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Warhammer Online: The Age of Reckoning fails miserably

Greg Dewar
The Commuter

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

I know I’ve already turned a video game’s name into a story that has bore in the title, but here I go again, once more, unto the breach, dear friends! Warhammer? More like Borehammer.

I waited three long years for Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (WAR). And when I first tasted the beta, those first two, pristine, buggy preview weekends were amazing. Then the open beta started. Then my headstart began. All said and done they had managed to bore me of the game before it even began, but still I trekked onward and continued to level up my adorable little Dwarf Engineer.

The first thing I noticed (aside from the fact that they have a hard time conjugating verbs) was the severe lack of world-building and lore. In a game world so rich and heavily steeped in lore, all they managed to capture were a few snippets of something that’s as deep and storied as Dungeon and Dragons, if not moreso. After about sixty hours with the game you realize that you’re just playing World of Warcraft (WoW) with some different graphics and a slew of distracting typos.

How do you really review a Massively Multiplayer Online game (MMO) that’s only had one major patch? It’s fresh out of the gate, though it’s been in beta for what seems like an eternity. Some of you may recall my beta previews of a then promising game that could be amazing if all the problems from beta were corrected and there was more to it. But the WAR experience essentially ends there. Read up on the beta at: http://commuter.linnbenton.edu/ae/171/two-weekends-with-warhammer-online.

First off, I’ll cover what most everyone says: it looks like WoW (World of Warcraft), it feels like WoW, it has more PvP than WoW. However, interface lag and the inclusion of only four class types really drag the game down.

The game touts a large number of classes, but aside from a few small differences, all of these classes can be divided into four basic categories. Healing/Support, Ranged Damage, Melee Damage, and Tank. Not that exciting.

The game promises much, but quickly turns into a grind; the fastest and easiest way to level is through PvP, which provides both level rank and renown rank. In fact, those players that choose to PvE will quickly be left behind those that opt for PvP. The game promises that a mix of PvP and PvE will be the fastest way to level, but that turns out to be incorrect, as leveling through the first half of the game in PvP quickly proves to be the fastest route.

The idea of the game is very cool- each of the three independent conflicts has four tiers and four sets of two zones, control of both of which gives control of a tier. Eventually you control all the way up to the top tier if you’re good enough and take their capital city and the neutral zone in the middle of the two capitals, which promises some magical game experience after all that effort.

While that may sound cool and the way it’s set up is so that even level 1 players are a part of it by contribution points to the next tier, you very rarely feel like a part of anything. World PvP on my server is rare and disparate, while instanced scenario PvP rages all the time. Public Quests, that anyone can take part of at any stage are overly simplistic and rarely is there enough players around to complete one. Sometimes you’ll be out randomly doing a solo quest and you’ll gain renown when your side controls a world PvP point you haven’t even been to yet. All in all it doesn’t feel very different from most MMOs, and while it promises a great deal to exceed the pack, it seems to just meet them in the middle on most issues and provide yet another way to spend your afternoon.

PvP is crippled by interface lag and the constant queuing of abilities and subsequent waiting for them to finally be performed.

All quests in the game are boring and unintuitive and rarely require you to think. They also all appear on the map so you needn’t even really read them, you just go to the assigned area and it’s usually self-explanatory. All Public Quests seem to follow the same basic pattern with little deviation.

Don’t get me wrong, WAR isn’t a bad game. It just doesn’t really do anything that revolutionary, and it doesn’t live up to its promises. As far as MMOs can go, World of Warcraft is still the top dog and the upcoming expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, will probably keep it there.

I come full circle to my first point, the game fails miserably to give you any sort of immersion whatsoever. So much so that there is no point in roleplaying. It feels like an empty simulation that lets you PvP and not accomplish much else. In my mouth; it turned to bitter ash.

If you’ve never played an MMO before, or just plain love Warhammer, you’ll probably find something in this game. If you’re a current WoW Player, it may be best to wait out the expansion in November.

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