I’m addicted to video games. They are my Anti-Depressant. Whenever I want to relax or take a complete exist from the real world and get my mind off of things games fulfill me.
As a college student I’ve put in thousands of hours in games and majority of those hours are in MMOs. World of Warcraft was my first taste I will have to admit. Becoming familiar with WoW and the world of MMOs I discovered that Dark Age of Camelot was one of the main games before WoW. Since Starcraft and Blizzard had my heart as a young school boy I was welcome to the idea of WoW. I soon fell over the spell and skipped way too many hours of class. I eventually put the game down and discovered having a real life outside of the computer helped and my true Love with women. Granted a woman who played video games would be a dream but that didn’t happen back then.
Now with all that BS out of the way. I guess it had to come out since I haven’t posted in awhile. Here is my review of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning.
Many people will say Warhammer is a well executed clone of World of Warcraft. You know what I think they are right. Even being a WoW clone that is done well is an awesome game in my book. If Blizzard has huge successes why not make something very similar and easy for a WoW player to get into?! Now as my close friend Mike says, “WoW was PvE based and later on added PvP elements into it & WAR is PvP based with PvE already in mind”. I completely agree with this statement. Granted I don’t mind doing PvE majority of the time. I’ll be honest I never really did Battle Grounds in WoW. One thing that completely surprised me was how much fun Realm vs Realm is. I had my heart set on just doing tons of quests and leveling up as fast as possible. Never did I have intentions of jumping into this massive WAR. With all those plans in mind once I hit that RvR que and enter, OMG! The game took on a whole new life for me. With all you who hear that the game is mainly PvP it’s not true. You can level up to 40 which is where the level cap is as of now completely without doing any RvR. I assure you though once you try it once you’ll be hooked sitting there waiting for you to enter Northern watch!
As for how the game actually looks. The graphics are definitely better than WoW. I will say that you do need a decent machine to play this game. WoW definitely is real soft when it comes to PC requirements where WAR isn’t as lenient when it comes to the Processor or Video Card. I had to upgrade my old PC to play the game because you need at least a single processor @ 2.4 Ghz. Even if you meet the requirement the game will run sluggish. Highly recommend dual core processor for this game. Now lets say you have a huge screen, dual video cards, tons of ram, and a dual core this game looks AMAZING. It’s no Age of Conan I hear but it looks great when compared to WoW. One thing that really impressed me was that the game supports EXTREME resolutions. I’m running 1080 on my 40” screen.
The actual User Interface is almost IDENTICAL to WoW. You’ll just look at the UI and feel like you as if this is WoW just tweaked up a tad. The one major difference is how WAR has a book where it stores everything from your quest, achievements, story line, awards, etc… This adds a bit more but I’m not entirely sold on it. The only thing I really have used it for is to change my title. As you unlock different achievements you get titles that appear under your name. This can be fun and worth unlocking.
One thing worth mentioning before actual game play is classes. The classes are one thing that is a bit foreign when compared to WoW. Each class has a different name. A warrior isn’t a warrior on different races. For example the two tank classes on the Destruction side are Black Orc & Chosen. Also just because they are tanks doesn’t mean they both play the same either. I now understand why some classes were removed. I’m definitely satisfied with the selection of classes available and see how it could get quite confusing if there were twice as many as originally announced. It is also worth mentioning that each class has almost a mirror on the other side.
Now for describing how actual game play is like. It’s much like any MMORPG out there. You’re going to quest. That means kill this amount of x and then kill the leader in the mob. Also go collect x amount of y’s. Now what makes questing much more bearable is the fact that once you’ve accepted a quest it automatically shows you where on the map that the quest items or mobs are located. This saves so much TIME! It feels like you are actually on a path instead of trying to decipher where you have to go for each quest. Something that is entirely new to me is the idea of Public Quest. A public quest is a location in a zone where groups form to complete a large quest. The location usually has 3 to 4 stages. Most of the time stage one will be kill a large amount of easy mobs all around the area and have no time limit. Each time someone in the area kills one or collects the certain item it keeps track of it. Once you’ve killed/collected the large amount in Stage 1 it automatically switches to Stage 2. Stage 2 usually has Champions (elites in WoW terms) that you need to kill. On average it’s about 10 in Tier 1. It’s pretty safe to say that if you don’t have 2-3 people working together you won’t be able to finish Stage 2. At Stage 3 you need a pretty balanced group working together. Majority of the time Stage 3 is the final stage and requires you to kill a Hero. One thing to keep in mind is that Stage 2 & 3 are timed so that if you don’t have a strong group and can’t complete the stage it time it automatically resets. Suppose you have a good group formed and end up finishing the public quest, what happens? Well the game figures out how much influence you had in the whole quest process. It then ranks everyone who participated in the quest and awards bonus points to the players in the top 5. Once that is figured out it rolls a number and if you have any bonuses it adds those points to come up with a final number. Depending on how many people helped do the quest varies on the different loot bags it hands out. Generally from what I’ve seen they have Blue loot bags, Green loot bags, and White loot bags. If you placed and receive a bag you can open them and chose from a list of rewards. The blue bags usually has a blue item, green has green, etc… One thing to note about this is that suppose you get a green bag and decide to complete the PQ again and receive another green bag you’ll have the same choices as before. That means each color bag has the same reward no matter how many times you complete that specific PQ. The last thing about PQ to know about is that usually the rewards in the PQ are the same Influence rewards you can earn. The game is split into chapters of a story. As you are moving zone to zone and tier to tier the chapters increase. On the top right of your screen it has what chapter you are located in and an influence bar showing you how much influence you have. The way to increase your influence (INF) is by doing PQ or RvR. As the INF bar fills up it allows you to earn rewards. Basic rewards are usually potions, advanced rewards are average items, and Elite rewards are high lvl items. This encourages you to keep doing PQ over and over or participate in RvR to acquire better gear.
To Be Continued…
I’ll be adding my review about RvR (Battlegrounds) soon. Also talk a little bit more about the game.
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