Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning

I've had several sit-downs with Warhammer Online since I bought it the other week, and my opinion has varied widely from session to session. What is Warhammer Online about? What makes it fun? What makes it different from World of Warcraft? And what, exactly, is wrong with it? I've spent no small amount of time trying to figure these things out.

At its core, Warhammer Online is not World of Warcraft. WoW is an epic tale about Azeroth, and revolves around the player's involvement in exploring and rescuing this world; on an atomic scale this sometimes reduces to killing rats and games of Capture the Flag, but the intent is that the player become part of the World of Warcraft. WAR, on the other hand, is about a constant and inevitable conflict between the forces of Order and Destruction for reasons no one particularly cares about anymore; and although this sometimes requires killing rats and games of Capture the Flag, it is all for the sake of War.

So it is different. And yet, at the top level - when taking the game in as a whole - it has come out much like World of Warcraft. The races are similar. The environments are similar. The classes, the enemies, the abilities, the names, the look and feel; a lot of WoW has been re-implemented in WAR. Warhammer Online's "Realm vs. Realm" system, which pits High Elves against Dark Elves, Dwarves against Orcs/Goblins, and Humans against Chaos (...evil humans), ends up a lot like the Alliance and Horde from WoW. Each faction (Order and Destruction) has counterpart classes, among the archetypes of Tank, Melee DPS, Ranged DPS, and Healer. There are Shamans. There are Hunters. Battlegrounds ("Scenarios"). Copper, Silver, Gold. Special abilities, in three different ability trees, that you can start putting points toward when you get to level 10 - okay, in WAR it's level 11. Actually "rank" 11, as levels are referred to as "ranks," which is one of the biggest visible differences between the two games.

Don't get me wrong, there is a considerable portion of WAR which is definitely unique. The RvR stuff fleshes out into some very cool game features: Public Quests, for instance, are quests that occur out in the open, that anyone can participate in even if they are not grouped together, and in which the factions can compete against one another. Public Quests, along with other faction-specific goals within a particular zone, are used to gauge which faction has more influence over that zone; zones can be effectively conquered, and in high-enough leveled zones, Keeps can be controlled by one side or another. At the top levels, capital cities can eventually be reached, breached, and looted, although I personally have yet to see this occur. There are some auto-balancing mechanisms built into the game (via assistive NPCs) that, like any given episode of a TV sitcom, brings everything back to a rough state of equilibrium over time, but meanwhile the idea of sacking a city sounds like a blast.

At the same time, WAR's PvP emphasis results in a PvE experience which leaves something to be desired. Having done nearly all the standard quests available to me throughout my race's areas - as well as a number of Public Quests through a group of friends - I am still several levels under what appears to be appropriate for the areas I subsequently enter. The lack of interesting "story" is another issue entirely - only 1/6 of the races, the Greenskins, has writing and speech that is anything close to amusing - but more solo-able content, and/or a more sensible flight path system (flight path nodes are very infrequent), are on my wish list.

At the end of the day, Warhammer Online has taken its own unique, promising ideas, and - while not necessarily diluting that promise - implemented it as a user experience extremely similar to WoW. Whether this is a marketing tactic for drawing in a userbase, or simply the result of lazy content development, is an exercise left to the reader. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and WAR flatters WoW quite a bit. Some things from Azeroth have been changed for the better, like no equipment durability, no ghost runs, and flying to allied cities early in the game. Some have been changed for the worse, such as the aforementioned infrequent flight destinations, really lame trade skills, and a barely comprehensible minimap. Regardless, these similarities work largely to the benefit of WAR, if not making it particularly persuasive as a competitor to WoW. Much of it boils down to a PvP rather than PvE emphasis.

One last item of contention, and this is actually a big one, is that WAR is, technologically, downright ominous - and not in a good way. The unreliable networking framework used in the game results in a sometimes hideous gameplay experience: enemies, allies, and pets pop in and out like magic, health bars are not always necessarily accurate, ability timings are a crap shoot and sometimes, from the middle of a friendly town, you might get attacked by an NPC in a cave on the other side of the map. The game is fairly buggy, which is to be expected, not that that's any excuse - the worrying thing is that the networking engine appears built to perform poorly, and I wouldn't be surprised if reliable network performance is more than a few months of patch-work away.

I do intend to keep playing Warhammer Online for now, if for no other reason than to find out what the mounts in this game are like. And I do enjoy the unique features it brings to the table. WAR is good; but I'm not really sure if it's good enough.

Progress: Level 12 Squig Herder