Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning

aka: WAR
Moby ID: 38024
Windows Specs
Note: We may earn an affiliate commission on purchases made via eBay or Amazon links (prices updated 3/28 12:22 AM )

Description official description

Warhammer Online: The Age of Reckoning, is Mythic Entertainment's contribution to the still growing MMORPG genre based in the Warhammer universe.

Warhammer Online boasts a robust PvP system with many character classes unique to the universe as well. These include Ironbreakers, Black Orcs, Chosen, Disciple of Khaine, Marauders, and more.

While most of the content is available through PvP (or RvR, "Realm versus Realm") gameplay, Warhammer Online also boasts PvE experiences including public quests, raid instances, and more. There are also world events that occur from time to time where players can participate for status and loot. The "Heavy Metal" event was one that took place over many days.

Players can choose to level independently in PvE or PvP, the later of which involves running instanced PvP scenarios, or can occur in the overworld in common areas. There are a variety of servers as well, including those with the standard rule sets, but also those where PvP is allowed anywhere in the world. No place is safe here!

Warhammer Online also features a new concept - public quests. This enables large numbers of players to involve themselves with PvE raids without having to hassle much with organizing ambitious raid parties. Players can jump in or leave at anytime and are rewarded based upon their level of participation.

The game is based in Warhammer's original "Age of Reckoning" world.

Spellings

  • Warhammer Online: Время Возмездия - Russian spelling

Groups +

Screenshots

Promos

Credits (Windows version)

503 People (499 developers, 4 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 82% (based on 35 ratings)

Players

Average score: 2.4 out of 5 (based on 5 ratings with 2 reviews)

Two years of WAR, has there been progress on any front?

The Good
First let me clarify that MMOs are not my preferred genre, and I prefer traditional RPGs, so that will influence the review I have of this game.

A month shy of the 2-year anniversary of Warhammer: Age of Reckoning (WAR), how has the passage of time fared for the game? Nearly every aspect of this product has been tweaked and revised, but the core gameplay remains the same, naturally. I recently restarted the game earlier this summer, after a long hiatus -- my previous stint in this MMORPG was during the beta test and first month of the product launch.

As with most MMORPGs these days, you can download and play the game for free to a limit (level 10 out of 40, confined to one area, can't send mail or use auctions), but otherwise you have full access to all of the game's features. This is a great selling point and what got me back in the game.

Mythic attempted to produce a product that will satisfy the two general categories of audience for MMOs -- those that prefer solo and co-op (Player vs Environment/AI or PVE),and those who live for player vs. player combat (PVP). Overall WAR is heavily oriented to supported PVP.

There two main PVE options. Naturally for every race their have their own missions/campaign, and some missions are even class specific. It doesn't take too long to finish a campaign, probably 20-30 hours if you don't count any PVP play, so it's not difficult like other MMORPGs that just want to leech your subscription payments.

There is quite a bit of grinding, but it's actually reasonable. Most of the missions just have you killing a handful of enemies, and many mission link with the same enemy kill type so there's quite a bit of satisfaction seeing you knock 2 or 3 birds out with one stone.

Other mission types include retrieving objects or scouting areas. The maps are very diverse and it's fulfilling to discover new parts of the world. Mythic's designers and artists did a good job translating the Warhammer environment to the digital world -- this is not a beautiful world, as it rightly should not be, but grim and gothic unconquered terrain that is punctuated by some semblance of nature and civilization.

Public Quests are the other solo/co-op alternative. These are open areas in the game world where any number of players can participate in an objective that usually involves killing a number of monsters and/or retrieving objects in the area. PQs all have 3 stages, and they progressive get more difficult as your complete them. Besides the first stage, the second and third stages have a time limit before they end and reset to the first stage. Players are encourage to participate as this is the only way to acquire rare and powerful weapons if PVP combat is not desired.

For PVP, there are also two options. The first is, of course, the raison dete for WAR, the realm vs. realm (RVR) battlegrounds, where Order (Empire Humans, High Elf, Dwarf) players fight against Chaos (Chaos Humans, Dark Elf, Orcs/Goblins). These zones in the gameworld have minor objectives and larger structures such as castles/keeps to capture, all populated by elite AI, which bolster the defending side's player forces.

Scenarios offer the other PVP experience. These are instance maps of very unique locations where players are teleported to, and objectives include player elimination to capture the flag style gameplay.

Besides the challenge of competing against other humans and the chance for acquiring powerful equipment, there is one main factor which encourages PVP: Renown. This is another "level" that you character attains, separate from the main class level, and the cap is 80. Renown advancement gives you new special abilities/boosts, and also the option to purchase unique arms and armor.

For novices with no MMO experience, this game has a fairly reasonable learning curve. Players with an extensive background in the online RPG gamespace will be very familiar with the interface and concepts. The game is also more stable now, and in the past few months of heavy play I only recall a handful of lockups/crashes, and most were due to network issues (unknown if on my end or the servers'), and playing the game in windowed mode.

The Bad
The biggest disappointments for me all revolve around the implementation of PVP.

First, I think it's a poor representation of the Warhammer mythology -- massive armies mustering for war. During RVR, it's still just a few parties or warbands of players. It hearkens back to the days of Herohammer, a negative moniker given to the tabletop game from a few editions past when individual heroes could wipe out entire regiments of troops on their own. Not that there are regiments of troops to obliterate, but that this entire "war" is fought only by heroes in WAR. Sure, there are some "battles" raging on in all the areas, but these are just small skirmishes of background AI troops that have no effect on the game.

I may be dreaming too much, but I was expecting to see large units AI troops fighting with the players in the RVR battlegrounds. I'm not sure how exactly it would be implemented, but it sure was not even attempted here.

Second, for an MMO game, the handling of the player populations and matching is very weak. On weeknights it's impossible to find any RVR and scenarios with players. Speaking of scenarios, there seems to be a bug where sometimes the game can't match properly and you end up with a handful of players for one faction and dozens for the other, causing the scenario to end due to balance reasons. A more elegant solution would have been to keep players from joining if one faction is too large. Anyhow, in general this all just stems from the lack of players.

Ultimately, there also is no permanency to any of your actions. Granted, this was never billed as a persistent world type game, but it all just seems pointless, like you're just playing on a game matching service for any competitive multiplayer game like first person shooters.

PVE also seems unfinished. Solos are not fun as you'll never receive any of the even moderately powerful equipment, and even the co-op required PQ loot is nowhere near the caliber of the PVP rewards. In addition, though there's a lot of text to read for missions, but they just aren't interesting fluff for the single player experience.

WAR is heavily focused on stats and combos, following in the traditional archetypes of other MMORPGs - melee tanks, healers, ranged area attackers, etc. There's no originality, and no real "RPG"... it's just about maximizing your damage or healing combos. Nothing wrong with this, except I just wanted to put this out to those interested in the Warhammer theme not familiar with MMOs.

Graphically speaking, it seems to be struggling to find a direction. The environments are decent, but the character design appears to be caught somewhere between the cartoony caricature of Warcraft, while trying to be more grim and realistic, but just not looking that interesting ultimately. The technology is a bit dated, too. Even two years ago when it was released it looked dated eye candy.

The Bottom Line
What really solidified my negative feelings of this game was the fact that it feels unbalanced between Destruction vs. Order. There have been some complaints about this, and it may be that Order classes require more "finesse" -- but my only experience with this is that the Dark Elf I first started playing a few months ago was able to fare much better in RVR than my human character (both rogue classes), even after having played much more extensively as the human.

And yet, I'm still playing it. I think it's just due to the fact that it's paid for, and I want to get my money's worth for the subscription (though to be honest, the only reason I restarted was because I received a copy of the collector's edition for free). I'll probably terminate it at the end of this month.

Windows · by grimbergen (433) · 2010

Would be great, if it were not broken.

The Good
Warhammer Online, WAAAGGH as the orcs might say, is the latest, ambitious endeavor into the Warhammer universe. As for myself, I’m completely new to this long running fantasy realm, but not to MMORPG’s. So having said that, forgive me while we trade my lack of knowledge in regard to Warhammer in exchange for solid MMO experience when compiling this review.

This game is the epitome of the love/hate relationship. In many aspects the game is remarkable, but unfortunately, it’s also broken. What we do see is experience in design marred by technical annoyances that will keep all but the most dedicated (or lucky) playing for a long time to come.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. For all practical purposes Warhammer Online does not take a step backwards. This is obviously a game that has built upon the successes of pioneers in the MMO industry, and learned from those that had failed implementations and have steered clear of those pitfalls, for the most part.

It’s important to take into account that this game has the most to offer two types of players; those that like pvp, and those that like to solo. While there is a little bit for everyone, if your forte is raid style pve ala end game World of Warcraft, you will be seriously let down. Many MMOs are a pve experience first, and a pvp experience second. As we’ve seen in times past, pvp function in MMOs is often a small piece of the pie, or at best, an afterthought. There are exceptions of course such as the case with DAOC and other less successful MMOs, but generally speaking, pvp is not the center of attention in most MMO experiences. Sure, there are battlegrounds in WoW, and the original EQ did offer various coin loot and even player item loot servers, but generally speaking, this is the exception rather than the rule. Everquest 2 had even gone completely in the opposite direction by not allowing even consensual pvp (you couldn’t even challenge one to a duel) at launch… an endeavor that they found to be a grave mistake. Many companies in years past had this funny idea that all players hated pvp and were annoyed by it, and as a result much of the design left pvp out of the picture except for strict, exceptional circumstances where the “minority” pvp crowd could somehow be satisfied.

Apparently, they had it all wrong. Now the vast majority of MMO games are released as pvp friendly and generally, pvp servers retain higher populations. This majority should be pleased with the design perspective of Warhammer Online (WAR), where pvp IS pve, for the most part.

I say that pvp IS (or can be) pve because one can advance their character with both experience and loot rewards all the way to end game. Just as one may do the typical “grind” to level or advance their characters in traditional MMO fashion, this can be accomplished by doing nothing but pvp. Or, if you’d rather grind pve you can do that as well, however the item and cash rewards aren’t as lucrative.

Speaking of World of Warcraft, that’s what WAR looks and plays like. Yes the graphics are the same style but let’s not forget that WoW stole from the Warhammer universe to begin with, or at least, that’s the argument made by long time fans of Warhammer. The play style is mostly the same as well, with action points and a multi-tiered attack system being the standard method of dishing out the punishment. But WAR goes a step further and has a very wide variety of tactical moves that serve better in some situations than others. I could for instance, decide to take more damage and dish out more damage, or perhaps I could change my style to do a little less damage but have a higher defense rating. Even using a 2 handed weapon vs. a 1 handed weapon involves utilizing completely different play styles as what you can do with one you might not be able to do with the other.

And aside from the typical moves that spend action points, there are also tactic and morale abilities. In short, tactics are largely passive abilities that offer some benefit, such as extra damage on an attack, or perhaps more hit points. You get many tactics, but there are a limited number of active tactic slots. Therefore, you must make hard decisions on which tactics you select depending on the situation. This is good stuff!

To add, morale is similar, but instead of being passive the abilities must be activated. You receive a morale “bar” and the bar starts filling up the longer you are in combat. Once it reaches a certain point, you can activate your morale ability which could be anything from an area affect attack, to being able to block all attacks in your direction for 10 seconds, and the like. Like tactics, morale has a limited number of slots so one must choose both tactics and morale abilities based on their situation. Because of this, the style of play, and the action movements themselves, SKILL rather than level or equipment is the biggest factor in playing a class effectively.

And what about the classes? Well, they are your typical classes, although there is one big difference here; the classes are race dependant. So for example, only Orcs can be Black Orcs, only Dwarves can be Ironbreakers, etc. You cannot play say, a human ironbreaker. No, the class is race dependant, and there are differences to the classes on each side that are meant to play the same role. However, the consensus is that the Destruction side is terribly overpowered, and playing a Black Orc I can see this.

But before going on to that, let’s talk about how the factions work out. Well, there are two, Destruction and Order, constantly fighting one another. To add to the environment, if you’re playing Destruction in a pve environment, you’re typically killing Order themed characters, and vice versa. However, the problem presents itself halfway through one’s career in that this game has very little variety in the way of “mobs” or computer controlled opponents. At higher levels, you’re killing the same type of mob you were killing at level 1. I remember starting my Black Orc and my first quest ever was to kill some dwarves, otherwise known as “stunties”. I just got a quest today at level 22 to kill more stunties, and for the most part, that’s all I’ve been doing on the pve end. It gets really, really boring.

For this reason I’ve done most of my leveling through pvp (well, that and the fact that I like pvp). Where pvp is concerned however, it can happen in the “overworld”, or in “scenarios”, the latter of which you enter a queue to compete in a themed game such as capture the flag or capturing territories types of environments. The overworld involves pvp that can happen in select “RVR” (their term for pvp… by the way, everything is called something different here, which we’ll get to in a moment) zones which have keeps and outposts that the warring factions can try to hold. By holding a keep there is a bonus to players in the zone, say, more xp on kills and the like.

But along with traditional advancement there is “renown” xp, which is earned through pvp endeavors. It is a separate leveling bar that by increasing dictates the types of rewards you’re allowed to purchase from renown vendors. More on this as well, in the “bad” section.

Another relative innovation is that of public quests. Public quests are a fantastic idea, where anyone, at any time with a group or without one can jump into an area where a public quest is happening and earn rewards. For starters, killing mobs associated with public quests earn you “influence” (yet another xp bar, yes, we’re working with 3) for that particular quest. As you advance the bar, you can select influence awards. If and when the public kills the boss mob at the end of the quest, a random lottery is drawn for loot. Here’s the best part; you get a bonus to your random number based upon your contribution to the quest. Therefore, if you started the public quest at the beginning, you have a mathematically better chance to get raid loot than someone that joined at the end or even half way through. It gets even better; HEALERS are awarded points for healing, just as the melee and spellcasters are given for doing damage. This is fantastic! Finally, healers can be equally represented among the classes that actually take down the mob. While I don’t play a healer, this was a much needed innovation, and it furthermore gives incentive for healers to keep their party members alive. Good stuff! Better still, public quests reset every few minutes and should not take more than half an hour to complete. Therefore, you can jump in without having to spend 8 hours on an end game raid, and if you missed it, you can just wait for it to reset and try it again!

The sound for the game is mostly par, while the music is very good, although you don’t get to hear it much except for logging in or changing zones. Speaking of zones…

The world is massive. It’s huge. You could and probably will get lost. There are vast tracks of land wide open that give the feel of being on a planet, rather than a section of the world. Interestingly enough, most of the space is wasted. I’ve been in sections that don’t have relative quests requiring that I go there, and furthermore there were no overworld pvp objectives, so this is just vast open space that isn’t being used except by people that just wanted to wander around. I did so, for a couple of hours. Deep in the woods, I found a cave and went to the back and discovered a chest that had a couple of potions in it. I thought that was pretty fun. Truth be told the potions were rather weak and not worth the time I invested in stumbling upon them, but it did spark my imagination to realize there are little hidden gems out in the middle of nowhere, places where neither NPCs or even another player could be seen. However, the real heart of the game is pvp, which is quick and accessible in the scenarios. The overworld sieges are another matter, but when people do congregate around them, a sweet amalgam of tactics, strategy, and teamwork are imperative to successful raids. Did someone bring oil to pour on the people attacking the front gate of your keep? Is the front area of the keep secured so that siege weapons can be used to get in or destroy players high atop the towers raining fire down on your invading force? The options and strategies relevant to overworld conflict is where the game really shines, and is where I fell in love with WAR.

The Bad
If only I could say three words to sum up the Achilles’ heel of this game; stability, performance, function. All three get an F, an F- if that were possible. The technical issues often bring the fun to a screeching halt, and none but the most determined (or as mentioned earlier, “lucky” enough to not have technical issues) will be around for long.

But before I tear this game a new ass over my frustrations on the technical side, let’s talk about the leveling, which is one of the inherent, troubled design flaws. In short, it’s too slow. Leveling takes a very long time at higher levels, similar to EQlive leveling. Granted, the level cap is set at a meager level of 40 so we’d expect it to be slower between ranks, but in turn this means that there are longer times between advancement, and fewer advancements overall. Many of the tactics that you earned at a particular level will be in use 10 or 15 levels later, and beyond. Given this, grinding xp is less rewarding and gets boring really fast.

Then there’s the issue of renown rank, which makes no sense in its application. You would think renown rank at level 20 means using renown rewards at level 20. Nope. You typically must have more character rank (or level), than renown to use the renown rewards. So, if my level is 22, and my renown rank is level 20, guess what, I’m not high enough to use some of the gear I’ve EARNED by working up my renown level. The sick part is, this changes later on, and you must have a higher renown rank than character level. Why? Because renown rank is capped at 100 where as character level is 40. Why did they do this? Why do they have 100 pvp levels but only 40 characters levels? Would you think because renown climbs faster? Nope, it doesn’t. You can level your character easier (even though it’s slow) than you can move your renown. This makes no sense whatsoever.

And if you focus primarily on leveling up your character on pve instead of the xp and renown earned at pvp, then you will go for very long periods of pvp action (later when you decide to do it) without any reward that is better than any gear you’re using. So, pick your poison.

What’s more is that the influence system makes grouping or completing public quests irrelevant. For example, I don’t need to complete the public quest to get the rewards, rather just kill enough mobs related to it to build up enough influence. As a result, almost nobody messes with completing the quest or grouping up for the boss mobs at the end of it, rather are content killing the yard trash until they max out their influence bar. This is good in the sense that you can receive the public quest rewards as a solo player, but it also means that there is no incentive to group up to tackle the harder aspects of it. The end result is that you’ll spend your time just grinding these out, rather than participating in a raid to win.

But the technical issues do it for me. I love this game with all of my heart, but as I write this review, I’m considering leaving the game over the technical issues.

First and foremost, the graphics are too laggy. This is a very widespread problem that a quick Google verified is well established. My system is a 5600+ dual core with 4 GB ram, running a 9800GT video card. With ALL of the settings turned down, the graphics set to “fastest framerate”, and even going into the nvidia control panel and turning off or down EVERYTHING, only then is the game playable. And I say, “Playable” as in just that; it’s playable. Constant dips to 2-3 fps are not uncommon, and in large RVR battles it’s a slideshow, a slideshow that looks like total shit because all of the textures and effects are removed. I’ve talked to many people that have this same problem, even on much more powerful systems. I know my specs aren’t a supercomputer, but they aren’t exactly chopped liver either. I can run Fallout 3 and CoD World at War with high settings on and it runs flawlessly. The slowdown with WAR however is so apparent, that that alone is almost enough to make me quit playing.

Then there’s stability. Crashes requiring a hard reboot are bordering on common, and everyone in my guild that’s I’ve spoken to gets them at random. You’re playing and then boom, it freezes, the sound stutters, and the only way out of it is pressing the reset. ARGH!

Even if you can get past the slowness and are having a crash free adventure, random glitches tend to happen which require logging out and back in to fix. For example, for no reason at all, your attacks may be interrupted by being hit. This is not the norm, you can take hits and still attack, but when this bug rears its head, you can’t beat a mouse; because anytime you take any damage it will reset your actions. Logging out and back in resolves it for a time.

Then you may start to notice that mobs stop dropping coin and loot. Hmm, at first you might think that they just didn’t have anything on them. Wrong, log out and try again, it’s there. Good grief!

Oh cool, I just earned a new passive tactic that will increase my health by 880 points. I’ll use that for this big fight. How did I die? Oh, I see, the tactic didn’t give me the hit points, that makes total SENSE NOW DOESN’T IT!?? Here, let me log out and back in. Yep, it seems to be working now. Oh and by the way, there are NINE SCREENS from desktop to getting in game, only one of which can be skipped with the esc key. WTF WERE THEY THINKING!?

The sound… the quality is good, but it’s buggy. Suddenly, your own battle sounds and the sounds around you will become very quiet, almost inaudible, yet, you’ll hear sounds from other area of the map as if they’re right next to you. I recognized this because I could hear the sounds that NPC’s were making in town, while I was out fighting in the woods and could hear nothing in regard to the sounds of my area. Oh but you can always exit the game to fix it, and sit through 9 screens to get back in, then hope everything else is working, and you don’t crash, and the mobs drop loot, etc. Get everything set up to be working, have any of the aforementioned issues rear their head, and then hopefully you can reboot to fix the problem, and hope that something else doesn’t go wrong which it invariably will.

Moving on to other issues, the factions are not balanced very well, and the server populations show this. On almost every server there is an overwhelming number of Destruction characters to Order ones. There are several reasons for this, the main one being that the Destruction classes are simply more powerful. As a Black Orc (pure melee class), I regularly crush the corresponding Order class, the ironbreaker, in one on one fights even with them being several levels higher than me. I attribute some of these wins to having more experience in pvp and MMO games in general, but many times I can tell I’ve gone against really good players that despite being levels above me, are simply lacking in the tools or firepower to take me down. It must be frustrating for them. Furthermore, the Destruction side is just simply more attractive, with nitty gritty and hardcore looking character types, as opposed to namby pamby looking high elfs in conical hats. The “good” side is good in the wrong way, that is to say, not like a troubled vigilante out for justice, but more like the “play dress up Barbie” type of good.

One thing that also annoys me but is invariably overcome by familiarity with the game is the unique naming of various attributes. For example, “hit points” or more commonly, “health”, is referred to as “wounds”. How many “wounds” do you have? Come on. Mitigating damage is called, “toughness”? What? Oh and speaking of that, melee damage is first mitigated by armor, and then again by toughness? That seems a little unfair, until you look at magic resistances (corporeal, elemental, and spiritual… huh? What happened to fire, cold, magic?) in which damage is mitigated first by resistances, then by toughness. However, all clothing has armor, but not all clothing has resistances. This seems rather unfair as it ends up meaning that melee damage is heavily mitigated two times and magic based attacks are mitigated lightly and then heavily, or only one time as opposed to melee damage.

The Bottom Line
My patience is wearing thin. I really love this game and its potential is phenomenal. There is a good foundation here, a few innovations unique to WAR, and hardcore pvp action which I love. But whether the technical issues will be addressed before I lose patience only time (and a very short amount of time at that) will tell.

Windows · by D Michael (222) · 2008

Trivia

Development

The game was originally developed by Climax Online, but it was cancelled in June 2004 by publisher Games Workshop. Climax Online still continued to develop the game with their own money, but had to cancel it a few months later. In 2005, Mythic Entertainment picked up the license and developed a new game under the same title.

Awards

  • GameSpy
    • 2008 – #2 Game of the Year
    • 2008 – #2 PC Game of the Year
    • 2008 – PC MMO of the Year
    • 2008 – Best Use of License of the Year

Analytics

MobyPro Early Access

Upgrade to MobyPro to view research rankings!

Related Games

Warhammer: Mark of Chaos
Released 2006 on Windows
Warhammer 40,000: Carnage
Released 2016 on Linux, Windows, Macintosh...
Warhammer 40,000: Deathwatch - Tyranid Invasion
Released 2015 on iPhone, Windows, PlayStation 4
WWII Online: Blitzkrieg
Released 2001 on Windows, 2002 on Macintosh

Related Sites +

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 38024
  • [ Please login / register to view all identifiers ]

Contribute

Are you familiar with this game? Help document and preserve this entry in video game history! If your contribution is approved, you will earn points and be credited as a contributor.

Contributors to this Entry

Game added by D Michael.

Macintosh added by Kabushi.

Additional contributors: Sicarius, Zeppin, Klaster_1, Patrick Bregger.

Game added December 11, 2008. Last modified March 7, 2024.