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

Playing Second Fiddle: PvE

I know that I’m oftentimes given to being long-winded, so I’m going to put this next part as bluntly as I possibly can: If you don’t like PvP, do not buy WAR.

PvE in the game is nothing to write home about—that is to say, there’s not really anything that stands out as particularly good or bad about it, it’s just a whole lot more of the same.

Right around the year 2003, Western MMO designers all seem to have gotten together and arrived at the singular conclusion that players would no longer stand for just being told to go off on their own with no guidance, find a secluded corner of a dungeon somewhere to set up camp, and grind until they capped out.

To remedy this, they came up with a diabolically ingenious new solution: Quest grinding. Offering players the illusion of choice by having thousands of quests available to carry them from the very first moments of the game all the way up to the cap, and beyond.

Do not be fooled by this trickery. You’re still grinding all the same, just moving around a bit more, with your quest log keeping track of which particular mobs you’re supposed to grind, and where.

Warhammer Online is the latest poster child for this design philosophy, with the PvE game largely consisting of the same handful of basic objectives rehashed ad infinitum.

Unless you relish the thought of doing nothing but standard-issue FedEx, rat killing, and item retrieval quests for 40 levels straight, PvP is going to be where you’ll spend the bulk of your time as a player.

If you aren’t a big fan of PvP in general, you’re out of luck. While it is conceivable that you could go through the game never having engaged in it, by sticking exclusively to the “safe zones” surrounding contested areas, in doing so you would be cutting yourself off from the majority of its premier features, the things which largely serve to separate it from the competition.

Even the highest-end PvE content in the game can only be reached through PvP: The main purpose of the RvR campaign, unlocking access to the enemy’s capital city, also unlocks the chance to do battle against the faction leaders themselves, where the greatest challenges (and by extension, best loot) are to be found.

But, all of this doesn’t really hurt the game too dearly in my eyes. Slaying dragons is a dime a dozen. Good MMO-scale PvP is hard to find. I doubt that the PvE crowd is who they were gunning for in the first place, and what the genre really needs is a high-quality PvP-centric game on the market.

The Tome of Knowledge

Equal parts Wikipedia, quest log, and Xbox Live achievement system, the Tome of Knowledge weaves it way through nearly every facet of the game.

It starts as a largely blank slate, but, from the moment you log in you’ll start unlocking its entries—most likely, strangely enough, starting with a note that you’ve encountered a member of your own race for the very first time after speaking to the starter quest NPC.

The Warhammer universe has been around for 25 years—longer than many of the people who are going to be playing WAR have even been alive. In that time, Games Workshop has generated an encyclopedic amount of lore involving the universe—such that it takes an encyclopedia in the game just to catalogue and distribute it all.

If you don’t know what a skaven is, or a squig, or why the Dark Elves are such stereotypically evil bastards, the Tome will tell you.

But, it also goes much further than that. Nearly everything you do is either recorded for posterity or serves to unlocks something deeper in the Tome. Your hours played, how many times you’ve died, how many people you’ve killed, the mobs you’ve encountered, important NPCs you’ve met… Even the act of unlocking things itself unlocks even further things down the line.

The depth and breadth of the Tome is likely to keep diehard achievers busy for years to come, and is one of the game’s more interesting features.