First Look: WarHammer Online

Merv | 23 Sep 2008 - WAR is here!!! Yup, WarHammer Online: Age Of Reckoning, the highly anticipated MMORPG from Mythic Entertainment, was launched recently. I’ve not personally seen it or tried it yet (though I may be tempted to give it a go just to try out the Realm vs. Realm gameplay), but a friend here has joined the fray and he gave us his first impressions on the game:

Good Points
Its fun! :). So far the quests seem faster and less tedious than WoW. Most of the quests are kill quests, and not “farm 100 guys to get 1 quest drop” quests. The quests do make a little more sense too, rather than “go to my farm and kill worms” quests.

As expected, PvP is a huge part in the game. Level 2 Quest: “Go participate in PvP battlefield”. Combat is quick, brutal but pretty fun.

You can get XP and loot from killing enemy players You don’t get THEIR stuff, but they are considered a “mob” character. I got some gear from killing in the battlefield. The XP for killing players is very good too: As Don saw, I killed a lvl 9 Dwarf 3 times (when I was lvl 8), got 1.3k xp each time I did. At lvl 9, 1.3k xp is about half a quest reward… which is a lot.

Public quests are like WoW’s version of Raids… except you do not need to organize a raid party. Anyone in the area can participate to gain influence, XP and drops. Of course being partied will guarantee more coordination, but the point that you don’t have to organize 20 people to show up on time makes a huge difference.

Public quest loot drops depend on automatic rolls, which are modified according to contribution points. Basically the more you contribute, you’ll get bonus to your rolls, thus getting better rewards. Its a pretty fair system as far as I can see.

Time requirements are like any MMO, but the good thing is you don’t have to wait for everyone to come on to be able to do stuff. I logged on for an hour, ran into the PVP area, ganked some guys, logged off and went for dinner. In WoW, had to wait for at LEAST some one to come on before you can even do any quest, or wait 20 minutes for Battlefield to load, etc etc…

Bad Points
Not very polished yet. I still get graphical glitches, weird bugs, memory leaks. Though not fatal, it can get quite annoying when you need to restart the client after 3 hourish of play. Though it doesn’t happen often, it HAS happened twice or so.

System requirements higher than WoW. I think most of our PC’s can handle it no problem, but older machines (like Loretta’s nvidia 6800) suffers from slow downs at medium to max settings.

Non-intuitive interface. Admittedly, WoW made a really good interface. For WHO, too many of the commands are hidden away, controls can be unwieldy in its default mode. Maybe its the “getting used to a new OS” syndrome, but somethings that shouldn’t be hidden are.
- Shen

On a side note, you can now play Bejeweled from within WoW :P.