PAX 2008: Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning
Saturday, September 6th, 2008Or maybe just WAR…jeez.
So, I had a chance to play a little with this sucker while at PAX. Sanister’s actual knee deep in the closed beta but he’s under an NDA. That’s what he says at least…maybe he’s trying to live the Men in Black lifestyle…can’t talk about it. Look at this little pen…
Anyhow, I’ve loved the Warhammer world since I discovered those huge tomes at the local game store. No one around me played it (they were stuck on D&D, go figure) so I never really got a chance to play it out as much as I wanted to. Then, years later someone decided to make all sorts of games based on it and the 40k franchise…and here we are…uh…why does everything look like WoW? Sure the classes and races are a bit different (though they had to cut some stuff because they were overly ambitious). But, really?
Yup, the engine looks beautiful. It’s polished. There are the usual skills/abilities you activate, etc. Nothing new…and maybe that’s my issue with it. There’s talk of it being the next WoW-killer/assassin/whatever but I don’t know.
EA Mythic’s famous for RvR MMOGs (after all, DAOC is all about this). I never got that far in DAOC to play the RvR part of the game (Sanister’s the achiever-whore, I’m the RPer) but it represents a big part of high-level replayability.
Is it worth trying out? Of course! Everyone’s tired of WoW and is looking for something new. The Warhammer universe is fun and brutal. Is it going to replace WoW? Probably not. Even so, Mythic has a chance of launching a great product that will be the spiritual successor to DAOC while snaging all those Warhammer fans. Check it out.
Title: Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning
Pub\Dev: EA Mythic
Release: September 18, 2008
Chances: 80%

