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Recently I got a chance to get into the beta for Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, the next big MMORPG on the horizon, currently in development at Mythic Entertainment.

For those not familiar with the game it is based in the Warhammer world which is full of the usual fantasy staples of orcs, elves, dwarves, humans and assorted other beasties both sentient and not.

Warhammer Online has been designed around an ongoing struggle between the forces of Order and Destruction, known as “Realm vs Realm” or RvR within the confines of the game. While you will often find yourself fighting the forces of your opposite faction in the general questlines against the AI, there is as much or more fighting against opposition players.

Yes, the “RvR” term is for the most part interchangeable with “PvP”. However it’s not on the same scale you may be familiar with from other games such as World of Warcraft.

For more about the game’s RvR and other details, continue reading after the break…

RvR Zones

The first thing you need to know, if you’re coming from a game like World of Warcraft, is that the “Forced PvP” areas are much larger in scope. On a PvE server in WoW about the only areas you’ll be forced into PvP in the open world is a couple of very small arena areas.

In Warhammer there are huge tracts of land that are set aside primarily for RvR activities, rather than general questing. When entering one of these areas you will get a 10 second countdown on your screen during which time you need to turn around and go back if you don’t want to engage in RvR at the time. You remain unattackable during this countdown but any offensive action - even starting to cast a spell - will immediately flag you for RvR, so look out!

However, unlike in World of Warcraft and many other games of the same type, there are actual objectives in the RvR zones. Early areas will see you fighting over relatively unimportant flags in the world with little indication as to whether they’re even worth holding onto for your side.

But it doesn’t stay that way for long. Once you get a little further into the RvR zones you can start taking over much more important objectives such as Keeps (aka big honking Castles) which will then be populated by friendly NPCs of your faction who can sell you a variety of items.

RvR (Renown) Gear

Which leads us to the rewards for participating in RvR / PvP.

While you’re killing the enemy and accomplishing objectives you earn Renown Points, which you can think of as Experience Points (XP) as they function in much the same fashion. Earn enough Renown Points and your Renown Rank increases. As your Renown Rank increases, so does the gear available for you to wear.

And it’s gear you’re going to want to get your hands on. Generally, particularly at lower levels, you won’t find anything better as quest rewards or as loot. The Renown gear will have better stats, better damage and so on. Occasionally you’ll find something better but for the most part if you’ve been participating in RvR it’s always worth checking the Renown vendor.

Other RvR Rewards

Also there’s a Renown Trainer, which is sort of an additional track for your character to develop alongside your regular progression. There’s nothing super-fantastic available, it’s mostly just small perks. Things like 5% extra gold or XP in RvR or small boosts to your statistics.

But it’s all essentially free. You participate in RvR, you get little boosts that can help you all the time!

But it’s not just open world RvR

Taking a leaf out of World of Warcraft’s book, Warhammer also includes its own version of Battlegrounds, known as Scenarios.

Unlike Warcraft though you can actually pop into a Scenario regardless of where in the world you happen to be. By clicking a (quite non-descript and obscure) button on the UI you can queue yourself up to join a Scenario.

Inside the Scenarios you battle it out with the opposition players, usually for control of specific points, but the exact objectives do vary according to which Scenario you’re taking part in.

An early Dwarf vs Greenskin Scenario, for instance, involves simply standing very close to a flag which automatically starts being captured. Once your side captures a point you get a bonus to your side’s score and the longer you hold it, the more points your side earns. Should the enemy capture a point away from you they receive a bonus and then it continues generating points for them instead. So hold those points!

However in a departure from standard practice for such games you will not only earn Renown Points for participating in Scenarios and killing enemy players - you will also earn regular XP, both for kills and a large lump for staying through to the end of the Scenario.

You will in fact earn so much XP that it is a very viable and very quick way to gain your first few levels in the game. Coupled with the excellence of gear from the Renown system it is well worth starting your RvR career as early as possible!

Public Quests

Aren’t all quests in all games public? Well, generally, yes, you can pick up any quest at any time, for the most part, in most any game. And Warhammer does that as well.

But Public Quests are a different kettle of fish. The nearest comparison would be an open world raid instance… But even that does not really do it justice.

A Public Quest in Warhammer is a small section of the world set aside just for this purpose.

The first one of these you will run into as a Dwarf follows the pattern of many. When the Public Quest starts a swarm of Orcs will come flooding out of a nearby wooden fort through various holes in the walls that have presumably been blown apart by the nearby Dwarves.

Once you’ve killed enough of the orcs the remainder will retreat back inside the fort to prepare for the second phase of the battle. It’s not entirely clear why but during the second phase you have to collect barrels of gunpowder stashed within the fort. I guess something needed blowing up but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen whatever it is that goes kaboom.

Regardless, collect enough barrels and the third and final phase of the quest begins with a bigger and badder Orc coming from a cave up the back of the fort, along with a couple of shaman helpers. The Shaman are listed as “Champions” which makes them significantly tougher than regular enemies of the same level.

The big bad armoured Orc is a “Hero” class, making him significantly tougher than even a Champion. You won’t be taking that guy down by yourself unless you’re quite a lot higher in level.

Which is where the “Public” part of the quest comes in. Everything explained above is not open to just you. You don’t need to kill all 30 of the Orcs for the first phase. Anyone in the area killing orcs will contribute to the total kill count and thus the progress towards the next phase of the quest.

Even though it’s open to all, forming a party or warband (a party of parties!) to tackle the PQ is often a wise idea. You earn more XP that way.

You also earn more Influence with the relevant rewards vendor. The items available for Influence from the vendor are usually quite decent but probably not as good as what you’ll be getting from the Renown vendors, if you’re participating in RvR.

The last but by no means least part of the Public Quest system is if you and your party and/or other random folk manage to complete the last phase you all get assigned a score based on how much you contributed to the victory and a random number is generated to add to your score. The top few scores will get a sack of loot out of a chest, the value of the items within varies according to the quality of the sack and you get better sacks according to which position you came.

Each loot sack contains a selection of items. You can’t pick them all at once and generally there’s a really good item at the top of the list plus some other bits and bobs, or you can just take some cash. It’s a nice reward at the end of a fun quest…

And once the Public Quest is finished, win or lose, the whole thing resets and you can start all over again! And if you do particularly well you can even win yourself another bag of loot.

Class Selection

This is sort of a split issue in my mind. On the one hand there’s 20 classes available for you to choose from.

But on the other hand, many of the classes are exactly the same. Many of the mechanics of the skills for different classes are identical, or very similar. Not between a Tank class and a Ranged DPS class, but the Dark Elf Sorceress and the Empire’s Bright Wizard both have a system where the more spells you cast the greater the chance of a “backlash” style effect, where the spell you cast does damage to you as well. It comes with an increased chance to do critical damage as well, but it is nevertheless the same mechanic for two classes…

For the most part the classes don’t stray too far from the standard RPG archetypes. You have your tanks and your healers and your damage dealing classes. There’s some interesting twists though. The White Lion class is a DPS (damage dealing) class, with a pet. In other games a character class with a pet would mean the pet gets in the face of the bad guys while the character plinks from a distance.

But not Warhammer. The White Lion character is a melee heavy class. At higher levels you can focus more on having your Lion play more of a supportive role while you take the brunt of attacks. Or you could let your Lion take the brunt of the attacks while you support it, or you can go for a mix of the two.

Healers, too, are a departure from the norm. Most of them either require you attack opponents to generate power with which to cast your healing spells or they reward you with faster cast heals or more powerful heals if you attack opponents. It’s an effort to make Healers feel less like “Whack-a-mole” and it’s an interesting idea… though honestly it makes a role that is already hard to get people to fill even more difficult due to requiring more than the “whack-a-mole” aspect. I would expect some changes coming down the pipe to make it a little less tricky, but with it having been in beta for so long it’s difficult to understand how it got to this stage without changes.

The Tome of Knowledge

Much has been made of the Tome in the gaming “press”. Certain writers have claimed it’s completely original, never before seen, a revolution.

It isn’t. It’s a great system and a lot of fun unlocking all the various achievements and titles and a variety of other rewards. But it really is just a jazzed up version of the Lord of the Rings Online Lorebook. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either misinformed or has received a kickback of some kind to deceive you.

All that said, the Tome is definitely an improvement over any system you’ll’ve seen before. There are so many things to unlock that it honestly, at times, feels like there are too many things in there. Kill an Orc, get a Tome entry, kill a Dark Elf, get a Tome Entry, discover a new zone, get a Tome Entry, get killed 5 times, get a Tome entry… It goes on and on and on.

For each unlock you get a kick of XP and if you unlock enough things you get an unlock for unlocking so many things and another kick of XP. I expect even if you just went around killing one of every enemy and visiting every zone you could level up quite well just from Tome unlocks. Would certainly be an interesting experiment…

Each time you unlock something in the Tome you can open the Tome itself and get all kinds of interesting information about whatever it is you’ve done. If you’ve killed an orc you’ll get information about orcs. Discover a special location and you can read about what makes it so special, etc. If you really dig backstory the Tome is likely to prove a goldmine for you. Ditto if you love stats, since it counts how many kills you’ve made, for example.

This is definitely a feature you’re going to see future MMOs looking to copy in some fashion because even though it isn’t original, it’s been done so well that it actually adds to the game, rather than distracts from it.

Bugs and Issues and Annoyances, oh my…

As with most beta testing, particularly of MMO’s, there are a number of bugs and general annoyances in the game right now.

This would not be a huge concern but for the fact that the game is scheduled to launch in under a month’s time.

The issues are many and vary widely. Things like getting stuck on world geometry just shouldn’t be happening this late in the testing process. It might be tolerable if it was only a handful of locations or if you had to really try to get stuck. But when you can get caught up trying to hurdle a very low fence, there’s something seriously awry. Sure, you can generally jump out of being stuck, or use the /stuck command, and that’s not a huge issue when you’re just playing the usual quests against the AI.

In RvR it can quite literally get you killed, or make you miss out on a kill, or stop your side from capturing a point… It’s completely inexcusable.

Another personal annoyance is that when you’re dead - a common occurence for me in Scenarios! - and waiting for your respawn, you can’t do anything in the game, other than chat. And I do mean anything - you can’t even mouseover your XP bar to check your progress, nor your Renown bar, nor check your Tome of Knowledge nor…

Perhaps the stupidest of issues is that when starting a Marauder character, you don’t have a weapon equipped by default, even though every other character in the game starts with a weapon. Not a huge issue, unless you want to do anything crazy like attack something. With no weapon equipped you can’t attack anything - unarmed, you are unable to attack.

Which is made more absurd by the class mechanic of the Marauder - you mutate your arm, one of the forms of which is a sharp blade like appendage… yet if you don’t have your axe equipped, you can’t attack.

Yeah, I was confused as well.

There are a lot of other niggling issues and I’m not sure they will be solved by launch…

The verdict…

I’m still undecided. The RvR Scenarios are a bundle of fun. At least in the lower Tiers they’re all time limited, meaning no 4 hour standoffs like you see in World of Warcraft battlegrounds from time to time. The general questing is fairly fun, though much like other games. The Public Quests are genius. The classes are not all to my taste, but there’s enough there to be interesting…

But oh, the annoyances.

If you’re looking for a game with a heavy emphasis on PvP gameplay, including end-game raids on player controlled cities, Warhammer Online is worth looking into.

If instead you’re looking for a deep PvE (you vs the AI) game, Warhammer may still be of interest to you… but honestly, you may be better off with World of Warcraft. Warhammer has a lot of PvE content but with the exception of Public Quests, Warcraft does it better.

The so-called “Open Beta” is due next month. It isn’t really an open beta since it seems you’ll have to have preordered to get in. Regardless, I will have access to the Open Beta and that may sway me one way or another. If Mythic can get things smoothed out it ought to be worth the purchase, particularly if you’re tired of World of Warcraft.

But if you’re still enjoying Warcraft there’s little in Warhammer worth leaving it for.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 26th, 2008 at 10:06 pm and is filed under Gaming.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.