Is WarHammer online a World of Warcraft clone??

Update:  9-9-08

There is a fabulous “Transition from WoW to WAR” here.  We are playing the Open Beta on the Pits of Zardok server as Ymiris & Deliria.  Please come join us.

Admit it, the first time you saw game play of Warhammer online you reacted much like Penny Arcade “Pfft, yeah, WORLD of Warhammer.”  We  wrote off Warhammer Online (WhO, as we’re nicknaming it) as EQ & WoW having a baby in order to sell it as a thoroughbred pup & become rich rich rich! MWAHAHAHA.. err, what was I saying? Oh yes…

This last weekend I was invited to the preview weekend, and due to our fabulous friends from WoW and the interests of this website, we decided to try it out. 24 hours later, when we finally looked up from the laptop (after fighting over who could get it first for most of those 24 hours), we realized… we were wrong, we were horribly, horribly wrong.

Let’s say you took the colorful spells from EQ, the neat new PvP Zones from WoW, and then threw in those cool “zones-with-plots-and-events” every 400 feet or so, and Xbox’s ACHIEVEMENTS ploy.. you might have a good start on WhO, and why we were addicted after 2 hours.

Sure, there are the many aspects of every mmorpg that pulls us in, like our spells and kicking lvl 1 pixies asses at level 1, a battleground area, a “kill this many” quest, new spells, blah blah blah. If you have seen the Fabulous new video (and if you haven’t, I’m thoroughly ashamed of you), then you know the different classes & races and their basic fighting strategies.

Then you start playing the characters. Albeit the designs are a little more cartoony than the outsmarting-itself EQ2, but anyone that played the original Warhammer accepts that as it’s artistic style.

The characters feel like they are built for war, every class screams “take me into battle!” WhO has stated it is RvR (or PvP .. or “player vs player” for us newbs) centric, so if you are playing a class that should NOT be going into battle, you’re doing it wrong. The battles themselves are far engaging, simple AND complex, story-driven, quick AND FUN. The RvR aspect is incredibly similar to WoW’s Battlegrounds, where you queue up and go in, and while you do have a slight disadvantage being a younger level in a battle with higher-level chars, there is actually a mechanism that offsets that balance & raises you up a few levels, so that it really is about who can play their class & their gear, instead of all about being the highest level battling (yay WhO! I’m so proud of you!!).

Now, for those of us (like Ophilye) that approaches RvR with a “Deer in the headlights” approach, there is enough originality in the PvE aspects of the game to make a young doe squeal with delight. (wtf? Yeah, I don’t know where I’m going with that) First, some of the actual quests you get are very unique; in the first few hours we played, we took over a machine to become snipers, and were shot out of a cannon to the top of a castle wall.

A very new, and one of our favorite aspects, are Community quests, which allow anyone in a certain area to participate with everyone else accomplishing these plot-driven quests. There are usually 3 parts to each battle, and when its done you get ranked and roll for loot automatically, with roll bonuses based on how much work you did in the quest. When you finish a few of these, you can see the Kill Count guy, who will give you rewards based on how many points you’ve accumulated during the public quest. These public quests happen ever 400 feet or so.. so that all you have to do is veer to a new path a little and BLAMMO! You’re in a public quest!! These are going to be HELLA fun when the game first starts, but I can see them getting a tad difficult when there are only 3 or 4 other people doing the public quest with you. And we say “Public Quest”, but you do not have an actual quest in you logbook to do these things… they are just side notes.
And to segue nicely into “side notes”, the game keeps track of what you encounter and keeps it in your Bestiary book, along with how many times you’ve killed things. This becomes something of a 360 Achievements nod, as you not only get XP for killing so many of something, but you also get a Subtitle. You also seem to get these for doinb not-so-well, like dying over 50 times on the battlefield.. not that Ophilye says she found this out by herself or anything. It was nice to be just hacking your way along for fun and see “Rank Acheived!”.. just like we want to see in real life.

So, quick summary? Yes, We have both preordered the game and are putting together our guild. There is enough information online that if you want to find out the specific classes, races, or even watch some gameplay via Youtube, you can. This post is really just to say: Please do. It is worth some of your time to check it out. We promise.