Mythic's MMO take on the Warhammer universe hits the ground running with an exceptional game built around social bonding and the joys of killing your friends.
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Some time ago, the developers at Mythic Entertainment began working on a crazy dream. They would take the best portion of Dark Age of Camelot -- the realm vs. realm combat -- and marry it to the fantasy setting of a beloved tabletop game, Warhammer. They were gambling that a game that focused on one particular gameplay dynamic and built all of its systems around that dynamic would be a fun and exciting experience for millions of MMO gamers. Fast forward a few years through some rocky development woes (including numerous product delays and cut content) and the dream is finally a reality. And while there are certainly issues that need to be dealt with, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning has hit the ground running with one of the best MMO experiences we've had in a long time.
War is Everywhere
There are individual elements of Warhammer Online that merit praise, but the game's greatest achievement is actually the integration of its PvP, RvR and PvE experiences into a consistent whole. The "meta-game" of Warhammer Online is the constant state of war between Order (Dwarfs, High Elves, Empire humans) and Destruction (Greenskins, Dark Elves, Chaos humans) to dominate enough of the game's landscape to open the enemy's capital city to looting and pillaging. Everything in the game from basic quests against NPC mobs to instanced PvP battles called "scenarios" to open-world RvR struggles over fortresses in the middle of the landscape all contribute in various ways to that struggle. Even better, players are involved in it from the first moment their level one character appears in the world until their level 40 character goes on their first city raid. Mythic has essentially dropped the early-game "leveling process" in favor of an MMO that's pretty much all "endgame."
In Warhammer Online this sense that "war is everywhere" comes through in myriad ways. The graphics do a great job bringing the world of Warhammer to life in ways both gross and subtle. The game's opening zones, for example, are filled with atmospheric details that throw you into the Warhammer mindset immediately. The Empire opening area takes place during a full-fledged Chaos assault on a small town filled with explosions and cannon fire. As the player works his or her way through the world, there's always something beyond just NPC mobs to indicate the war, whether it be as big as a burning windmill or the old bone fragments that litter the ground.
The frenzied and chaotic atmosphere is enhanced by some exceptional landscape design. The game's zones are a riot of broken terrain, unscalable ridges and dangerous drops. While the actual land area is fairly small as MMOs go, every inch of it is stuffed with mobs, towns, public quests, RvR zones, points of interest and visual obstructions that block line-of-sight. This makes travelling anyplace without getting attacked by mobs or other players very difficult and pulls players in a dozen different directions at once because there's always something interesting to do or somewhere interesting to explore. It also ensures that when players do fight, it's always on a landscape that adds to the excitement of the battle.
The World at WAR
Gameplay in Warhammer Online proceeds along two basic tracks -- the PvE and the PvP/RvR areas. Of the two, it's the PvE zone that initially comes off as the less impressive. When considered by itself, it doesn't beat the often-elaborate scenarios offered in a game like The Lord of the Rings Online, which is essentially built around a core of questing and storytelling. That, however, isn't the purpose of Warhammer Online's PvE content. The game's PvE is instead designed to weave in and out of the PvP content and offer compelling group-based experiences without the pressure of PvP combat. This it does exceptionally well.
The primary vehicle for this kind of experience are the public quests. PQs are geographically bounded multi-stage world events that everyone within its region can contribute to. Once the event is over, loot drops are rolled for with bonuses going to those who contributed the most. They're also a brilliant innovation, one that we wouldn't be surprised to see other MMOs copy in the near future. They offer all the challenge of a group-oriented dungeon and (in later stages) raid-level challenges in short 10- or 15-minute intervals without all the tedious looking for group or the huge time commitment such content usually entails. On Open RvR servers they become even more enjoyable. At least one competitive PQ in the Dwarf/Greenskin zone (where players compete to kill 100 NPCs from the other side) has become an insanely fun kill-zone that's now a must-stop as players level through theAs players progress through the game, a fascinating melding of PvE and PvP content begins to occur. Certain PvE quests will send players into PvP "lakes" to complete objectives that have nothing to do with fighting other players. Others will offer players in PvE zones opposing PQ objectives conveniently located right next to PvP areas where players can slip over and try to kill one another when taunting and interference aren't enough. In higher-level PvP zones, capturing objectives entails dealing with very powerful NPCs that require raid-level coordination to take down. City sieges -- the very goal of the game -- are the ultimate fusion of the two. Once a city siege begins, players will have to compete in PvP events to unlock a whole instanced capital loaded with PvE content ranging from low-level quests to loot and kill regular citizens to high-level dungeons and huge raid-level bosses that will take the resources of a guild to destroy.
The Enemy of My Enemy is my Enemy
It doesn't take much play time before the PvP heart of Warhammer Online becomes clear. Scenario-based PvP is available from the instant a player logs into the game. All a player has to do is click the "Join Scenario" button on the UI anywhere in the world and they queue up. When in a scenario, characters will be leveled to the tier mean. They won't be given any extra skills, which means that very low-level characters will still be at a slight disadvantage, but the field will be more or less even and everyone feels useful. Scenarios run the gamut from simple timed slaughterfests for points to take-and-hold actions to king-of-the-hill games to capture the flag. As players level, they'll be asked to take part in more elaborate scenarios that will require more coordination and planning but even the simplest (Tier One) scenarios in the game offer a huge variety of play styles and a host of ingenious play mechanics.
The other part of Warhammer Online's PvP system is the Realm vs. Realm combat. This consists of PvP "lakes" within larger PvE zones (one for each side) that surround it. In these areas are a series of objectives such as castles or points of interest that are guarded by NPCs that can be captured by players to control the zone. This is easily the game's biggest individual attraction. First, it offers a ton of balanced PvP combat confined to limited areas under specific rule sets and avoids the annoying "ganking" phenomenon (for those who want it, Mythic has created a number of "Open RvR" servers). Second, these RvR lakes are amazingly fun. In a couple of days' worth of battles we accumulated more stories of brilliant assaults, sneak attacks, dirty tricks, desperate last stands and amazingly funny moments than in a year of another MMOs PvP. If the greatest piece of content in an MMO is other people, Warhammer Online offers an endless variety of PvP "content" to explore.
Unfortunately, all of this PvP combat comes at a price -- fairly steep system requirements. While lag, stutter and chug are usually not a problem at the game's lower levels, in larger battles with dozens of players it's very possible players without a high-end system will see their game slow down. We never had a problem so bad it made the game unplayable, but even on our highest-end machines we had to tone down the graphics in some of the larger fights. That may turn off some gamers who were looking forward to the game but may not wish to upgrade their systems -- especially that segment that's been playing nothing but World of Warcraft for the past four years without an upgrade.
Hell is Other People
The biggest irony of Warhammer Online is that its greatest strength is also its biggest weakness -- the reliance on other people. The vast majority of the game's content, especially its meta-game, requires an active and enthusiastic player-base committed to getting to the city sieges. In the game's opening days as everybody levels up and the game still exudes that "new game smell," that isn't a problem. Even in these first days, however, we've found that there are inconveniently located PQs that are virtually abandoned. We're concerned that as the player base ages, these areas may be abandoned, making the trip to level 40 the grind that Mythic worked so hard to avoid.
Fortunately, Mythic is aware of this and put systems in place to try to stem it. Since every zone in the game contributes to the push-pull city-raiding meta-game, there is certainly an incentive for players to level alts and leave them at specific levels in order to be able to switch to different content tiers when the situation requires it. The game also offers a "Tome of Knowledge" that in itself is a huge piece of content. The Tome is combination achievement/kill-counter system that tracks virtually every aspect of gameplay. There's a kill counter for every type of creature (and player) in the game, exploration unlocks for finding specific locations, well-written story snippets as a reward for following the PvE questlines, titles, new skills and much much more. In fact, there's even a whole host of silly and secret achievements in the Tome such as clicking on your own character 100 times, fighting while naked or just adding five players to your friends list.
Xbox Live's achievement system proved some time ago that people will go to incredible lengths for a score beside their name and a few virtual medals. The developers at Mythic took that lesson and ran with it. There will certainly be a large contingent of players who make it a goal to unlock everything in the Tome. For everyone else, the Tome is a sort of goad to experience everything in the game. It's worth playing that PvP scenario one more time to finish an obscure Tome unlock. It's worth going through low-level PvE quest lines in the other races' areas and doing public quests that one has outleveled just to get the unlocks. More than that, the Tome is just one of a host of meters to fill and counters to click and trophies to go for. The game's guild system treats guilds almost like players with their own system of levels and bonuses and prizes that players can work to unlock. There's an entire separate system of PvP leveling that unlocks access to high-level loot. One of the key benefits of all this is it keeps players circulating throughout the world and participating in all of its content.
Greenskins in the Woodpile
Despite all the well-deserved praise, Warhammer Online is not without its problems. While the game seems to have avoided the big technical nightmare of unstable servers, there's a definite danger of population imbalance. As players come on board, there seems to be a pronounced predilection for the Destruction side. While the developers at Mythic have taken steps to ameliorate this, the resulting low population caps on servers have contributed to long wait times for scenarios and 10- to 20-minute waits to log in at peak hours. Since balanced populations fighting each other are the key to this game -- much more so than in World of Warcraft, which continues to wrestle with this issue four years after launch -- this is something that needs to be carefully monitored and controlled as the game moves forward.
There's also a host of smaller problems, though none of them rise to more than a small level of annoyance. Players in scenarios can "AFK" their way through, stealing experience and renown points they don't deserve. There's a weird graphic bug that will lock an avatar into one animation cycle (though you can still play the game). The crafting is confusing and feels like an afterthought. The UI, while quite good, could use a few now-common elements like the ability to hot-link items and abilities in chat. Considering how important player coordination is in higher-level PvP, the game could really use some type of built-in voice chat system. Some of the terrain in the scenarios and the PvP lakes could use some tweaking, as their proximity to spawn points sometimes gives an advantage to one side while the other faction faces an incredibly long post-death trek.
In the end, though, all of the problems, even the most serious one of lag in heavy player combat, are ultimately fixable. Warhammer Online has had the smoothest, most complete MMO launch we've ever seen. Game balance and other elements of the game need tweaking but they're all there, they all work and most importantly, they're all fun. This is a game that has 20 separate classes and while some may be overpowered or underpowered, none of them are boring to play. The game comes loaded with PvP and PvE content that -- balance issues notwithstanding -- is as good as or much better than that of any other MMO on the market. Warhammer Online is the next great game of Player vs. Player and Realm vs. Realm content and we have the feeling that somewhere on the other side of reality, the Chaos god Tzeentch is smiling.
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