State of the game: Warhammer Online

What's been happening in the world of non-Warcraft?

So, we’re well over a month into playing Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, and that’s always an interesting time to have another look at an MMO. For one thing, at this stage you’re usually pretty familiar with how a game works, any serious issues at launch should by now have been fixed, and server populations should be pretty stable and humming on toward a stable economy.

Another important thing about this time is that it’s the end of the honeymoon. Your free month is up, and now you have to decide if the game is good enough to justify parting with hard earned cash every month.

We played WAR pretty heavily at time of launch, and even through the many and rather serious issues that game had locally it seemed an excellent new entry into the MMO pantheon. And boy, were some of those issues doozies. We mentioned some in our First Look at the game out of the box, but on top of those there were rumours that Australian servers had an incorrect version of the game on them that was causing log on problems for a lot of people. There were random crashes, ongoing mail bugs, and all kinds of performance quirks, all made far worse by the curious decision on EA’s behalf to not host any official forums for the game.

But the game, when we could actually log on, was fun. The innovations of Public Quests and the focus on PvP and very rigidly defined classes for each race made for a fresh experience. The only early hurdle was the lack of population on the Oceanic RP server – call us fruity, but we like our RPz. A quick switch the better populated US RP/open RvR server fixed that, though, and with the greater pop we were able to more fully enjoy instanced battlegrounds, open world PvP and public quests.

But the niggles started to set in a couple of weeks ago.

It can be hard to find time to dedicate to a game like WAR, and moreso than its MMO cousins WoW and LotRO, it’s easy to fall behind the levelling curve. As the initial population started to outlevel us, we found it harder and harder to find open groups for questing or drive by faction kills. That, combined with being on a US server and out of sync with the high pop times stateside, left us feeling lonely and more than a little frustrated.

In fact, that might be the case for anyone who signs on after the initial blush of launch, and in a game that relies heavily upon having the numbers to enjoy the key features – bloody murderous rampages on an epic scale – we can only imagine a lot of people feeling similar to us.