Marching on in Warhammer Online

Warhammer Online is a game that from the start has been plagued with numerous problems. Ever since release the developers have been working hard on fixes and balance however and as time progresses the game just keeps getting better. As I'm writing this my wee (both literally and in terms of levels!) Squig Herder is sitting in Mandred's Hold, waiting for my share of the treasure for successfully defending the keep.

For those who don't know, Warhammer Online is a game whose main focus is Realm vs. Realm. Realm vs. Realm is a way of saying that players choose one of two factions at the beginning of the game and fight for them throughout their stay. This may sound identical to PvP but there is a key difference. Your success in PvP depends upon your "realm-mates" because if they're not strong enough to face the enemy then your army will crumble.

Overall while there is still drama and problems in a community like any other game, games in this style seem to have drastic improvements over games not of this style. An example would be in World of Warcraft people belonging to the same faction of you are going to have very little effect on your experience, so why help them?

The game had an immense amount of players at release, with a tremendous amount of servers. This number has dwindled drastically, with a large chunk of the playerbase leaving with the release of World of Warcraft's "Wrath of the Lich King." More players bled away over time as problems persisted but many of these problems are gone, a few persist but pale in comparison to the good points of the game now.

It's a simple matter to level up your friends with the right tools. If your realm has fought hard enough you'll have access to a place called "Land of the Dead," with a summoning stone to bring lower level players in you can level them up extremely quick and get them right into the war. My personal recommendation is to RvR your way all the way through "Tier 2" which is the second set of zones in the game. Tier 3 is quite inactive, this may be because everyone seems to go to Land of the Dead to level quickly when they get to that point.

They've overhauled the city sieges to make them much more of a player vs. player affair with the recent patch and this is a very welcome change to me. As it used to be, the system was like rewarding an epic build-up of player vs. player combat with a large battle against a computer. Large battle against the computer is what I got fed up with when I quit WoW so I didn't want it to be the ultimate goal yet again. It seems Mythic has been listening and turned it into an experience that is truly fun. Now you're fighting players every step of the way.

City sieges are incredibly common now, which means that almost every player can experience it and win loot on top of experiencing it!

Pros:

• Interesting PvP that is active almost all hours of the day.
• Collision detection on all players in PvP combat, leading to more strategy than the norm.
• With recent changes much easier to get "the good gear" to have more interesting battles.
• For the most part a good community willing to answer questions and help, moreso than the average mmo.
• Crafting is easy to hop into and can help you drastically.
• Pioneered the "Public Quest" system which many games are now borrowing from.

Cons:

• Terrain bugs: This has been haunting the game since launch. Sometimes you'll get stuck on the tiniest of objects. Sometimes you'll get stuck so bad that you'll take fall damage and -die.-
• Rewarding loot for public quests: I got first in contribution for the keep defense I wrote about at the beginning of the post. Probably because I killed a great deal of enemies, aiming for healers to slow their progress to their crawl. However because of the rolling system I didn't win anything.
• Rewards in City Sieges: There's a lockout timer for rewards in Sieges which I can understand but the length on them seems a bit excessive. I successfully defended "The Inevitable City" earlier and didn't win my roll and yet I found myself with the lockout timer much to my dismay.
• Population: While not as bad as some older games it's declined drastically. However things seem to be getting much better as the game gets better.

My final verdict on would I recommend it:

Yes. Try the trial, there's an infinite trial but you can't level past level 10 with the trial. You may run into "twinks" which are characters built specifically to be really strong at this level but they're easy to combat by twinking yourself. The secret is stack armor talismans, at low levels they make all the difference in the world. If you played the game at launch and quit try the free trial, there's a streaming client so the download for the game is not that large at all.