Video Game Review | Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning - Download Free Phim, Nhac, Phan Mem, Karaoke

conmeo · #1 (**permalink**) 10-27-2008, 09:50 AM

A Fantasy Universe Raises Its Broadsword Against World of Warcraft

A screen still from Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, which was released Sept. 18.

Designing a successful massively multiplayer online game may be one of the supreme challenges in all entertainment.

Such a game is not merely consumed, or even played. It is inhabited. In most of them someone who is online for 15 hours a week is considered casual. Subscribers who log 30 hours weekly are fairly common, and for people who play any online game at an elite level, it becomes a significant part of their lives, not only in the sheer amount of time spent but also in the bonds formed with other players.

Of course the average American spends more than 30 hours a week watching television, but he doesn’t spend all 30 hours watching the same show (one hopes). Making a top-grade online game means creating an entire universe that an intelligent, motivated player can expect to enjoy spending years exploring (and paying $15 a month for) without getting bored.

That is a high bar, and very few games meet it. Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning does. I spent more than 70 hours with the game recently, and it is clear that Warhammer is the best new massively multiplayer game since World of Warcraft, which was released in 2004. Warhammer provides a more engaging and diverse experience than either Lord of the Rings Online (unless you’re a serious Tolkien fan) or Age of Conan (unless you really need topless barbarians in your life), the other major online fantasy releases in recent years.

Warhammer was released on Sept. 18, so it is only now that the early adopters have to start thinking about whether to maintain their initial 30-day subscriptions. It is only with extensive play that subscribers can determine if they are faced with another Age of Conan situation. Droves of players flocked to Age of Conan earlier this year, only to discover after a few weeks of play that broad swaths of the game’s more advanced content were largely unfinished.

I have not reached Warhammer’s highest levels, and probably won’t until after the holidays (so many games, so little time), but Warhammer does not seem to suffer that problem. The game’s developer, Mythic Entertainment, has done a wondrous job of melding familiar conventions from World of Warcraft (so a WOW player can start playing Warhammer and feel immediately at home) with a barrage of “Why didn’t anyone think of that before?” gameplay innovations, like a “public quest” framework for bringing disparate players together to accomplish common goals.

Best of all, Warhammer is built around a deep system for players to war with one another for control of fortresslike strongholds and even entire cities — an expected bounty from Mythic’s previous development of 2001’s Dark Age of Camelot, which also focused on player-versus-player combat.

And here is the one major caveat with Warhammer Online: If you don’t like to fight against other players, it is probably not the game for you.

That’s because there are two major facets to a good online game.

First, you need a vast amount of content constructed from scratch: varied geographies to explore and hundreds if not thousands of challenging quests to attempt, characters to meet, virtual foes to defeat and bits of shiny loot to accumulate. This is where World of Warcraft excels. The best part of WOW is banding together with friends to battle big computer-controlled bad guys in carefully scripted encounters. Gamers call this player-versus-environment content, or PvE.

But second, you also need systems that enable players to interact with one another to create emergent entertainment and story lines among themselves. This aspect is more like sports, where the basic rules are defined but the narrative is created through the interplay of participants rather than defined in advance. This is where a game like Eve Online excels. The best part of Eve is banding together with friends to battle other real people. The broad plot in a game like Eve is a product of conflict and cooperation among players, rather than the product of a team of professional writers. Gamers call this player-versus-player content, or PvP.

Online, PvP players sometimes refer to people who prefer PvE as carebears. The deal with Warhammer is simple: If you’re a serious carebear, don’t come to Warhammer.

In fairness, Mythic has done well with the game’s PvE content. There are a ton of quests, but if you really don’t ever want to fight other players, stick with World of Warcraft. WOW provides a far more extensive, involving PvE experience than any other online game and will probably continue to do so for years.

But if you’re one of the many gamers who like to indulge in player-on-player mayhem once in a while, Warhammer may provide a refreshing change of pace. And if fantasy PvP is all you care about, there is very little reason to play anything other than Warhammer Online at the moment.

Warhammer is no “WOW killer,” which is what many gamers and industry executives seem to be waiting for. With its international player base and dedicated development team at Blizzard Entertainment, World of Warcraft isn’t going anywhere.

But for a lot of online gamers, Warhammer is providing the most significant competition for their leisure hours in many years. It’s about time.

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