Warhammer Online Age of Reckoning

Un article de XMIX.

Battlegrounds and RvR

Perhaps the biggest irony of the game's PvE and Tome content is that as much as there is of it, it's ultimately a sideshow to the heart of the game -- the PvP and RvR content. It's in this area where Mythic's learned the biggest lessons from their Dark Age of Camelot experience. Scenario-based PvP is available to players from the moment they log in. All a level one character has to do is click on the "join queue" button on the interface anywhere in the world to get in line for a Scenario. When in a scenario, characters will be leveled to the tier mean. They won't be given any extra skills, which means that very low level characters will still be at a slight disadvantage, but the field will be more-or-less even. Newbie players who don't know where the button is will be directed to a Scenario by a PvE quest around level four.

Players will run into their first world-based RvR content around level eight or nine, assuming they're following the PvE storyline. The first RvR area are built around the two opposing sides merely capturing strategic points on the battlefield. As players continue moving through the world, the RvR zones get more elaborate. Tier two adds the first keep sieges in which players must capture three geographically separate fortresses in order to capture the zone. By Tier Three battlefield objectives and capturing keeps become more tied together until players reach Tier Four at which point they'll need to capture and hold the big end keeps in all three racial warfronts to open the enemy's capital city for attack.

It's impossible to describe in the space of a short article all the different varieties of PvP available in Warhammer Online. Scenarios run the gamut from simple timed slaughterfests for points to take-and-hold actions to king-of-the-hill games to capture-the-flag. As players ascend in level, they'll be asked to take part in more elaborate Scenarios that will require more coordination and planning. The beauty of all of this PvP is the way it's all tied together into the ultimate end game of taking the enemy capitol. Low-level players in early areas of the game, PvE players and Scenario players all contribute by opening up zone locks and giving bonuses to higher level players. From level one, players are thrust into a larger "end game" that they can contribute to merely by pursuing their own agenda.

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The more we explore in Warhammer Online, the more it seems like there is to see. Little, for example, has been made of the "Living Guild" system that turns guild from mere collections of players with their own tabard into sort of pseudo-characters. Guilds in Warhammer Online have their own levels, Tome unlocks, flags and bonuses as they level up. Guild flags of a certain level, for example, will give a region-wide bonus selected by the guild itself to the players of that side when hung on an RvR keep. Guild banners can also be stolen by rival guilds for equally impressive bonuses. This bring inter-guild politicking and rivalry a whole new dimension as guilds will argue and compete fopr the right to place their banners on keeps and decide what bonuses to impart.

Indeed, if there's a snotling lying in the woodshed, it falls in the area of incomplete implementation of all these systems. As impressed as we are with the basic design of the game, Warhammer Online is an enormously complicated beast and Mythic's clearly got its work cut out for it. Class balance -- the perpetual complaint among MMO gamers -- increases exponentially the more classes there are. Warhammer Online has 20, which makes one's head swim. At this writing, the inter-class sniping has already begun with the current consensus that Warrior Priests are way overpowered while Witch Elves are a joke. No one expects the balance to ever be perfect -- especially not in a beta -- but if the classes aren't a bit closer at launch, it could seriously skew the server populations, something World of Warcraft is still dealing with four years after launch.

We have yet to compete in a Tier Four capital city siege, but if these aren't handled right, they could easily bring the server down. We experienced chugging on our fairly powerful gaming rigs during some lower-level fortress sieges which makes us worry. Then there's the level of coordination required to attack a capital in the first place. Some of the high-level fortresses could use some landscape tweaks to make them more competitive and taking and hold three massive fortresses in three different zones is going to take a lot of players working together and if the guilds and guild system isn't up to handling it, it might never happen. That would be an unmitigated disaster when the whole purpose of fighting is to get to that content. We're also fairly unimpressed by the game's crafting system.

WAR is Everywhere!

Reservations aside, though, we're pretty excited by how Warhammer Online is shaping up. After many years and far too many delays, the clock is ticking down to its early September launch. There's a little more cleanup and a lot more balancing to do, but in terms of achieving what they set out to do, it looks like the Mythic team may have pulled it off. Warhammer Online feels like the next great game of Realm vs. Realm combat and we can't wait for the Waaaagggghhh! to truly get started.