Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning

Give Peace a Chance?

From our time with WOAoR, we’ve taken something of a mixed bag of impressions that while by no means disappointing, doesn’t leave us totally convinced of the game's merits. Goa has set out to create an MMO which has the mass market appeal to grab some of the big fat money pie that Blizzard has been scoffing for the last four years, and while many parts of WOAoR are similar to WoW, the key focus of the game is server wide PvP, rather than WoW’s emphasis on organised PvE content.

This shift affects the whole game right from the get go, and you’re encouraged, via the inclusion of public quests and in world RvR battlegrounds, to spontaneously group with your fellow players to accomplish larger PvP goals.

The problem is that large scale PvP is never going to be as ordered or organised as PvE, and PvP engagements tend to be won on sheer strength of numbers in the area rather than individual player skill or co-operation. Obviously this isn’t so much the case with PvP scenarios, but these don’t really offer anything which you won’t find elsewhere in the genre, and are easily bypassed by players determined to level as quickly as possible.

On that subject the whole process of levelling has almost been made into a single player experience. There’s no real motivation to engage with others and group together to accomplish goals – you can drop in and out of public quests at will and all the remaining quests are strictly solo affairs. While we can appreciate that some people just want a single player RPG experience, surely MMOs should encourage player interaction – isn’t that what the whole online part of the genre is about? Here, the player to player interaction has been stripped to a minimum, and it makes for rather lonely gameplay.


That’s not to say that WOAoR isn’t rewarding as an MMO – character development is constant with XP earned for doing pretty much anything and the flow of new and improved gear steady throughout our time with the game. The game world itself is also a big highlight, with the massive arsenal of characters and lore from the Warhammer franchise making for a very deeply detailed and highly polished environment that’s extremely involving.

Throughout our playtime with WOAoR, we were, almost without thinking about it, comparing it to WoW, but that comparison isn't really fair. The two set out to accomplish very different goals, with WOAoR focusing on PvP and WoW, despite having significantly expanded its PvP since the release of The Burning Crusade, still being grounded in instanced PvE. They cater for very different styles of play, and if PvP is where you get your MMO rocks off then I’m sure Warhammer Online will prove more than worth your time and money.


However, if you’d rather fight monsters than players then World of Warcraft is still our MMO of choice for the time being. It has a charm and humour that’s very much absent from WOAoR (well, apart from the fart joke filled Greenskins), which just seems to take its subject matter far too seriously. Levelling in WoW for example is an altogether more enjoyable experience than levelling in Warhammer Online, where you just feel you’re racing to the next ding, such is the pace that new quests arrive and quest mobs respawn.

I’m sure Warhammer Online will find an audience of players who will think that the realm vs realm content is fantastic and that the focus on PvP makes it the superior MMO, but from our experience of the game, it’s not a real contender to World of Warcraft’s throne just yet.