Updated Third Impressions: Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning

By Steven Crews | August 27, 2008 | | Filed under: Features, Impressions | Tags: Fantasy, Impressions, Mythic, Warhammer, warhammer online

The Cornerstone: RvR

One of the game’s key design tenets is “war is everywhere,” and that is certainly the case.

It is entirely possible for you to log in with a brand new character, completely ignore the NPC standing in front of you offering a quest to kill rats, press the button on your minimap to queue for a scenario—instanced battlegrounds that tend to have objectives such as capture the flag or take and hold—and then, from levels 1 to 40, do nothing but kill people, all day long.

If instances aren’t your style, within every zone in the game you can find contested areas with objectives to seize, and indeed the zones themselves can be taken control of by either of the game’s two factions through the capture of those objectives, victories in combat, and, to a somewhat lesser extent by people completing PvE content.

In the later areas, large swathes of the map are given over to massive battlefields running north and south in a straight line between a pairing of the game’s six capital cities (though, I should note that only two capital cities are going to be available at the game’s launch).

Once you’ve locked down one of these battlefields under your faction’s control, it opens up the opportunity to lock down the next one, and the one after that, and so on.

The taking and holding of these zones is all part of the larger overriding objective of the game, known as the campaign, whose ultimate goal is the capture and destruction of an enemy’s capital city itself, culminating with battles that promise to be truly massive in scale. Don’t quote me on this, but the last information I had was that capital city sieges would top out at 75 vs. 75 before a new instance opened up.

Open-world battles tend to be fast-paced, fun, and engaging, with plenty of chokepoints, bridgeheads, and strategic objectives to generate action. A quick check of the map shows War Icons where battles are taking place, with various sizes and colors indicating how long the fighting has lasted, and how many people are taking part.

The combat itself can at times feel a bit rushed, and there is occasionally a feedback gap between what you think your character should be doing and what it actually is on the screen. But, those are minor quibbles, and they still have a few weeks to go before release to try and iron them out.

WAR’s vision of RvR is what I would call “PvP-Lite.” The only death penalty at all for those killed in battle is the few moments of their time it takes to get back into the action, along with a bit of pride. Indeed, you can even be rewarded for dying, in the form of titles earned through the Tome of Knowledge… for instance, “The Singed” for receiving a killing blow from a Bright Wizard’s fireball.

There is no experience, money, or item loss involved when you’re on the receiving end of death. Players doing the killing themselves receive experience (both “standard” which levels up your character, and “renown” which is only earned through PvP and earns you points to spend not unlike talents in other games), coin, and occasionally items from fallen enemy players, but those are generated out of thin air, no one is actually losing anything.

You can’t even gank anyone, because a player’s level scales appropriately upward upon entering a higher-level battlefield.

These facts are likely to grate against the sensibilities of more hardcore PvP fans, and I would expect an uproar demanding a “free for all” server with harsher rules be released along the lines of Andred and Mordred from DAoC. But, considering the fact that Andred and Mordred ended up getting merged due to low playerbase (and, as of this writing, there are currently 12 people logged in to Mordred in total), perhaps this time around those cries will go unheeded.