Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Updated Hands-On - Bright Wizards, Magi, and More Player Versus Player
We try out the Empire and chaos factions in Warhammer Online, and get our hands dirty in updated player-versus-player battles. Read the preview and watch exclusive high-definition gameplay footage of PVP combat.
EA Mythic's development team discusses the Empire, chaos, and player-versus-player battles.
Massively multiplayer games originally captured players' imagination by offering a persistent and dangerous world full of monsters to be slain alongside other players, recovering treasure, and gaining experience levels along the way. But increasingly, players sought the most challenging and exciting quarry of all: other players, in competitive player-versus-player (PVP) battles. This wasn't an accident; games like Mythic Entertainment's Dark Age of Camelot, which focused on team-based "realm versus realm" battles, helped give players a taste for zapping enemy archers with their wizards' magic spells. The studio, now known as EA Mythic, is currently working on its next PVP-focused game, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, a game that will let you take up the standard of the fantastic armies in Games Workshop's Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play universe. We recently had a chance to try out some of the early game for both the chaos and Empire factions, as well as dive into some more rounds of PVP in some down-and-dirty orc-versus-dwarf battles.
The Empire faction is essentially the standard race of humans, though according to Warhammer lore, the Empire represents "humanity on the brink of extinction"--a nation of paranoid people besieged by orcs and dark elves on the outside, but fighting the corrupting influence of chaos (which causes humans to eventually become tentacled, three-eyed lunatics) on the inside. Since the Warhammer universe is all about, well, war, all human characters are being designed to hold their own in battle, even the faction's healer character. The Empire, like the game's other factions, will offer four different character classes when the game launches: the knight of the blazing sun, a heavily armored class that specializes in dishing out (and absorbing) melee damage; the witch hunter, a class that focuses on dealing lots of damage up close; the warpriest, a melee character class that attacks enemies with hammers to earn "faith," a magical energy that can heal nearby teammates; and the bright wizard, the humans' ranged damage-dealing class, which we had a chance to try out for ourselves.
In the early beta version of the game we played, the humans begin their lives in what appears to be a run-down village, the kind you'd see in medieval Europe, including patrolling pikemen in armor, peasants hiding in their hovels, and half of the village on fire. All starting areas will be under siege, and your character's nation will sit right next to your enemies'--so as a new human bright wizard, we found ourselves under attack by the forces of chaos immediately. The starting quests in the Empire zone required our bright wizard to rally peasants to war, rescue them from their burning houses, and slay chaos lieutenants before they could open fire on the village with hellcannons, the fearsome chaos artillery.
We then participated in a "public quest," one of the game's innovative cooperative quests that don't require players to belong to the same adventuring party. Public quests currently bring up a separate quest log in the upper corner of the screen that keeps track of how far along everyone in the area has come. The early public quest in the human area culminates in all players battling a chaos giant, a towering monstrosity that was brought down only after a handful of bright wizards zapped it repeatedly with every spell in their possession. Public quests apparently gain you "influence" with local officials, and with enough influence built up from the various public quests in any given area, you'll be able to select basic, advanced, and eventually, elite quest rewards from that area's magistrate. "Boss" monsters from public quests will also drop exceptionally good loot; exactly who gets that loot will be determined by, among other things, your character's contribution to completing the quest. Public quests will cycle regularly, so if you miss out the first time, you'll be able to stick around and try it again if you care to.
The bright wizard class itself is focused on using magical fire to burn enemies to the ground, using a variety of sorcerous abilities that directly damage enemies or gradually injure them over time. In addition to basic magic spells, bright wizards, like the other classes in the game, can earn "tactics," which provide additional advantages in battle when equipped before the fight, and "morale" abilities, which can be earned in sequence the longer you fight enemies. The game will attempt to deemphasize having characters of a specific level ("level 60 wizards" and such), and will instead give your characters ranks (apprentice, journeyman, expert, and so on) whereby your character will advance through certain tiers, picking up new skills, morale abilities, and tactics. Apparently, instead of grinding away at experience levels, your character will constantly gain new abilities. As we saw later in our PVP matches, your characters will eventually learn more abilities than can be easily readied, so there will be an element of preparation and strategy involved in those as well, which we'll get into later.
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- ESRB: Teen
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