Warhammer:  Our Bloody, Hands-On Impressions

by

Pig

It’s ok to be jealous. Just don’t slaver. And stop drooling.

The envy is understandable. At todays E for All, we got to do something that very, very few people are allowed to do right now. We got some serious hands-on playtime with Warhammer: Age of Reckoning. Since the beta is temporarily “on hold”, and the game isn’t scheduled to come out until deep into 2008, this playtime was indeed a rarity, and we were happy to get our hands on this hotly anticipated MMO. We’re also keenly interested in passing those impressions on to you, the MMO-addicted public. Heck, that’s what you come to Wandering Goblin for, isn’t it?

In no particular order, allow me to fire some overall impressions of the game down range. Here goes:

The classes are interesting. While our staffers weren’t able to play every class in the game — there are a lot of them — we were able to sample a few. Each is interesting, and they are all distinct. The warrior priest, for example, is an interesting take on the old idea of a cleric. In fact, the WP is a plate-wearing healer, but not in the traditional sense. His melee attacks are formidible, for one thing. He’s an offensive force to be reckoned with on the battle field, but he’s spewing out area-effect heals as he fights. I suppose it could be called a pulsating aura, one that heals both the priest and his group mates as the fight progresses. This fighting aspect of the WP an important thing to note, as he isn’t standing in the back healing the main tank. He’s an in-your-grill face-smashing badass. We’re not sure where, exactly, the goody-goody support aspects of this “priest” comes into play, if at all. The WP we played was a front-line soldier, and this alone made us sit up and take notice.

This friendly guy is actually on the side of Order.

We also got to try out a goblin squig herder, which is a hunter-like class. What’s a squig, you ask? Imagine a short, fat velociraptor, and you get the idea. The SH has got both ranged and melee capability, but it appeared to us that his primary offense came from his pet. The pet AI, from what we saw, was actually quite intuitive. The pet knew to defend me when I got jumped, for example. This was important, because at the time I was running away from the fight like a screaming little girl.

Have you even noticed that pets and their owners look a lot alike?

Another innovative class was the witch hunter. It’s like nothing else we’ve seen in an MMO before. Witch hunters carry a pistol in one hand, and a melee weapon in the other. They wear light armor, and unlike the medieval feel of many of the fighter or caster classes, they look much more like a musketeer. True to form, the WH was quite swashbuckling, firing off pistol shots and slashing with her sword. It is certainly a fun style of play.

The spell-casters are certainly offense-oriented, but each have a different feel to them. The bright wizard is a fireball casting offensive powerhouse, for example. A couple of the casters — the magus and the acolyte — both seemed somewhat creepy. (Since the entire Wandering Goblin staff likes creepy things, we all agreed that these were good character designs.) The warrior-type classes actually offer a wide number of variations. There are melee classes that are more tank than anything else, able to absorb tons of damage, while others are more oriented toward offense. Each class is significantly different from the other.

One thing to note, as it will cause endless debate among overly knowledgable fanboys forever and ever — the classes on the side of Order, and of Chaos, are not merely parallels of each other. Will this cause imbalance? Of course it will; no game is every perfectly balanced. Most MMOs, however, attempt to resolve this issue by making one side’s “rogues” almost identical to the other side’s “assassins”, if you follow my meaning. WAR does not appear to even be considering this approach. Acolytes and shaman are not now, nor will they ever be, merely parallels of one another. The spells aren’t basically the same, just with different names. They are different. We felt this added a lot to the game, and for this bold stand on class differences, we applaud the EA Mythic developers.

This bright wizard is the most attractive pyromaniac we’ve ever seen.

The graphics are beautiful. In fact, this is an understatement. Allow me, first, to say that we saw WAR at ComicCon several months ago. I hate to say this, but we were not impressed. The graphics were choppy, the scenery didn’t look very impressive, and we left with something of a disapointed impression of the game.

That’s all changed now, and in a big, big way. This game looks great. The towns, forests, and countryside look simply fabulous. The characters, too, look really great. A developer told us that the build they brought to E for All is quite recent, and quite upgraded from the build we saw at ComicCon. Of course, he explained, the game isn’t finished, and the graphics will become even more impressive as the game nears release.

The art style is not cartoonish, like WoW. I wouldn’t really say it leans toward photo-realism, like Vanguard or EQII, either. It’s a unique-looking style that isn’t really like other MMOs. I’d say that the characters have a CGI quality to them; they have realistic looking textures, even though the character models often have an exaggerated look. The goblins and orks, for example, certainly don’t look like creatures in the real world, but they have a realistic look to them nonetheless. Oh, don’t listen to me; just look at the pretty pictures.

Here at Wandering Goblin, we like to think of dwarves as “the supermodels of MMO games.”

The gameplay is fast. Let me put this as simply as possible; inside of about two minutes of loggin into the game, I was killing pigs and nasty humanoid something-or-others. The towns are interesting, with friendly NPCs to chat with, but I don’t log into an MMO to hang out in town. Thus I didn’t even bother to pick up any quests, I just headed for the nearest bridge and got to the bloodshed.

The learning curve for the game is short. If you’ve ever played an MMO before, you can play WAR right now. Of course, I’m not claiming I was particularly smooth or quick or showed a lot of expertise. But I was able to figure out what my spells were supposed to do just by looking at them. Sure enough, one mouseclick later and that spell performed as advertised.

The controls are conventional. I mention this because MMO developers sometimes try to “innovate” in ways they shouldn’t. They change the control keys everyone is already used to, just to be different. WAR avoids this pitfall entirely.

Their is a spell/ability bar at the bottom of your screen, a mini-map in the top right corner, and mouse-clicking on a target or a friendly NPC does pretty much what you’d expect it do do. There are some self-explanatory menu keys in the lower left corner of the screen; clicking on them produces no surprises whatsoever. Moving around is equally easy, and figuring out how to play the game takes about as much brainpower as starting your car. (In my case, this is a good thing.)

The player-versus-player bloodshed is all over the place. This is a key feature of WAR. The developers at EA Mythic like to use the tearm RvR, which stands for Realm versus Realm. There are very few “peaceful” zones in the game (though they do exist for you peaceniks and hippies out there) since Warhammer is a game about warfare. The two sides — Order and Chaos — are substantially different, but each is equally intriguing.

This nice man from EA Mythic is Spyke Alexander. Don’t be fooled by his friendly demeanor; Spyke is a bloodthirsty advocate of RvR mayhem.

Aside from the above facts, you need to know that RvR is a rewarding way to play the game. By rewarding I mean literally rewarding. You get loot drops from your battles with other players, just like you would if you killed a monster. The loot doesn’t come from their inventory, either. A loot table is generated for RvR combat, and you can get armor, weapons, and other whatnot just from killing enemy players. Good concept, isn’t it?

Besides loot, you gain actual experience from fighting other players, just as you would from fighting mobs. In a nutshell, you can level up from battling other players.

On top of this, you gain “reknown”, a type of experience that yields special rewards. You only get reknown from RvR combat; you can’t get it from PvE.

Don’t let his ork’s appearance put you off. He’s cuddly. You know, like Shrek.

Our RvR experiences were somewhat limited, but intriguing nonetheless. Developer Spyke Alexander explained to us that as you’re adventuring in the game world, you’ll see RvR battles breaking out nearby or even around you. This was exactly as described. While simply exploring as a witch hunter, we noticed some neophyte warrior priests (our allies on the side of Order) attempting to drive off some Chaos invaders. We felt compelled to help them, and rather quickly found ourselves drawn into an RvR fight. The game has the kind of edgy feeling that only player-vs-player competition can provide. It’s the kind of thing that keeps tension — the good kind — in the game.

The game will have lots of “extras”. Ok, ok, we didn’t get to see this part, exactly. But the inclusion of these “extras”, we were told, was the primary benefit of bringing EA into the mix. Mythic was getting pretty close to releasing WAR when EA bought the company. The influx of cash allowed Mythic to extend the development time of Warhammer and include a whole range of features that otherwise would have been left out. What are these features, you ask? Well, they remain a secret at this time, but we were assured they upgrade the game from “just another MMO” to “a grade-A MMO.”

And that, fellow goblins, is all we have for now. Check back later in the week when we feature not one, but two seperate interviews with the WAR developers. Trust us; what we learned will make your palms all sweaty with anticipation.

Also, check back with Wandering Goblin all week as we put pen to paper, covering everything we learned about your favorite MMOs at E for All.

Copyright 2007 by WanderingGoblin.com. All rights reserved.