Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning

War Never Changes.

Literally in MMOs, as regardless of how bitter a conflict is it all whittles down to a few games of Capture the Flag with the eventual putting aside of differences to save the world. However, in the gritty Warhammer World, everything is to play for - every zone, every territory - as from Rank 1 onwards, you're very much at war, the enemy is near you, and you've got the chance to fight for your realm. While on paper it sounds like AOR will be a horrible gankfest, allow me to put your fears to rest - I am a die-hard PvP hater, and Warhammer Online has revved my siege engine.

Get To The Choppa

First choose a realm - Order or Destruction - and your army: the human Empire (humans), High Elves and Dwarves who support Order, or the Dark Elves, Greenskins (Orcs and Goblins) and the demonic hordes of Chaos (mutated humans, unique to Warhammer), who side with Destruction. Your last task when stalling is to choose an army-specific career. This sets your basic ability to deal, take and heal damage.

AOR trades on its unique and distinct personalities, though - so while each army will host similar careers, their playing styles will be very different. For example, the Orc Choppa gains morale as he fights, building into a berserker frenzy. His most powerful abilities will drain these reserves, so he must keep slicing and dicing to keep his beserker ability powered. In comparison, melee combat powers the Human Witch Hunter's ranged attacks, so he must engage in and withdraw from hand-to-hand combat to be effective. Both are damage dealers, but have radically different styles.

The mastery system is EA Mythic's mishmash of Titan Quest's tiers and WOWs Talents systems, with a few tricks of its own. After level 10, yon can specialise further, allocating mastery points across deeper abilities. If yon play a High Elf Shadow Warrior, you'll be limited, at first, to killing from a distance. With progress, and well-chosen masteries, the warrior can turn into an brawling beast. Furthermore, yon can combine masteries to make complex hybrids - tailoring yourself to either RvR or PvE combat, or making an amalgam adapted to both sides of this rongh-and-tnmble MMO.

Waaagh! And Peace

The combat is a familiar affair, but while it still involves the tapping of hotkeys, the morale system shakes things up somehat. Morale builds as a battle continues, accruing and opening up bigger and better attacks, with larger, more successful groups gaining it faster than a solo combatant. This is a simple and intuitive system that adds another dimension to longer battles, replacing powerful abilities that - in other games - would take five minutes to recharge, with shorter ones that keep battle momentum going. For RvR battles there are abilities designed to lower opponents' morale, which is especially useful when a bunch of psyched-up Orc Choppas are about to go berserk on your hit points.

Another interesting addition is the tactics system, which allows you to equip enhancements on a battle-to-battle basis, possibly adding more damage against a particular army (for RvR) or beasts (for PvE), or weapon skills (for both). These item-like augments let you adapt your strengths, like adding more healing ability if a Warrior Priest wants to act as a group's medic, or more skill with hammers if they want to go solo - it's an easy way to specialise on the fly without the permanence of RPG skills.

Under Siege

EA Mythic are ensuring players won't be forced to spend months getting the best gear before they join the war. They want to pull together the disparate worlds of PvE and PvP into one game.

From the start you're introduced to Scenarios, AORs battlegrounds, which are bracketed into smaller level groups than MMO players are used to. This way AOR gives all players a chance to play a key role in the PvP missions. Even Public Quests (sec Public questing), can have PvE and PvP objectives. And unlike WOW, killing another player grants run-of-the-mill experience, as well as AORs second levelling commodity, renown.

Glory In Death

While there are 40 ranks of experience, which are gained through questing and killing, renown has 80 ranks gained exclusively by fighting your fellow players. Tliis may sound like a powergamer concept, but it's one that works for more casual players too.

You gain real tactical advantages through taking and defending areas within a map. At the high end you'll improve your army's living capital city, while at the low end you'll receive immediate rewards - big experience, renown and loot are your prizes for defending keeps and key areas. So being selfish means that you'll leave yourself unprotected.

RvR and PvE areas flow together naturally, but you're warned very clearly both where they are and when you're about to be flagged for combat. Don't worry about ganking - a higher level trying to smack up defenceless newbies will find themselves turned into a chicken and stomped into pate.

With each renown level, you're able to spend points on permanent statistical upgrades or tactics, as well as earn RvR-specific armour sets. There are also specific PvE sets, along with a bounty hunter set that can only be collected through completing quests that combine both PvE and PvP objectives, such as killing a few of the opposing side, then having to head into dangerous territory to kill a monster.

This kind of accessible, realm-driven combat is an example of EA Mythic's main goal for AOR - NPC and player combat that flows together naturally, culminating in a siege of the main cities. This will be, the developers tout, a huge, 100-200 person battle against players and NPCs, that finishes with a final scrap against either one of the leaders, such as Tchar'Zanek or Emperor Karl Franz. You'll be able to burn the town to the ground, while murdering the populace and looting for a day, real time, as well as exploring the city's unlocked dungeons, special vendors, and capturing the defeated leaders and placing them in stocks in your capital.

AOR stands to be the first truly war-based MMO. While I have hated PvP in its past forms for being a selfish, meaningless game of barrelshooting, AORs RvR gives it substance and a point. In the past MMOs have stressfully forced combat against players away from the main game, but EA Mythic have, successfully I might add, made it not only useful, but enjoyable and accessible to the masses. So, if you've been reticent about PvP combat, or ignoring Warhammer Online because of it, it's about time you stop doing so and start getting yourself ready - AOR is coming, and it's going to change absolutely everything.

The Tome of Knowledge

This is your (second) life

The Tome of Knowledge is a quest log, storybook, map and an achievements system. Everything you do, down to the number of times you've died, gets chronicled in your own personal tome, along with a chapter-by-chapter recollection of all the major storyline events so far.

Every time you progress the main storyline, which can be done both by accepting and completing quests or just by entering an area, you gain a big chunk of experience and a 'tome unlock'. These always give experience rewards, but can range from simply meeting a race or an enemy for the first time, and all play towards achievements that can unlock titles, LOTRO-style.

Roleplaying and lore fans will love the Tome's detail about your cliaracter, the things you meet, and the history that it builds up over even a short time of playing. Grinders will adore the fact that achievements reward you with experience for completing objectives, and there're titles for status-hungry fame lovers too. It's a new way to grind, and it looks scarify addictive.

There's A Bit Of stigma towards player vs player combat these days, mostly centred around how selfish it's become - you kill other players, you get a reward, and you use it to upgrade yourself. Not so in Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, by Dark Age of Camelot developers EA Mythic, the guys who invented realm vs realm warfare.

"Our RvR features are beyond what other games offer in PvP," explains Jeff Hickman. "We want to capture anyone who likes competitive gaming. Whether they're MMO or FPS players, we have a game that they can play and enjoy."

Warhammer Online is pitched as an accessible MMO for newcomers to the setting and fervent fans of the pen-and-paper RPG and wargames the MMO is based on. "We want those people who have always played the table-top Warhammer game to play AOR and see it come to life, and how well we've realised that universe in doing so."

That means that the game has to cater to a lot of different people and a lot of play styles, from the ones that focus on trying to hack apart your fellow man to the more placid desire to exercise one's virtual legs on an electronic treadmill for hours on end. "Even though we put a lot of effort into RvR and our unique features we have a great fully-featured MMO, great quests, great dungeons, great loot great armour - all those things that you'd expect from an MMO, we've got." adds Hickman.

There're going to be - and fairly - a lot of comparisons to IVOIV, because AOR is a fantasy MMO, with hotkeyed abilities and elves to have cybersex with. Mythic fully admit that there are certain things the genre expects of the game and that AOR will have them, but they'll also be touting original features like public quests. These are gigantic, story-based adventures that anyone can walk into, join in, and get experience and renown from. Hickman's sure the rest of the industry will be using them in a few years, "They'd be stupid not to - they're so good in the game." Things like bounty hunter questlines, which have you doing both RvR and normal NPC-killing as part of one jaunt, are all part of Mythic's grand goal to make online RPG fighting less of a chore and attract the reticent to its mothering arms. "You can get in and within 15 to 20 minutes participate in a meaningful PvP session that actually has an impact on the world and helps you progress."

Potentially, AOR could be a hugely successful game, a more rounded, cogent WOW with the ability to really fight a war, rather than being a grumbling, lonely curmudgeon on the battlefield. Roll on autumn, when we'll have the definitive verdict.