Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning
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ESRB:
Blood,Suggestive Themes,Use of Alcohol,Use of Tobacco,Violence
Publisher: Electronic Arts Genre(s): MMORPG Home Page: http://www.warhammeronline.com/
Visuals and PerformanceVisually the game does a fair job in turning the great art style of Games Workshop to a MMO world. Yet it's technologically very conservative. I guess the best way to describe the visual quality would be to compare it to World of Warcraft. Textures are generally done in higher resolution and locations are slightly less cartoony, but the style is somewhat similar. The character shadow for your own character is detailed at the maximum settings, but all other characters get blob shadows similar to the pre-Lich King WoW - most likely because the engine couldn't take the detailed shadows on all characters in mass combat. In animation, WAR loses out mostly due to problems with the animation system failing to react to gameplay. The engine scales fairly well, but truly low end systems are mostly out of the question due to the fact that WAR tends to be CPU and RAM hog. Video card is not quite as critical if you are happy to scale down the visuals, but no matter how low you go, for smooth gameplay you should really have a dual core CPU, even if that's above the strict minimum we recommend. You also need RAM. Lots of RAM. In fact, three gigabytes is strongly recommended and almost required if you run Vista, as the game will stutter and swap constantly with just 2GB on Vista. Even on XP you have to make sure there is nothing memory-intensive in the background if you only have 2GB. A browser and few other things on the background and you can easily run into performance issues. The listed minimum for XP - 1024MB - is pure fantasy and the game won't run well on that as the average RAM usage for Warhammer Online executable after the game is loaded is between 1.3 and 1.5 gigabytes - and it tends to creep up from that.
 High bumps up the draw distance, adds a proper shadow to your own character and improves water effects, but overall the differences are minor. On the upside many mass market PCs that tend to have excessively fast CPU compared to the video card can manage the game if there is enough RAM, but the downside is that many old systems that can push around World of Warcraft cannot really do the same with Warhammer Online. Additionally, even if an older system might be able to handle small-scale PvE, problems start when large PvP battles begin - and in WAR they are not optional. Hence our recommended system is a fairly beefy one.
Visual options are somewhat limited. The texture RAM slider is the only way to tweak the actual quality of textures being used, and at least on high end cards the performance tends to increase with the slider maxed out as there is need to swap low and high res textures to card memory as you move around. In a way it appears to be a band-aid to a problem with the engine as in Beta it was discovered that the game often used very little memory on the video card even when there was plenty available. If your card has less than 512MB onboard memory or you get visual artifacts you may have to tweak this down, and there may be some performance penalty due to texture swapping.
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