Warhammer has been around for quite some time and many games, books, and stories have pulled different ideas from this setting.  And why not?  There's a lot to it, ranging from gun toting dwarves to fire mages with brimming red hair.  There are a host of books set in the Warhammer series, and quite a fw pc games have already been released, ranging from Warhammer 40,000 to the good old fantasy Warhammer and each has achieved what it set out to, so what's left?  Why not create a MMO right?

Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning recently came out and is having it's servers filled up by the day.  Is it a World of Warcraft killer?  Let's be honest, the only thing that will take WoW down is WoW, plainly said.  If anyone would like to disagree with that statement, let me know in the comments section down below.  But, I recently got to spend a week in the Warhammer world and I must say that it was an exciting one filled with late nights and countless PvP attempts. 

I know that there have been quite a few reviews out for the game lately, so I'm not here to gve a score or tell you about every feature, but I will tell you what I liked and what didn't interest me too much while I was playing.  Let's start with the beginning.  After installing the game and then patching the game up, I quickly started up the game.  Now I know that I don't have anywhere near a top of the line computer (AMD 64 3000, 2 GB Ram, Nvidia 7600 GT 256 MB), but it runs quite a few games quite well and it is above minimum specs to say the least, but this game didn't run as well as I thought it would.  Not to say that it was completely chopping and stuttering, but I did have to run it at the lowest settings at the lowest resolution for it to play the smoothest.  It didn't look horrible, but I expected the game to run a little better overall when playing.  Yes, I could turn up sme of the specs, but then it began to stutter more with each feature I turned on, especially in more populated areas.

But the game still looked pretty darn good with the settings on the lowest quality, but what was surprising to me was the lack of options to switch on and off in the graphics options.  Normally with computer games, especially MMOs, there are a host of features to turn on and off, if needed, dealing with textures, AA, AF, resolutions, among quite a few others and with each feature, there are a multitude of choices to pick from when using these options.  I remember with LOTRO, there was something like Ultra, Highest, High, Medium, and so on, but with Warhammer, it's Highest Quality, Balanced, and Fastest Framerate.  While, on one hand, this is nice and simple, it also makes you fee like you've either got a great computer or a really crappy one.

But enough with the graphics, lets talk about the gameplay, because in a MMO, that's what's gonna keep bringing you back.  I thoroughly enjoyed the gameplay aspect, whether I was doing some PvE or PvP, both were interesting and kept me logged in for hours.  Where some MMOs can have PvE that gets dull after awhile, Warhammer gives you new reason to enjoy PvE even more with the Public quests everyone talks about.  These community style quests not only give you good experience and integrate you with others on the game, but they also give pretty good rewards depending on the time you spend with it.  Even the regular quests, which are a mixer of go here, and kill this person, are quite fn and challenging.  No more will you have to kill 100 creatures trying to collect one of their specific organs or hides, because all that will be expected of you is to kill a certain number of creatures.  This is nice because it keeps you looking for new quests and not gettign pissed with the inability to find one more hide, especially when gaming wiht groups.

Now PvP, that's just fun from beginning till end.  Not only can you play PvP at anytime, but you can gain renown and rewards from the more PvP you play.   It's extremely nice because you click one button to get queued up to play, and when you're up, it'll ask you if you're ready and then you can hope into it. Once done, it drops you right back into the world where you left, even if you were in the middle of a quest.  That's pretty damn nice if you ask me and convenient. 

One thing I did notice is that you gain levels slower, but that in no way disheartened me towards the overall gameplay, but made me want to play even more to gain ranks (levels), and also gain renown in PvP. 

One last thing I would like to touch upon is the Tome of Knowledge that you can look at at any point in the game.  It carries all the statistics throughout the entire game that you can look up within seconds.  it is extremely easy to navigate through, with whatever you're looking up.  There are a multitude of achievements to gain and keep track of with your travels and this only adds to the addictiveness when you simply can't log off  One nice thing that I did enjoy was the mapping system.  When you get a  new quest, it lights up an area of the map where you need to go for the quest, kind of like a blood stain on the map, but it's extremely helpful and nice and certainly keeps the flow of the game going.  Does it give away information or make things too easy?  No, but it certainly doesn't say go west from this pillar, then north from that tree like some othe MMOs out there right now.

In the end, this is a great game.  I know I didn't explain a fraction of the game to you, but I wanted to come on and let you know that I thoroughly enjoyed this game and when I finally buy a newer computer next year, I will be purchasing this game without doubt.  Because of the ability to solo or group up easily, jump in and out of PvP whereever, and a depth of background really unmatched in most MMOs, Warhammer Online deserves the praise it has been getting as many of the reviews of Warhammer so far have been easilly above 90%

So, now I leave you with your own thoughts on this game.  If you have any questions about the actual gameplay, let me know and I can try to answer it for you.  If you have disagreements, let me know, thoughts, speak them.  Overall, with my time with this game, although it definitely wasn't too long, was a very pleasant one.