I managed to get use of a friends closed beta account for Warhammer Online and I have to say my first 6 hours in game have been very impressive. Which I wouldn’t expect anything less, considering Age of Conan for the first twenty levels was content rich and provided a great gaming experience. I mean if you cant get the first twenty levels right, your game is doomed from the onset.



However Warhammer Online brings a number of innovations to the table that put it above the rest of the new releases to date. First off you know from the second your character spawns that you are in the middle of a War. You are made aware of the conflict through quests and the fact the enemy are knocking at the door to your starting city from the onset. The beauty about Warhammer is that you can contribute to the War without having to fight other players. Your efforts in PvE and completing quests that assist the War effort can be substantial. However if you want to get into the thick of it you can and the another great aspect of War is you can viably get into it from the first level.

In fact if your not into PvE you can get quests that require you to enter the fray from level one and fight the enemy such as other players. I last night completed my first scenario which is in an instanced battle over a preset set of objectives. It was a blast and once I realised how it worked which didn’t take long at all I was totally immersed in the conflict. At the end of the scenario I had completed a couple of quests, the first one was to participate in the scenario regardless of the out come and the other was I had to kill 5 enemy players. The concern I had with the kill 5 other players when I took it was that I am a clothy/healer and therefore this may have been a challenge for my class. Well when you enter the scenario you are grouped, if your group kills an enemy player you are awarded a mark towards your quest goal.

This totally put a new incentive on PvP as it allows those that are not confident to PvP to get involved and complete PvP related quests by grouping. Get into a guild and you can total level your character through PvP only. Name a game that can do that today? Other innovations that Warhammer has brought to the table is the open grouping system and public quests. The open grouping is that groups can have anyone in the group invite others which allows groups to very quickly form. As the group leader you can make your group private if you wish, however in a public quest this systems rocks. Especially as a healer as I can easily identify people that need healing. Now I have an incentive to keep people alive because it counts towards me getting rewarded when the public quest has been completed as the more that I help the more chance of a reward and the more doing the quest the quicker we get to the loot. Its a win win scenario that actually works.

Public quests are an excellent way to get a boss monster encounter that normally requires you in other MMO’s to sit at the dungeon entrance and SPAM the world chat channel looking for people to group with to do the encounter. Warhammer offers this in public quests and allows you to just run to the quest area and automatically take part in the quest. If you sit on your hands and let others do the work, then when it comes to rolling on the loot you wont fair so well at all. The loot is something else that was also a pleasant experience in that when I did win a reward for the public quest, I got a loot bag with loot in it that was specific for my class. No more getting loot and then having to give it up or sell it as it was useless to you.

 So my first impression are that Mythic have got a real contender on there hands to give World of Warcraft a run for its money. There are enough features in this game to entice all play styles and the over all Realm versus Realm theme that allows you to contribute in any fashion you want, makes this game a bloody good reason to purchase it and give it a shot. That coupled with the Aussie server and the sub 100 millisecond ping time makes this a very enjoyable experience. If Mythic also make the maintenance cycle to suit the Aussie crowd, which EA does for UO, they are really going to draw a crowd.

My next write up Ill cover the guild system and the character I am playing, a Rune Priest and some more of the mechanics.

Cheers
Shane