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

Public Quests

Many people hammered my last article for not mentioning what they seemed to feel was one of the game’s key defining features: Public Quests.

Perhaps they might not have hammered quite so hard if I mentioned why: At both of the events I was able to play the game prior to writing, the two available PQs were not properly working.

As I’ve since been able to play through a number of them first-hand, I now feel a bit better equipped to discuss them.

The game’s various zones are broken up into “Chapters” in the Tome of Knowledge, and there are roughly three PQs per chapter.

Essentially, Public Quests are a chain of interconnected objectives that all bleed into each other, which anyone within a designated area can join or leave at any time.

The quests each consist of several steps, the first of which tend to be soloable, with the final one usually culminating in a boss fight requiring one or more full groups with tanks and healers. This could prove to be a problem for the now tank-less Empire and Dark Elves, unless their PQs are rebalanced prior to launch.

The steps generally consist of things you’d probably already be doing during ordinary questing—killing mobs, breaking things, picking things up—only you and the other participants have to do a lot more of them, and with a time limit.

Aside from experience, PQs also carry the added reward of Influence, which can help tip the balance of power when trying to take control over a zone, and earning enough of it in each chapter unlocks special rewards of items and gear.

If you complete a PQ, there’s a random roll for loot—the more you participated, the higher your roll will be—and the winners of the roll have their choice of items or coin.

Once a PQ is over, there’s a brief cooling off period before it resets. In my experience, the period might be a bit too short. I understand the appeal of broad accessibility, but it’s somewhat discouraging when you walk past a PQ you’d just completed moments earlier with great effort, to find that all of your hard work has magically reset itself in the time it’s taken you go get another Coke.

“Oh, there’s that dragon we killed five minutes ago… I guess death didn’t take.”

Still, they are a novel concept, and one that I’m sure many other games are going to copy in the years to come (imitation, more than just flattery, is the lifeblood of the gaming industry).

But, while they’re certainly a value-add for players, I’m not quite seeing the criticism that “He didn’t even mention Public Quests in his last article! He missed the point of the entire game!”

Open Groups and Living Guilds

Back in the Warhammer Online conference call in May, Josh Drescher stated that the holy grail of gaming is to trick players into having a social life.

One of the ways WAR tries to accomplish this is the Public Group system, taking the old “Groups” tab available in most games and running with it to a whole new level.

Every group in the game starts out by default in an “open” state. This means that other players can request to join without having to be actively sought out and invited by the leader.

Upon entering a new zone, the system automatically checks for open groups in the area, and if any are found, lists them on screen, letting you join at your leisure. This is a definite improvement to the days of standing around shouting “LFG” for six hours straight, and is another item I’m sure many other games are going to “borrow” in the years to come.

A second feature designed to entice players into interacting with each other is the living guild system.

Guilds in the game are “living” in the sense that they level up as the players within them do. Higher levels allow for certain benefits, such as designing and locking in a unique guild banner (it’s been claimed that there are 1.5 million possible banner combinations, and no two will be the same) which can then be carried into battle. And, at the highest levels, guilds can take over keeps in contested areas, claiming them as their own.

I haven’t been guilded in the game long enough to glean much more than that, so I’ll have to leave it there, for now.

Conclusions

At the end of the last article, I said that it was going to be a horse race this year for a new number two MMO between Conan and WAR.

Conan, of course, has already thrown its cards down on the table. FunCom had been telling players for years that they were holding a royal flush… but turned out to be bluffing with a pair of deuces, promising to deliver the flush on the next hand, when the expansion comes out.

The game launched strong—with claims of a million boxes shipped to retailers and over 800,000 sold… but then, from all quarters there came complaints of bugs, substandard play, and unfinished features.

By one of Conan’s producers own accounts, the game has lost half of its playerbase since going live.

The door has now been left wide open for Warhammer Online to carve out a niche for itself out at the top of the MMO heap. All they have to do to pull it off is to spend the next three weeks working as they have never worked before to get the game as polished as humanly possible, out the door, and launched smoothly.

Whatever happens, we will of course be bringing you a full review of the game shortly following its release.