Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning [PC]

Although it doesn't "officially" launch until later this week, EA and Mythic Entertainment on Sunday opened the doors to Warhammer Online for those customers who had pre-ordered the collector's edition of the game. On Tuesday, those who pre-ordered the regular edition will be allowed early entry, and on Thursday, the game officially hits store shelves and the servers will open to everyone who buys it then. I was in the first group, so I installed the game on Friday evening so that, on Sunday, I could begin playing the game for the review.

You'll note that this isn't our official review of the game. That's because massively multiplayer online role-playing games such as Warhammer Online require a lot of playing time, far more than games in other genres. It's almost impossible to gauge such a game with only a week of playing time, let alone a few days. And it's difficult to gauge an MMO until players arrive in bulk. So this is the first of a number of hands-on impressions that we'll post until we are ready to review the game in the coming weeks.

Now Warhammer Online will undoubtedly be compared to World of Warcraft; both are conventional fantasy style games that feature humans and dwarves and orcs and elves. Call me crazy, but they even share a slight aesthetic, though Warhammer does come off as more graphically detailed. (No surprise there, WoW hails back to 2004, after all.) So what does Mythic have to offer? Well, though I'm not much of a Warhammer universe fan, I find myself being drawn into the intricate lore, and there are definitely some cool ideas at play in this game.

When creating a character, you can choose from Order and Destruction factions. The former consists of the Empire (humans, mostly), Dwarfs, and High Elves. The latter are the more evil factions: the Dark Elves, Chaos (humans, mostly), and Greenskins (orcs, goblins, etc.) If you play as Destruction character on one server, you can only create Destruction characters on that server, and vice versa. And servers come in three varieties. Core servers use the core rule-set and are recommended for all players. Open RVR/Role-Playing servers are for those who like player-versus-player combat all the time. (RVR stands for realm-versus-realm.) Then there are role-playing servers, which is for those who like to be "in-character" all of the time.

I originally rolled a high elf swordmaster, but after getting in the game I realized that I wanted to look like and play a more traditional elf character; think of an elf clad in leather armor and armed with longsword and longbow. So I rerolled a high elf shadow warrior, which is a ranged combat specialist. What I like about the shadow warrior is that it's possible to switch between ranged and sword combat instantly, so I can loose three or four arrows at a target, then easily transition to melee combat when they charge at me. One last note on character creation: I'd definitely like to see more options when it comes to things such as hair styles and such; as it is, you run the danger of everyone having similar heads and hair styles. Customization and variation could certainly be improved in this regard.

The high elves' starting area is set against an invasion by the dark elves. The gigantic Black Arks of the dark elves are unleashing an invading force, and the high elves are scrambling to defend their homeland. As such, many of the early quests revolve around this idea of killing a certain number of invaders; six dark sprites here or six witch elves there. If you're an MMO veteran, you'll recognize the quest types. Go find so-and-so and talk to them in one quest, or recover three crystal shards in another. At least these quests are fast and simple, so you feel like you're doing a lot. Then there are the public quests, which I find myself really enjoying, especially since I didn't expect so many of them. Public quests are these big, multi-stage battles that anyone can join; all you have to do is enter the public quest area and jump into the public quest in progress or wait for it to reset. The more people, the better, but it also means that your risk of reward is lower at the end.

An example of a public quest is that you might enter a burning wood and discover it's crawling with enemies. Stage one is to kill, say, 75 of those enemies. There's no time limit on this, but as soon as the players in the public quest have achieved the objective, the public quest advances to stage two. This is often a timed challenge where you have to kill a smaller number of tougher foes, like three archmages and four beastmasters. If you can accomplish that task, you get to the third and final stage, which is a timed boss battle against a very tough boss, like a giant hydra. You need to work together to take it down. When you win, the game calculates your contribution and you get to select a reward; the better you did, the better quality your reward. Public quests are a great way to get an impromptu big-scale experience without the hassle of organizing a group, and I encountered about six or seven public quests in the early going, most of which revolving around this theme of invasion.