Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning

David Hollingworth | Sep 19, 2008 11:13 AM

Electronic Arts | http://www.warhammeronline.com

RRP: $AUD$99 (time of review)

From a very rough start, and good game is starting to emerge...

Overall Rating: ---

The wait is over - have the delays been worth it?

So we finally got our copies of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning yesterday. We eagerly rushed home, ripped off the plastic and got the thing to installing. There's always a serious sense of anticipation at this stage of a new MMO, knowing that a whole new world is about to open up...

Assuming everything works.

Which it didn't.

Well, not at first, anyway, and to say that we were a little... miffed is putting it lightly.

The install process runs smoothly enough, but the first sign of a problem was when the desktop shortcut to the file warpatch.exe wasn't the usual fancy icon, but rather a plain old DOS folder. Running it lead to more woe as it merely flashed up a command prompy briefly, and nothing else.

It appears that a lot of people are having this very issue, and that there are a number of workarounds. For some, it comes down to issues with Vista, and the game hiding the correct icon somewhere in the Game folder. I use XP, so that particular gem was not much help.

Further forum searching (which was seriously eating into what I had hoped would be a full night of glorious adventure) revealed one viable fix. If you had the old beta on your system, you could swap out the warpatch.exe file from that, run it, and get the game going. I gave that a try and viola! The patching started. If you don't have the beta install handy, you can still find it for download around the traps, but it's a huge package. Huge. I wouldn't be surprised if warpatch.exe finds its way onto numerous sites and torrents.

The High Elves are all deadly elegance and style.

At launch the game requires a 200MB+ patching process to run, so be warned. It seems a lot faster than patching on World of Warcraft, though, so that's something to smile about while you wait.

Once the patch was done, finally, it was play time, and... what the hell is a modern game using such a lush and artistically dramatic IP doing without any option to set anti-aliasing?!? I mean, come on, that shouldn't be that hard! I could feel the great looking game this wanted to be just dying to get out, but the jaggy monstrosity I was forced to endure sucked all joy from the experience. Shutting the game down, I opened up my NVIDIA options and set about forcing anti-aliasing from the OS.

Which, thankfully, worked. And you know what?

After all that hassle, after the searching and tweaking and file replacing, there's a really good looking, enjoyable game. Now, I've only had a few hours with one character - Anomandir the Swordmaster, on the Lustria Oceanic RP server - but I enjoyed every minute. There's no wolf slaying or rabbit skin collecting in WAR - from the get go you are thrown into vast conflict, killing the hated Dark Elves who are invading your lands.

Even at first level, you suddenly feel very epic, very capable. Part of this is the look - the game's designers have done a great job of bringing the Warhammer world to life. The Swordmaster, for instance, is a figure in flowing white robes bearing an elegant two handed sword, not some rusty hunk of metal. Every level offers up a new skill early on, so even at level five (hey, that patching rigmarole took a lot of time!) I've got five attack options.

The ancestral enemy - Dark Elves!

Speaking of combat, each class has a unique way of using those talents, too. The Swordmaster must chain attacks together to attain different levels of balance, each of which unlocks more attacks in growing dance of elegant destruction. It sounds hyperbolic, but the game mechanism actually makes you feel the part.

We've barely scratched the surface, of course, and haven't even looked at public quest and PvP combat, so far I'm liking what I see an awful lot.

Expect more updates on the game next week, as we begin to fully explore the Old World and all it has to offer.

Two Swordmasters cutting a swirling path of bladey doom.