WoW Dad

Yes that’s right, 18th September 2008 saw the long awaited release of a new MMORPG; Warhammer Online - The Age of Reckoning.
My youngest son (nearly 9) has been waiting for this game for ages, so to make sure we got it on release day I pre-ordered a copy from Amazon and also turned up at the doors of Game shop in Lancaster at 9am with cash in hand.
Fortunately the Amazon copy arrived through the letter box on the 18th, so we had a copy each.

I’ll skip forward now about 3 hours of installing, patching (830mb) and a really messy registration process, all times 2! It was all worth it though!

The game is seriously good. I’ve not played it that long so far, maybe 4 hours total, my son and I are at level 8, he is a Squid Herder and I chose a Sorcerer. The Sorcerer seems to be kind of a cross between a mage and warlock without pets and the Squid Herder is kind of a hunter - in WoW speak. On to the game…

Good points.

• The UI of the game is outstanding, it’s customisable and gives you a whole lot of information.
• The graphics in the game are very nice, I think there has been more use of colour than in WoW and the model details are very good.
• The quest system is excellent, you get hints on the map telling you where to go and hints on where to hand it in at once completed.
• The public quests are great fun, you get to dip in and out of these when the fancy takes you and the rewards are nice.
• The battlegrounds seem very good, I’ve only played about 4 of these, the queue times are very bad at present, hopefully they will fix this. There is so much information flying up the screen it’s a little daunting but gives you a sense of reward reaching a new goal here and having a new encounter there.

Bad points.

• At busy times I have to wait 10 or 15 minutes to get on the server. Whilst playing WoW I can honestly say this never happened on the server I was on.
• There is a damn annoying EULA that you seem to have to agree to each time you play the game. Please fix this!
• Battleground queues are awful. Hopefully this will be sorted in time.

On the whole I think its an outstanding game, there are many things I have not explored as yet so can’t really comment on them.

The guild system is very exciting, you get to capture buildings and keeps and plant your guild banner on the structure. At a certain level you get your own guild area for meetings etc. I’ll post another mini-review when I have had time to play more…