Warhammer Online - Age of Reckoning

Decided to try it out too because Rock, Paper, Shotgun had an interesting piece about it a while back where the writers discussed the beta. They seemed to enjoy the game and said it was very much like World of Warcraft, one of my favorite games ever. So I thought maybe it might be good and if it's not then at least it'll be interesting to see how many ideas they took from WoW. Let's not get into the whole "but WoW stole many ideas from Warhammer and other MMOs". Plagiarism is different and this is not it. WoW is the most successful MMO ever and even though it took a lot of the core ideas from other MMOs that came before it, it was the first one that did it all right. The results can be seen by anyone.

Anyway, Warhammer. When you first start it up the similarities with WoW are made extremely clear. It's a good thing in a way because you'll know exactly how to move your character, how to talk to NPCs, how to navigate your UI, how to chat with friends, and so on. It even looks like WoW. The graphical style is very similar but then again this is how Warhammer has always looked in the books when I used to paint those little miniatures as a kid. But all in all Warhammer feels like its own game.

PvP or RvR as they like to call it is the main focus of the game I would say. The areas are locked into tiers and you fight over them by taking over locations and forts. The battle never ends and that's what's interesting about it. However, if you're of higher level and try to enter a lower level PvP zone you'll get a penalty in the form of transforming into a chicken. On one hand I understand this but then again it would feel a lot cooler if at the level cap (lv40 is the current maximum) you could fight over the entire world and not just at the few zones made for the level cap.

There are siege vehicles and turrets that you can use to repel enemy attacks too and they're done quite well. When aiming a huge bow for example you get a specific UI for it with a crosshair and instructions on what to do. You can also buy different things like rams and pots of boiling lava that you can put on pedestals at pre-defined spots near a fort that you're trying to take over or keep under control. I would prefer if you could set them up where you wanted but that might create some bugged situations and might be hard for the developers to implement. In the beginning now things haven't really been that hectic on the PvP front. There are a few sieges sometimes but not that many people take part in them. It would be good to have some kind of way to entice people to take part in these bigger events, for example giving rewards other than an experience boost that you currently have for taking over some parts. For example raise the experience gained from killing enemy players by 20% or something really meaningful for a while. People like going after the level cap in MMOs even though Warhammer seems to want to focus on taking levelling up slowly. It's just human nature to go faster to the end and a level cap makes it feel like the end unless some drastic changes are made to the core MMO design structure. Maybe they're more active on full PvP servers.

There are 2 ways to do PvP. Either join a scenario which is like a battleground in WoW. This can be accessed directly from a button above your minimap which makes joining these fights easier and faster than WoW. The other way to do PvP is to walk into a PvP enabled zone in the map/area you're currently in. Every map has those areas and when you walk into one you get a countdown from 10. If you don't leave the area or attack anyone before the time runs out you get PvP toggled on. There are of course full PvP servers where you always have PvP on but I tend to think those are for Counter-Strike kiddies :)

With PvP being in such a big role here it's weird that handling your character isn't done very well. You can move around just like in WoW but there's one major difference, the net code is buggy. The game was released in a rush, obviously because WoW's new expansion is out in a few months and releasing any MMO up to roughly 3 months after it is a death wish. But somehow Warhammer still feels very polished which is nice, however it does lack in certain places and maybe the reason it feels polished is that after playing the terrible Age of Conan I've lowered my standards. I shouldn't because I'm always looking for very high production values and Warhammer isn't one of those games. It's still buggy, some quests can't be completed, mob AI is odd and the net code is bad. What do I mean by net code? I mean the way information is sent back and forth between the player and servers.

The game doesn't lag exactly, meaning that I can run around fine, but what can happen and does happen very often is enemies standing in place and after a moment they teleport somewhere completely different and continue walking. It's like the information of the NPC's location wasn't sent correctly to the client side machine. Also, when fighting, especially with spells, you can never be sure if what you're casting is up to date. This is especially evident with damage over time instant cast spells. In WoW when you repeatedly press a button to cast a DoT spell fast after your global cooldown is over you can easily keep track of when to stop pressing because your cooldowns will show you the exact time the spell was cast. In Warhammer your cooldowns bounce around oddly sometimes showing 1.5 seconds left after a cast and sometimes 0 seconds because the information isn't handled well between the two ends. I think this has something to do with trying to make information flow faster than really needed because we all know in an MMO world nothing is exactly as it seems. Things that you're seeing now happened already a few seconds ago. However, WoW takes this into account and you get a very balanced PvP aspect to the game. That's why Arena matches are such a competitive area in WoW. In a game like Warhammer, where PvP is the main focus, you would expect more focus on the handling of information. Currently 1 vs 1 matches aren't about skill at all, but rather about who gets the most commands through the system by bashing buttons or who's of higher level and thus does more damage. PvP is simply about big groups running back and forth shooting and hitting each other randomly. I'm not saying NPCs don't sometimes act weird in WoW but that is definitely minor compared to Warhammer.

There's also a lack of character feedback. What I mean is you don't feel like you're really playing your character. Sometimes your spell doesn't show any visual effect, sometimes you don't hear sound effects at all for it and in many cases sound effects weren't even added for a specific event. For example, casting a fireball type spell on the Magus class causes a sound effect to start when you press the button to cast it. However, this sound effect ends before the casting time ends, whereas in WoW every cast has a looping effect that lasts even if you get spell pushback from someone hitting you and thus the cast time increases. In addition to that you don't get an audio clue when the cast really end and the fireball goes flying. To top it off you get no sound when the fireball hits your target either. This simply makes you feel like you're distant from the game world.

Healer and Tank. Theses two classes are a bit problematic. I played a dwarf tank for a while and got utterly bored within the first few minutes. It takes ages to beat down one enemy. You're making people not want to level up such an important class if you take away all their abilities to perform alone. Healers are the same but can be better used when playing with friends because you can heal them and do damage yourself. I didn't get very familiar with the classes but this is the impression I got and I would definitely put more focus towards the important classes being cooler to play. WoW has done that too but in the beginning it was hell and even now levelling up a warrior is much harder than say a warlock.

The level design in Warhammer is interesting. It seems like some artists (not game designers) were given the world building tools and set loose with only a few requirements as to where to place camps for the 2 factions order and destruction. The reason I say this is because the maps look quite good (absolutely amazing in some areas, for example The Inevitable City), but they flow badly at times. The gameplay isn't good and the overall design is very linear. It's not like Age of Conan though, which is a good thing, but it's far from WoW. You can only run to the next map in line and between tiers (2 maps per tier) you get a loading screen. This does not create an open world feel. The maps funnel players toward certain areas and don't give you the same sense of freedom as in WoW. The maps aren't bad though and the quests do move you around a bit but in my opinion for an MMO it should be way more open. Some of the distances between areas aren't great either, especially seeing as you have no means of moving faster between them.

Having no mount also makes things annoying because there are only flight paths at one camp in each map. The camp near the PvP zone. This is good once you understand it but it took a while to grasp. It would still be better if all the other camps had flight paths leading to the RvR flightpath. Without a mount moving around is very slow and having played a few alts up in WoW I feel very bored running around. On the other hand, you get a mount at level 20 for 15 gold and at level 16 (when I quit playing) I had over 17 gold already. I can only hope the mounts are a big enough speed boost.

You have a sort of compendium with you that you can open to check up on quest progress, monster kills, titles and so on. A lot of the ideas are taken from WoW again but the book itself is a very nice touch. The linear gameplay lends to not only making the PvP aspect work better but also to building a story for your character chapter by chapter as you progress onwards. You will unlock different stories and chapters as you explore the world and complete quests and you can read about them in your book. There are also lists for each type of monster you've killed and special quests for them like each one having a quest to kill 25 of that type and you get an experience bonus. It's an extremely cool idea. Also, titles are more frequently given out than in WoW and you can get some really nice tasks like clicking on yourself 100 times gives you the "Ow My Eye" title. Funny stuff for sure! Giving players things to unlock is cool like the XBOX's achievements, but then giving them the opportunity to show off that achievement in a big way like a title above your character name is even cooler. Everyone likes to stand out from the crowd.

You level up by getting experience by killing monsters and doing quests. Same old same old. But you also can gain experience by doing PvP which is another example of how much this game focuses on the PvP side of things. You get PvP quests and there's also a separate PvP level called Renown Rank. You have a special talent tree for the renown points you've earned too that gives stuff like more health, more experience or gold from killing PvP players, and so on. Very nicely done. There's also your core talents that you can buy when you level up and add to your action bar and then some special talent trees like in WoW. These are simplified though in Warhammer and also work linearly. You go through them in order out of your 3 different talent specializations. 25 points in total at the level cap and 15 points in each of the 3 trees. Somehow I didn't get these to work though so I don't know what the idea was. I unlocked the first one and couldn't use it. The spell wasn't found anywhere.

In WoW there are gems for your gear and in Warhammer there are talismans. In Warhammer there are 3 slots for tactics too: Core, Renown and Tome. These are like 3 buffs you have on all the time. They could cause you to shield yourself against some damage at times or gather more gold when killing PvP enemies like stated above. It's a nice addition. There's also a morale system which is a bar that gets bigger the longer you fight and more you get hit I supposed. The bar has 4 stops in a linear fashion and you can set up rank 1-4 morale spells on them. When you fight long enough you reach rank 1 and can use the spell there, which could be an instant cast fireball that does a load of damage. Once used it goes on cooldown and the morale bar resets. It's a very interesting tactical addition especially for longer fights. If you're killing single enemies alone then you can also use the morale bar because it doesn't immediately reset after you go out of combat. Your health and action points (mana) recharge so fast anyway that it's not a problem. You also get a rolling experience boost the more enemies you kill in a row without the boost resetting. This is a cool idea that makes "farming" that much more fun and Blizzard should think about implementing something like this into WoW too.

The gear you get, at least early on, is an issue again. Players look the same because everyone basically gets the same gear. It seems later on you'll start getting more stats like spell damage and so on but for now the stats also seem very simple. The game seems fairly balanced (not perfect by a long shot) for now though so it's fine. But the gear still looks very much alike for the same classes. You can color your gear though which is a very nice addition but not all pieces will accept color. You can also add little tokens to your shoulders for example that further distinguish your look but up to now I've found no real visually great additions, they're all just small pieces. People like to stand out from the crowd as I said earlier. Give them more opportunities to do so.

The UI can be changed quite nicely in Warhammer. You have a UI editor directly in the game and that's a big plus. You should be able to set your key bindings directly in the UI editor though. Now you have to go through a menu that has every action listed in alphabetical order for some odd reason. That means Left, Right, Up and Down (as in movement directions) aren't listed next to each other but all over the list. The UI editor is nice though.

Animation is quite nice when up close. Characters walk past you and their heads turn to look at you. It's all very cute but then when they're further off some form of highly annoying animation degradation is used. It eats up frames from between and makes it look like you're viewing some old keyframes only. At least give us an option to turn it off because I don't think something like this should be that affected by the net code if at all. The textures also, especially on bigger areas like mountains, are extremely blurry and this is one of the reasons the game actually looks worse than WoW. WoW is the same throughout, under your feet and in the mountains, but Warhammer looks highly detailed under your feet but very blurry in the mountains because of low resolution textures used to drop system requirements. Anisotropic Filtering does not help here, the issue is with the game engine and how it renders things. The player characters also look bad up close but I guess in a game with huge fights and focus on PvP you'll want to create easily distinguishable (and this is probably why the gear looks the same too) classes at a distance and not really something that's perfect up close.

All in all Warhammer is a nice game with very many ideas from WoW but also lots of great ideas of its own. The game feels like its own game but still very familiar to those who've played WoW, which isn't a bad thing. Now if all those idiots who whine about comparisons between WoW would shut the hell up. This game is like a tribute to WoW. It's a lot more linear and the net code along with character response rates gives it a big minus but all in all I'd say it's a great way to spend a few months while waiting for Wrath of the Lich King, or if you're an anti-WoW kind of person maybe you'll find your new favorite MMO in this simpler and fairly buggy but still second best kind of MMO.