Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Reviews

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Written by BuckGB on October 17th, 2008

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Each pairing contains twenty-two chapters, totalling a staggering sixty-six for you to get stuck into, each with multiple unique PQs. Not all chapters are born equal however, with some being considerably larger than others. The overall size of the world becomes startlingly apparent when, after completing nine or so chapters in your own pairing, you realise that you've only completed the one - there are another two sat entirely untouched. Feeling a little tired of your surroundings or running low on quests? Then jump to another pairing via a flight master and off you go again. The Greenskin chapters were favourites of mine, with a great combination of interesting, original quests and plenty of witty goblin-related humour thrown in for good measure.

It's around Rank 10 when it hits you; stop for just a moment to pan and zoom your experience, viewing it as one sumptuous whole, and WAR's genius really hits home. The combination of influence, renown and experience is utterly compelling in its synergy and it's exactly this concoction that will keep you glued to the screen. It's odd, because the progression of the pairings is relatively unremarkable and linear, but the multitude of things to do with absolutely zero downtime or grind, coupled with the game's willingness to reward you for your efforts, all stacks up and just shouts "play me". In fact, it's hard to play for any length of time without achieving something - something big, something small - but always something. And that's exactly where another major feature comes heartily into play.

Once you get all the nasty payment hassles sorted out, which are actually quite hassle free thanks to an easy to use online accounts system, then it's time to choose a server and get your character ready. As stated, the server locations are quite thorough and will cover most gamers worldwide quite well, with North America, Europe and Oceania accounted for each with multiple servers, which themselves cover the game's three main modes of play - Open RvR, which is unrestricted player vs player maps, Role-play, which is for the hardcore role playing gamers who want to always remain "in character", and finally the much more mainstream Core, which is the standard mode featuring safe zones for PvE and specified zones for PvP. Naturally, the server you choose for any given character is the one you'll need to stick with for that character from there on out, so it is obviously a fairly important decision. The game will give you an idea of the character count on each server for each of the two realms, 'Order' and 'Destruction', so you have the ability to try and avoid queues by selecting from less populated servers.

When it comes to the actual range of classes that gamers can choose from for characters, AoR has a fairly well supplied amount of options spanning across these two realms, which obviously represent "good" and "evil", light and dark respectively. However, the classes are basically molded in typical fashion for the genre. You have the usual range of classes best used as 'tanks' and 'healers' across the game's races (Dwarfs, Empire and High Elves for the Order, and Chaos, Greenskins and Dark Elves for the Destruction), so class wise there isn't really too much ground breaking going on here, but with that said the twenty or so on offer do each have their own unique characteristics and attributes, so there are plenty of clear distinctions to be made, even if a lot of the classes are pretty standard for a MMORPG game like this.

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