Waking Dead

I’m going to put aside the furore surrounding GOA’s handling of the European Open Beta – you can read Mark Jacbos’ thoughts on his blog – and focus primarily on the game itself. Thankfully my wife was out last night so I got a good 4-5 hours of play in and, despite a brief dalliance with an Empire Bright Wizard, these thoughts will be from the perspective of a High Elf Swordmaster. I’ve taken a few screenshots to illustrate my points, but unfortunately they all feature the UI; for some reason the ‘Hide UI’ option is a modifier rather than a toggle, so it’s awkward to hold it down and take the picture whilst playing. Hopefully Mythic will change this for launch.

Right, onwards with the review.

Character Creation

The GUI is very pretty, well thought out, and the music suitably atmospheric. Your characters, once created, are arranged in the background in full 3D, and clicking on one brings it to the foreground. The actual creation side of things is a bit of a let-down though, being no more complex than World of WarCraft. After the masses of control Age of Conan gives you, this feels a little light. Still, the choices on offer are different enough and you can create some pretty cool looking avatars. Glad I get some extra options with my Collector’s Edition, though.

User Interface

The first thing that hits you is the sheer amount of stuff to look at. WAR features not one, but three experience tracks. The first at the top of the screen is your standard Experience bar; the one to the left and below is your Renown bar; the one to the far right is your Influence bar. There’s also the usual features like a Quest Tracker, Minimap, Hot Keys and so on.

The biggest and most welcome change is the Tome of Knowledge. This is a stroke of genius – and not the only one I encountered – as it combines all the disparate bits of information you get in an MMO into one easily-accessed database. It serves as your quest log, bestiary, reward and achievements list, history book, and plenty more besides. You’ll spend a lot of time looking at this, even if it’s just to read up the history of some beast you’ve just encountered for the first time.

One minor point about the interface: the GCD is listed as 1.5 seconds, but it’s more like 1.2 which is actually faster than WoW. This makes a massive difference to combat which I’ll talk about a bit later on.

Questing and Progression

Experience is gained through questing and mob killing and is tracked on your main Experience bar at the top of the screen. There are 40 Ranks to progress through – what WAR calls levels – and progress is at least comparable with other MMOs, at least to begin with. Quest icons are displayed as little books floating above the NPC’s head. They’re colour-coded to show whether quests are available or not, or whether you can hand anything in. The basic questing is pretty much standard fare for an MMO, which is no bad thing really, but it does do a few clever things with it. If you’ve been out in the woods killing Dark Sprites and you find an NPC that has a quest for you to kill Dark Sprites, they’ll already know what you’ve been doing and so grant you the quest completion rewards. It’s a simple touch, but it feels natural and cuts down on a lot of backtracking.

So far, so predictable. The real draw in terms of questing are the Public Quests. These are another stroke of genius; like the Tome of Knowledge they don’t really do anything revolutionary, but they really work well and serve again to cut down on the frustrations most people have with MMOs. Public Quests are scattered throughout each zone and bring the battles across each racial pairing to the fore. As a High Elf starting off in the Blighted Isle, my racial enemies are the Dark Elves. The first PQ I took part in involved storming a Dark Elf fortress, clearing the way for the High Elf army to set up Bolt Throwers, and then helping them take down an enormous War Hydra at the end.

You can take part in PQs at any point throughout the scenario, simply by being in the right area. Every time you enter a PQ area you get a little message to tell you so, and the current quest objective gets added to your Quest Tracker. The one I took part in came in three parts and is probably suitable for somewhere between 10 and 20 players. You all work together towards the objectives, gaining Influence as you progress. Once the quest has been completed you get a results table showing how everyone performed, with bonus points for the top three places. Then there’s a random roll out of 1000 which your score is added to, and this final total determines what rewards you get. A golden chest will spawn in the centre of the PQ area, and you get to loot different items from it depending on where you finished in the leaderboard. Pretty cool, really.

One other nice touch that helps with PQs, and questing in general, is that every party is created open with the option of locking it. What this means is that you can enter an area, click the Party button underneath your portrait, and browse the list of open parties to join. No need to spam the LFG channel or wait for an invite, just join the party and get stuck in.

The last part of progression I want to talk about is Renown. Basically, WAR is a PvP orientated game. You’re always in conflict with your racial enemy, whether NPC or player. There are open-world RvR areas which I’ve yet to encounter, but what I can talk about is PvP Scenarios. Basically, there’s a little Scenario button attached to your mini-map that you can click on at any time and view which Scenarios are available in your area. You can join the queue for one, then carry on questing, and when the time comes you get a little pop-up telling you the Scenario is about to start. You can choose to join it right away, join it in a bit (if you just want to hand in a quest first) or wait for another one to start.

The Scenarios are short PvP mini-games, a bit like Battlefield, where you have to hold control points in order to increase your score. The Scenario I played had a little twist, where the side who controlled all the points for at least 10 seconds unleashed the Fury of Khaine – a massive explosion that took out your opponents. Not played any other Scenarios yet, but this was good fun, and a pretty gentle introduction to PvP for newbies.

Combat and Abilities

Combat sits somewhere between the pointing and clicking of WoW and the visceral hands-on approach of AoC. Each Career in the game has it’s own mechanic, which basically involves a combo system of some description. For example, the Sword Master has Balances – each ability you activate requires a certain Balance and leads on to a different Balance. So, you’re creating combos by stringing together different abilities and planning a path through them so there’s as little downtime between attacks as possible. The Bright Wizard uses Combustion, were each spell you cast builds a certain amount of Combustion points, and the Meltdown ability ‘cashes in’ your Combustion for additional damage – a bit like a finisher.

As I mentioned above, the GCD is about 1.2 seconds, which is pretty quick. This means that combos can be strung together fairly rapidly and combat feels nice and immediate. The only downside I had was that the Sword Master’s Greatsword has a swing time of about 3 seconds, but that’s only for the standard auto-attack, so it’s not a big deal.

Summary

It’s hard not to get wrapped up in the world of Warhammer. Mythic have filled every second of the game with cool stuff. After the barren wasteland of Age of Conan, WAR feels refreshingly alive – you’re never short of something to do, and being thrust into the conflict from the moment you log in only reinforces this. My only critiscism of this is that it’s sometimes too much choice, but I know I’ll forgive it when I don’t have to grind another level just to open up a handful more quests.

In short, it’s everything I hoped it would be and more besides. Even in Open Beta it’s still way more polished and way more complete than AoC was when I stopped playing. They’ve taken all the good bits that Blizzard introduced with World of WarCraft, tweaked them were necesssary, added their own features, and really embraced everything that the license offered them.

In the words of Eurogamer: ladies and gentlemen, we have a contender.