks the game, mostly because it gets more fun when more people get involved.

For now, it's up to the players. This is such a strongly community-driven game that it guarantees that there will be some bitter, angry struggles in the Age of Reckoning, and we hope that Mythic (and European publishers and server-runners GOA) are prepared to support it. The license is strong, the game is great, and the quality of the content is second- to-none. If servers are stable, players are listened to, and expansion content is as well tweaked, inventive and superbly written as its launch material, this could be the game that savages WOW's subscription numbers.

Ed Zitron