One of the stars of this latest batch of big-name MMORPGs is Games Workshops’ Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. While it was criticised early on in its beta days for being too much like the current MMO king, World of Warcraft, it’s since been treated to more detailed models and a darker, less cartoonish art style.

While all MMOs have World of Warcraft to contend with, Warhammer is really up against it in providing points of distinction, since the Warcraft games have borrowed very heavily from the Warhammer universe for inspiration. As Warhammer Online currently stands, that fact is still very obvious. Many aspects of the game will be familiar to players of Warcraft games, especially the earlier ones.

After my first few hours of play I was calling Warhammer Online “World of Warhammer”, but I quickly found that I was missing the point. While the basic questing and grinding initially feels much like WoW, Mystic have streamlined the process a lot. To many players, it smacks of “dumbing down” the questing experience. To me it means I no longer have to alt-tab to my browser to look up info on thottbot.com (a WoW player’s best friend).

The minimap in Warhammer Online displays a lot of extra quest info. NPC quest givers are displayed, with a different coloured icon depending on whether they have a quest available, have already given you one, or are waiting for you to return, having completed their quest. The rough area where quest objectives can be found is marked on the map as well, with a red outline. Even writing this now, it sounds like an MMO for noobs, but it really serves to make the game more enjoyable. Yeah, it does take away some of the mystery of what (in its PVE aspects anyway) is really an adventure game, but it replaces it with playability. The success of sites like thottbot.com is a big indicator that many MMO players share my preference.

If you really do relish the mystery of not having locations handed to you on a minimap-shaped platter, the hints can be turned off, though it does feel somewhat liking cutting your nose off to spite your face.

And don’t think for a second that all this means that the game is less immersive than its contemporaries. The story detail in Warhammer Online is prodigious. Each quest seems to draw on the original Warhammer universe in a way that makes it all feel like an integral part of the world. Remember that Warhammer has been around for a quarter of a century – initially as a tabletop wargame, and later a pen and paper RPG, novels, a trading card game and then video games – and that huge amount of background content makes its presence felt.

The setting’s main conflict is that between the forces of Order and those of Destruction. The playable races will be familiar to anyone who’s played any of the legion of RPGs that have based their lore – more or less loosely – on Tolkien’s epic fantasy The Lord of The Rings. There are the usual Humans, Elves and Dwarves, opposed by the likes of Orcs and Goblins, and in Warhammer, the corrupt human forces of Chaos and the Dark Elves. It’s all so WoWish that I almost choked. I had to remind myself that Warcraft ripped off Warhammer, and not vice versa.

Very early on you’ll be given a quest to participate in one of the many player vs player scenarios. I found this was where Mystic seem to have expended the most effort in the development of this game. The scenarios are basic in theory, with fairly standard capture the flag and objective capture type challenges, with teams of players from each faction squaring off against one another. A lot of effort has clearly been put into the balance of the various classes, and it makes for an enjoyable experience, which is something of a minor miracle this soon after release.

It’s possible to play the RvR (Reams vs Realm) scenarios exclusively to level your character up, which is brilliant for fans of PVP combat. World PVP is also a big feature though, and large areas of the game world are PVP battlefields which have a real impact on the game world as objectives are won and lost.

By the same token, it’s possible (if not quite so straightforward) to ignore PVP in favour of exclusive PVE levelling. I found that a good mix of the two is easy to achieve, which keeps the grind to end-game content pleasantly diverse.

A big feature that Mystic have been heavily pimping is their Tome of Knowledge; a feature that’s been described (though not by me) as an “in-game Wikipedia”. The Tome records a huge amount of in-game info that loregeeks will love poring through. It also contains useful information that’ll help any player to navigate the world. The quest log is a part of the tome, thouh even that doesn’t necessarily need to be accessed, if you’d rather keep your reading to a minimum. A list of active quests appears on the right-hand side of the game screen, and mousing over any of them reveals the pertinent information needed to complete the quest. That small feature exemplifies just how flexible Warhammer Online is in terms of adapting to different players’ preferences. All of the lore is there at your fingertips, and each quest has several paragraphs – or more – of story content that can be read or ignored at your leisure.

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Tags: Games

This entry was posted on Friday, October 10th, 2008 at 3:08 pm and is filed under Games, PC, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.