Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning
Preview
MMORPG with a twist
by Spoondan
previewed on PC
They Say War is hell, but…
From the creators of Dark Age of Camelot comes another MMORPG. Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is nearly upon us. Developed by the good people at EA Mythic, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is shaping up to be a nice new twist on the seemingly standard fantasy MMORPG games. To be blunt, war is everywhere in Warhammer Online, players will be pitted in an arena of constant fighting and plundering against long hated enemies (and friends alike!). The game itself is based on Games Workshop's popular Warhammer® fantasy war games and although I personally am not too familiar with these games, they have a long history and a dedicated fan base.
Similar to other fantasy MMORPG’s, players must choose a fraction to align with at the start of the game. There are your classic “good” guys such as Dwarfs, High Elves, and happy Humans, who of course, are apart of what is known as the Armies of Order. You then have your “bad boy” fractions, which consist of Orcs, Goblin, Greenskins, the Dark Elves and the terrible mean Humans. If you want to be a bad guy, you will be joining the Armies of Chaos, because as we all know, bad people love to spread Chaos. Once you choose your side and race, you will immediately be sent out fighting against your counterparts in basic quests along a fairly straightforward storyline.
Hate Week
The game revolves around always combating your bad or good equivalent, or what the developers call, ‘realm vs. realm combat’ (RvR). Since there are three fractions for both sides there are thus, three fronts that the war is constantly being fought on: Dwarfs against Orcs, High Elves against Dark Elves and Empire Humans in the ring against Chaos Humans. You start the game against your common enemy so as to build up a stiff hatred of the other, but will later be able to travel to the other fronts to help out friends in their arena.
In Warhammer Online, you will never stop fighting your foes, so you can expect to slaughter enemy armies at the very beginning of the game right until the bitter sweet endgame. In the beginning you play very simple to follow quests and continue on to more and more detailed and exotic quest lines. This of course, follows suit with most MMORPG’s and fans of the genre will feel right at home with the progress of levelling up a character.
For Collectors
For the people out there (you know who you are) who need to finish every aspect of a game, see and do everything, etc, Warhammer Online features a tome of knowledge resource that allows you to track all quest lines, how many enemies you have killed, items you have collected and a vast amount of other information that is not generally provided for most other MMORPG’s. For those of you wondering, the game has been designed to run smoothly on DirectX9 on your computers but will be compatible with both DirectX 10 and Vista for those of us lucky enough to have them.
Every Beginning Must Have an End
What is most interesting about Warhammer Online is the endgame content; this is the bread and butter baby. Once you become strong enough, players will eventually end up being important soldiers in a massive Player vs. Player capital city battle. Whether you are good or evil, eventually you find yourself in your home city, which will be under attack and can be taken over by the opposite fraction. Players need to defend their cities and attack in neutral territories. And to the victors, go the spoils; if you succeed in winning the neutral territory, you will advance to the next area, eventually arriving at the gates of the enemy city. Once there, the plot thickens, as you blaze through the gates and over the walls and burn the city to the ground, kill NPCs, take the King hostage and do as you will… but we wary… victory is fleeting.
Even as you burn an enemy city to the ground, stronger and better NPCs will spawn and push you back, allowing the city to rebuild and suddenly you find yourself on the defensive once again. The longer you can hold out and keep your city from being ransacked, the better equipment you are able to buy and the more money you earn from the vendors in your town. This type of gameplay will surely result in a sense of urgency and personal achievement and defeat that is currently not really seen in the MMORPG’s that are on the market right now.
Needless to say, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning has a lot going for it, the only problem is, we don’t have it in our hands yet. Get ready to fight the good fight (or the bad fight) in the first quarter of this year.
