Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning
The popular MMORPG finally arrives for the Macintosh so now Mac users can join the fray along with or against Windows users.
I signed up for the Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning 10-day trial to see what this game was about. I’d been hoping it would be released on the Mac for months. After my experiences with World of WarCraft and City of Heroes I knew that installing the game would take a few hours. Mythic Entertainment offers a Full Client download for those who purchase the game and a Trial Client download for those who sign up for a 10-day trial. After installing the client and logging in to the Mythic Patcher, which is also the game launcher, the patching and installation process took from 9 AM to 10:30 PM to complete, costing me a day of my trial. Considering that I have a 1.5 Mbps connection that usually runs at about 900 kbps, I was a bit disgruntled. Every time a player logs into the Mythic Patcher, they’ll find themselves waiting 5 to 15 minutes for the game to update itself. This process can be reduced to about one minute by simply not checking the Perform Full File Check selection on the login screen. However, skipping this step may lead to your game having glitches. This only happened to me once, resulting in my character walking 90° from where I clicked for him to walk and, despite being locked, icons jumping from the Action Bar to my cursor or completely disappearing from the Action Bar. These glitches were cured simply by completely exiting the game and logging back in.
After being assigned a server to use for gameplay the player must then decide between joining The Realm of Order or The Realm of Destruction. Players are limited to one Realm - Order or Destruction - on each server, but can be on multiple servers. Players can have up to 10 characters per Realm. Each Realm has three races to choose from. The Realm of Order features Dwarfs, The Empire and High Elves while The Realm of Destruction features Greenskins, Chaos, and Dark Elves.
Each race features four classes that include a tank, a healer, a melee class, and a ranged class. The names of these classes for each race are listed as follows: Dwarf classes include Ironbreaker, Rune Priest, Slayer, and Engineer; The Empire classes include Knight of the Blazing Sun, Warrior Priest, Witch Hunter, and Bright Wizard; High Elves classes include Swordmaster, Arch Mage, White Lion, and Shadow Warrior; Greenskins classes include Black Orc, Shaman, Choppa, and Squig Herder; Chaos classes include Chosen, Zealot, Marauder, and Magus; and, finally, Dark Elves classes include Blackguard, Disciple of Khaine, Witch Elf, and Sorcerer/Sorceress. Some classes are not available depending on whether a character is male or female. A couple of the classes, White Lion for instance, include pets that fight along side their owners - I only saw High Elves and Dwarfs with pets.
Once the player has decided on a Realm, a race, and a class they are allowed to customize their character. Choosing male or female, facial features, hair, eye color, and other attributes. While I found the customization process a little limited, I understand that characters gain unique attributes as they progress through the game. There’s an option to randomly have attributes chosen for your character and the random name generator is one of the best I’ve seen in a game. I chose The Realm of Order and a human (The Empire) Bright Wizard who ended up, purely by accident, resembling Wolverine.
I should note here that Windowed Mode is easily accessible any time during the game through the Settings menu.
After clicking the Play button, players see a brief load screen and are introduced to the game through a brief cinematic with narration. The graphics are very good, sharp and more detailed than I’m used to - very similar to those of Lord Of The Rings Online for Windows. The music is also very good, pumping players up for battle. The sound effects really pull players into the game world with a variety of ambient noises.
Players familiar with World of WarCraft will find themselves right at home with the Warhammer Online user interface. There’s an Action Bar on the bottom center of the screen filled with icons that control a character’s abilities and executable inventory items, a Mini-Map in the top right corner, character status gauges in the top left corner, and a Chat Window in the bottom left corner. Along the very top of the screen is an Experience Points bar showing a character’s experience level as it pertains to advancing to the next rank. There was also an Area Influence gauge to show a player’s influence progress which I didn’t quite understand. After surviving several battles, a Morale Meter appeared in the bottom right corner which grants characters special moves depending on the amount of morale they’ve earned. A row of icons along the top center of the screen gives players access to info screens such as Abilities, Backpack, Character, Tome of Knowledge, Main Menu, Parties and Warbands, User Settings, Guild, and Help. The user interface is customizable. The Tome of Knowledge is an interesting device that works both as a quest log and a game diary - it also has other features that I did not get to explore.
Controlling character movement is pretty basic, a player can use the keyboard or the mouse. An on-screen keyboard such as KeyStrokes will work with the game when it is in windowed mode. For the mobility impaired, there are interface selections such as Click To Move and Auto Loot. Usually when I play these kinds of games I find that I need both the mouse and keyboard, however, with Warhammer Online, as long as I wasn’t chatting with someone, I actually found no need for the keyboard and enjoyed playing the game in full screen mode. Hearing impaired players should note that color indicators are used as well as sound for indicating action in the game. If an enemy is attacking you from behind, a red arrow will indicate to the player the location of said enemy.
Playing the game consists of finding Quest Givers, indicated by green icons over their heads with an open book in them, and completing quests. There are both private and public quests. Once a player accepts a quest, the icon will become grayed out and once a quest is completed, the icon will turn yellow and a check mark will appear on the book indicating that a character needs to speak with the Quest Giver to complete said quest. Once a character has moved up in rank by building up experience points they must approach a Career Trainer, indicated by an icon of an arrow-riddled target over their head, in order to train new abilities. Merchants are indicated by an icon of a bag of gold over their head. Rally Masters, indicated by an icon containing three skulls over their head, can give you Influence Rewards - items earned by increasing a characters influence - and allow you to set a Rally Point. Characters carry Books of Binding which allow them to teleport back to any Rally Point a player may have set.
Once a character has accepted a quest, the area where the quest can be completed is highlighted on the world map by a blood stain. Once that quest is complete the blood stain will move to where the character needs to go to turn in that quest. It was very convenient to have this feature built-in to the game.
Playing the game for me was relatively easy until I had to enter one of the Realm vs. Realm (RvR, Warhammer’s Player vs. Player) areas in order to complete a quest. As a character enters one of these areas, they are automatically flagged to participate in the RvR battle. For me, that meant simply becoming a target as I am not very good at PvP types of gameplay. I spent most of my time in the RvR area seeing the Respawn screen. The Warhammer world is broken up into zones. The first zone was relatively easy to play, but after entering the second zone I spent even more time seeing the Respawn screen. I did manage to get my Bright Wizard up to Rank 8 before my game trial ended.
There are many aspects of this game that I did not get to explore and there is plenty of this game left to discover. All in all, I really enjoyed my time with Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning and found that the wait for the Mac version was well worth it. If players are looking for an MMORPG that rivals World of Warcraft and offers a different style of gameplay, this is the game well worth trying out.
(The game manual available for download at the Warhammer Online website is a little out of date. It fails to show certain classes and has different names for many of the features listed here. Mythic Entertainment needs to update this documentation.)
UPDATE: Mythic Entertainment is now offering an "Endless Free Trial" for Warhammer Online. Click here for more details.
MAC System Requirements
Minimum System Requirements
- Mac OS X 10.5.7 Leopard or higher
- Intel Core Duo Processor
- 2 Gigabyte RAM
- ATI X1600 or NVidia 7300 GT with 128 MB of Video RAM
- At least 15 GB of hard drive space for installation. This game will not run on PowerPC (G3/G4/G5) based Mac systems (PowerMac).
Supported Video Cards
- ATI Radeon(TM) series:
- X1600, X1900
- HD 2400, HD 2600
- 3870
- HD 4850, HD 4870
- NVIDIA GeForce series:
- 7300, 7600
- 8600, 8800
- 9400, 9600
- GT120, GT130 This game will not run on the Intel GMA 950 or X3100 class of integrated video cards.
PC System Requirements
For Windows XP
- 2.5 GHz P4 (single core) processor or equivalent
- 1 Gigabyte RAM
- A 128 MB Video Card, with support for Pixel Shader 2.0
- At least 15 GB of hard drive space
For Windows VISTA
- 2.5 GHz P4 processor or equivalent
- 2 Gigabyte RAM
- A 128 MB Video Card, with support for Pixel Shader 2.0
- At least 15 GB of hard drive space
Supported Video Cards
- ATI Radeon(TM) series:
- 9500, 9600, 9800
- X300, X600, X700, X800, X850
- X1300, X1600, X1800, X1900, X1950
- 2400, 2600, 2900
- 3650, 3850, 3870
- 4850, 4870
- NVIDIA GeForce series:
- FX 5900, FX 5950
- 6600, 6800
- 7600, 7800, 7900, 7950
- 8400, 8500, 8600, 8800
- 9400, 9500, 9600, 9800
- GTX 260, GTX 280
Intel® Extreme Graphics:
- GMA X4500 Laptop versions of these chipsets may work, but may run comparatively slowly. Standalone cards that are installed in vanilla PCI slots (not PCIe or PCIx or AGP), such as some GeForce FX variants, will perform poorly. Integrated chipsets such as the ATI Xpress and the NVIDIA TurboCache variants will have low settings selected, but should run satisfactorily.
Recommended Audio Hardware
- Sound Blaster® X-Fi™ series sound card (Note: Requires Creative ALchemy for Windows Vista)
Please note that attempting to play the game using video hardware that isn’t listed above may result in reduced performance, graphical issues or cause the game to not run at all.
The NVIDIA GeForce FX series is unsupported under Vista.
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