Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (PC)
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 | Product Details: Release Date: 18 September 2008 Publisher: Electronic Arts Rating:   Sales Rank: 930 | | Look for similar items by category:
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| | Customer Reviews: meh (21 November 2008)I bought this game the other week. Fortunately i waited for the September release and consequently had none of the logging in nightmare others seem to have had. I should point out that i'm only level 12 so i probably haven't seen all the game has to offer, still i cant help feeling slightly dissapointed. The quest system is easy enough to use although half the time i dont bother reading them. The dead mob counter next to the map is enough to tell me i am doing the Emporer's will. Because of this lack of emotional investment i find myself totally apathetic the hundreds of dead villagers littering the landscape. As a consequence i feel like i'm just grinding xp and, for some reason, i'm sad theres no downtime (at least meditating in EQ forced me to interact!) Everything feels a bit too convenient and somehow this spoils my immersion in the WAR world. Death is only mildly irritating and because of this my achievements feel a bit hollow. The graphics are a bit more grown up than WOW and adequate i suppose. What i would say though is that after running this on a Geforce 8600GT -M- i would expect lesser cards to have problems and considering that the overall quality of the graphics don't seem much beyond WOW, im wondering why my laptop can now double as a hairdryer. Having to choose a face from a stock of about 8 per race is pretty poor in this day and age. All the merchants seem to sell exactly the same wares which makes 99% of them redundant. Altdorf is cool enough i suppose but it seems small and beyond the strangely erotic grunting servant i found, there doesn't seem like there's much else to see. Oh and as for the rather uninspired personal helicopter, well i think i liked getting teleported better. PVP is easy enough to get into but again, it almost feels a bit too user friendly, and the scenarios get boring after awhile. The crafting system is poorly thought out with only two production tradeskills. The two that do exist are good enough i suppose (although unneccessarily fiddly compared to the rest of the interface). Mythic seem to have purposefully avoided repeating other games tradeskills but in a world where people wear armour and carry weapons, it might be an idea to have a few blacksmiths. Infact this avoidance of classic D+D stalwarts seems to tarnish the whole game. I'm all for new ideas but don't be afraid to throw in the classic ideas that work. Overall, i'd say its a pretty good game although it needs a lot more content putting in. Those who played Warhammer on a tabletop will probably get more out of it than me, probably because they understand the WAR world better than I do. I have to say that looking at this game without a Helmet of Nostalgia Plus Five leaves me rather indifferent. And to be honest, if my pals wern't on it, i'd have probably stopped playing by now. Good, but good enough? (19 November 2008)I had thought that this might have been the game to break my WOW habit, but I decided not to renew my subscription after the first month, WAR is a pretty good game, but needs more polish in lots of areas. In WAR each race has it's own individual classes, for example if you want to play as an Ironbreaker, you'll have to be a dwarf. While this might have seemed a good idea in planning, it actually makes the character choice seem more restrictive than in similar games, even though there are many more classes. Another bad idea is having class specific armour, this has led to all characters of the same class looking like facsimiles of each other, the only differences being in the dye colours chosen. There is not enough variation in the world, and it seems too organised. Individual zones are quite large and pack a lot of content in, but rarely feel open and expansive, there are not enough different types of terrain to make a refreshing change when you enter a new zone. It's also not the type of world where you would log in to relax and speak to your friends as you might with other games of this type, the focus is definitely on war and destruction and leads to the world feeling a bit too macho. The PVE quests are all divided into numbered chapters. Finished all your quests at the Chapter 20 hub? Then move to 21 of course, Finished Tier 2? Then move to Tier 3, this doesn't make Warhammer's game world feel organic and alive, it feels like it's been designed by a Swiss urban planner. I doubt the lords of chaos approve of this logical ordering of the world. The graphics have the potential to be excellent but feel completely unfinished at the moment, the draw distance and anti aliasing need to be improved. Currently WOWs updated graphics look way more polished than WARs. After all the bad points are out of the way it's definitely the best MMO launched since WoW. There are some very nice features, the Tome of Knowledge is brilliant and will I assume be widely copied, along with public quests and open groups. It's a promising enough game and I will check back on it in a few months to see how it has developed, but it's not quite good enough at the moment to lure me away from the Lich King. Really nice at the first glance - after two weeks - BOOOOOORING! (18 November 2008)Like I said really cool at the beginning, nice looking, sometimes hangs on my 4870, but from the middle of tier2 it is just boooring like hell.. and this is my opinion. You don't have to read quests to perform them - just go, kill, pick, find come back - so booring! Very Poor Quality - Disc 2 (12 November 2008)Can't install this due to Disc 2 problems. These seem to be very common so I suspect that some sort of copy protection is to blame. Game returned for a refund as it is clearly unfit for purpose. Initial review (11 November 2008)I have to say I am not a big fan of MMO, the only games I bought prior to this was D&D Stormreach, I was a big fan of D&D when I was a kid but was disappointed in the lack of player helpfulness when it comes to the harder quests, even when I joined a guild there seemed to be a lack of support. After shelving the game I bought Guild Wars, which is free to play but it just wasn't a game I enjoyed. Being a fan of the Warhammer tabletop battle game and having played ALL the computer games based on this I invested in WAR, despite some of it's bad reviews. So far so good. INSTALLATION - Despite bad reviews about game installation and setting up and account with GOH I have had no problems, there is a rather sizable patch once installation is complete, but being a hardcore gamer I am used to this and just made a brew. Once the game is installed, actually starting the game is quite fast. RACES/CAREERS - I'm abit gutted that there isn't more of a variety of careers, given the amount of different troops in the TT battle game I was hoping there would be more. Hopefully they will introduce more in future patches. But you get to select whether to fight for Order or Destruction, then your race, Dwarves, Elves or Human, Goblinoid, Dark Elves or Chaos. Then you select your career ranging from sorcerers to fighters all with their different aspects and abilities. GAMEPLAY - Just like any other MMO you go wandering the world looking for quests to advance in levels, what I like about WAR compared to D&D is they are managable on your own, at least if you don't try and jump ahead to the more difficult ones before you have ranked up. Moving about can be quite boring if you keep dieing and have to go back to the same quest, but thats your own fault for not being battle worthy, lol. The graphics aren't the best I have seen in a game, but that's ok, given it's an MMO, I wouldn't want it to start lagging with the amount of players and graphics all going on. But they are still ok. I like the idea of crafting as well, which could be something like mixing ingredients to form potions and such, growing weed and that's not the waccy baccy stuff either. QUESTS - There are private quests and public quests, which is pretty cool. Given to you by NPC's, the private ones you can achieve on your own which I find a plus over D&D ST. The public ones are really hard, I tried one with only one other player and we got battered by a demon of change, I'll have to try and recruit some peeps for that. There is also the realm v realm combat, not exactly a quest but more of a battle between Order and Destruction. The Warhammer World in game, is split into zones which are owned by either side. All you have to do to take part is select a button on the interface and when the next battle starts you are teleported to that site and you fight it out with other players. Then teleported back when it is over. Everything you do in the WAR world contributes points to your realm (zone control), whether they be private, public or RvR. Overall, when my 1 month free subscription is over I will pay to play, so far it is worth the £30. I have only given it a 4 star so far as I am more of an RTS gamer than an MMO player. |
