Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning
User Rating:
  Log in to rate this game!
ESRB:
Blood,Suggestive Themes,Use of Alcohol,Use of Tobacco,Violence
Publisher: Electronic Arts Genre(s): MMORPG Home Page: http://www.warhammeronline.com/
Off To WAR We Go(...by following this little winding path)The main hook of Warhammer Online is, of course, war. Realm vs. Realm battles first introduced in Dark Age of Camelot, with hundreds of players on each side fighting over keeps and eventually raiding the opposing lands for their relic held deep in enemy territory. Relics are gone in WAR and instead the main goal is to ransack enemy capitals (something DAOC players asked to be able to do for years). On the way there, the area is partitioned off in several ways.
 Each tier is separated by a zone border, but the world still feels continuous. Each race is paired with their counterpart on the other side of the conflict. Greenskins share areas with Dwarves, Dark Elves and High Elves display their eternal hate against each other in theirs while Empire and Chaos are bashing each other in the third pair. Each of these "racial pairs" is one large map area, divided into zones. Each tier consists two zones, and tiers are designated for a range of levels - 1-10, 11-20, 21-30 and 31-40. There are zoning breaks between each tier and between the each racial area, but the whole map of one racial pair is one landmass. Warhammer Online does split things into zones, but the fragmented feel of Age of Conan is avoided as each racial pair feels like a continuous map - even if you do have to zone between tiers. Travel between different racial areas feels more clunky as you fly to other lands from flight masters - and the flight is just a quick cutscene before the loading screen. It's not one continuous massive land area like in Lord of the Rings Online, World of Warcraft or even Dark Age of Camelot, but it's close enough. Within a racial area, the PvE advancement path is rigid. You are expected to move in the world following a single path. It may be a twisty, turning path with tunnels, short forks and U-turns, but still it's a single path that you really cannot deviate from - unless you travel to one of the other two lands, to follow their winding paths. The upside is that you are never truly lost, and you always know where you are expected to find your next quest hub or public quest. The downside is that the PvE game feels very linear. The available play area also ends very quickly if you try to leave this designated path. There are some small bits and pieces for explorers to find, but the areas feel small and restrictive.
The map is designed very much with RvR in mind - each zone has it's own open RvR area with a keep or two and a couple of additional objectives, and some quests lead you to explore these bits as well. The RvR areas are more freeform with no strict paths to follow, but they are also mostly empty - they are playgrounds for those massive battles. I fear most of these will be dead once majority of the playerbase hits the maximum level, but it's a very nice touch. War truly is everywhere and in theory you can participate in both open RvR and small-scale scenarios at any level - even at level 1 if that's what you want. Level differences are solved by temporarily bumping up everyone in RvR areas or Scenarios to at least level 8, 18, 28 or 38 (depending on the tier). You won't get the extra abilities that would come from the levels, but your stats and existing abilities scale. Pick Your Career Your race is determined by your career choice. Warhammer Online has an impressive array of character classes - 20 in total. Yet this is somewhat misleading - in reality each side has a "counterpart" career, which is mostly identical. There are some minor differences, but a lot of uniqueness has been sacrificed to the altar of balance. In a way this is a good thing - realm vs. realm balance determines the popularity of Warhammer Online in the long term, and it has to be maintained. When comparing different classes on one side, there are further similarities and you can bunch everything up to four archetypes; Destruction
Order
Originally the game had additional careers to bring the total to 24. Four careers were cut late in the development and are planned to be introduced back later on.
As in the early game the players tend to concentrate on their own racial areas, these removed careers skew the balance. Greenskins vs. Dwarves pairing has no melee DPS classes present - not a huge deal, but tends to lead to a feeling that healers are overpowered as their natural enemy is missing from the mix. On the other hand, Empire vs. Chaos and High Elves vs. Dark Elves are noticeably lopsided as neither Empire nor Dark Elves has a tank class available to them. This tends to cause issues when trying to complete harder Public Quests or to trying and protect your squishies in Scenarios. In time the races will mix up more and the issue will go away, but the sooner these missing classes can be added to the game the better. Every character with the same career receives the exact same abilities from leveling, but careers also have three mastery paths. They are somewhat similar to talents in World of Warcraft, but instead of a tree that lets you pick and choose, masteries are completely linear. You just choose the mastery that gets your points and at certain levels you have an option to invest an extra mastery point to get an extra ability that was unlocked. Mastery points also give direct boost to a handful of specific spells or abilities tied to that mastery tree - as an example, for hybrids, DPS tree buffs up damage spells while healing tree buffs up healing spells. Simpler than WoW's talent system, but infinitely easier to balance.
Related StuffTags |
 
 
 
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
Games: 
