50 or so hours later and I can say that I’m done with Dawn of War II. I may go back in and skirmish with the AI from time to time, but for the most part, I’ll say that Dawn of War II was quite a satisfying experience and I recommend it if you are in the market for a PC based RTS/RPG style game. It’s pretty much Company of Heroes inserted into Dawn of War, and for fans of Company of Heroes, that’s great news, but for fans of Dawn of War I, not so much. Read on for my review.

Good
- innovative campaign design
- enjoyable gameplay mechanics
- excellent presentation

Bad
- campaign is only for one of the four playable races
- polarizing multiplayer that isn’t as deep as traditional RTS game
- quite a departure from the previous Dawn of War game

Intro
Dawn of War II comes from the Warhammer franchise, and has a long history. Dawn of War II specifically comes from the Warhammer 40,000 universe, which was created in 1987 as a sci fi tabletop war game to the original Warhammer fantasy tabletop war game created in 1983. Many people will notice (especially now with Warhammer online out) that the Warhammer universes seem to bear similarities to Blizzard’s Warcraft series, but it’s actually been around longer so warcraft has tends to have borrowed from Warhammer and not the other way around.

The developer behind Dawn of War II, Relic, has become very popular nowadays due to the huge success of the Company of Heroes franchise. Between the Dawn of War series and the Company of Heroes series, PC gamers have been in luck as they are one of the only few strong PC developers still remaining today. Fans of the original Dawn of War were somewhat rubbed the wrong way though with the Dawn of War II release, as the gameplay was more like Company of Heroes than the original Dawn of War game, which was popular enough to warrant three expansions. Perhaps Relic’s Company of Heroes fanbase is larger than their Dawn of War fanbase so they adapted the gameplay accordingly to pull in more players to the Dawn of War universe. That worked for me.

The overwhelming numbers of the alien race known as the Tyranids threatens the entire galaxy.

Storyline and Premise
In Dawn of War II’s campaign, you play as the Space Marines, one of the four races in the game. The other three races are the Orks, Eldar, and Tyranids. From early missions, you discover the Orks to be more like bandits, causing trouble wherever they can but not necessarily the most intelligent. Then you have the Eldar, an intelligent race that while dwindling in number, appears to place great thought into its actions and battles. And then finally, you have the Tyranids, an alien race that pretty much eats through any planet it invades. During the course of the campaign, your squad of Space marines has minor skirmishes with both the Orks and Eldar, but ultimately, almost all efforts are focused on fighting back the Tyranids as they prove to be the biggest threat.

The campaign consists of three planets, each with about 4-5 regions in them where you can potentially deploy your squad. The campaign takes place in days and while it seems odd why days would matter, I will explain later on why it’s actually a pretty nifty feature to the campaign.

Dawn of War 2 emphasizes cover, and units will automatically get behind nearby structures for cover when engaged in combat

Gameplay Mechanics
Squads
Dawn of War II has completely removed basebuilding from the game, so you deploy to each mission with 3-4 squads total. Each of the squads that accompany your lone commander has 3-4 units, all led by a hero. The squads can take damage, and as the lifebar of the squad goes down, the supporting members of the squad die before finally the hero falls. Any hero that falls is only incapacitated, and can be revived by another hero but supporting members are not revivable. Instead, heroes can “refill” squad members at any reinforcement point on the map. Generally, each map will contain about 4-5 reinforcement points littered across the map and it is often best to set up defensive positions at these reinforcement points because when squad members are killed, reinforcements warp in to replace them.

Out of combat, the commander and the squads regenerate health, and regenerate it even faster near reinforcement points. However, squads with missing squad members will only able to regenerate up to a certain amount of health due to the missing squad member. For example, if a squad of a hero and two members lost one, the most health they could regenerate would be 2/3 the lifebar until they got back to a reinforcement point to get the replacement squad member.

Combat
For those that have played Company of Heroes, Dawn of War II pretty much adopts that combat style rather than the more standard RTS gameplay found in its predecessor. New to Dawn of War II is the ability for units to take cover behind destructable and indestructable objects, to fortify in buildings, and to use weapons like flamethrowers and grenades to deal with enemy units in cover. In short, you shouldn’t simply be commanding all of your units to attack move towards every destination. Every skirmish with the enemy results in both sides taking cover and using whatever weapons they can to gain the advantage. There’s no “steamrolling” here.

Each hero has a unique skillset that allows him to play differently from the others. And with more than four squads available to choose from for a deployment, it comes down to which squad’s abilities you want to use most. Thaddius, for example, has the ability to taunt to get all nearby enemies to focus fire on him, while also having a tank like ability that has his squad reducing nearly all damage for a certain period of time. Cyrus’s squad is a covert ops squad, allowing them to cloak, lay traps, snipe, and generally perform sneaky kills when you don’t want to engage the enemy head on. The tradeoff is that they are weak, and can’t stand toe to toe with any other enemy when engaged in direct combat. Deciding which types of squads are best for your playtype is part of the fun.

Experience System
As you play through the campaign, your heroes will level up. Experience is earned through destroying enemies, completing levels, and even selling loot you no longer want (you get experience points instead of money when you sell unwanted loot). Every squad can level up to 20, and each level up earns the hero two ability points to put towards several different ability paths. As you put points into these ability paths, not only do the stats related to that path go up (increased health, increased ranged damage, etc.), but you also unlock new abilities every five or so points down that path.

The thing is, you can’t go down every ability path so you have to choose how you want your hero to grow. Each hero can generally go down a health/defense path, a ranged weapon path, a melee path, or a mana/special ability based path. That means there’s a lot of customization out there. You can have certain squads play completely differently than the way they start, having ranged based squads shift over to being melee proficient or health/defensive based squads becoming very strong with mana/special ability based skills.

Loot
The experience points in the game lend Dawn of War II an RPG-like feel, but the loot makes it even more so. Loot in the game is randomly dropped off enemies, and is also randomly generated as rewards for completing each mission. Loot can range from normal to green to blue, with blue being the most rare. The equipment that you find can range from 1-2 handed ranged weapons, 1-2 handed melee weapons, armor, accessories, and items only your commander can use.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be unique epic loot in the game, nor can you trade it with other players so it isn’t exactly central to the gameplay. It’s a nice touch but by the end when you’re at level 20 and every mission is offering a randomly generated level 20 blue item, you no longer care too much.

Days
The campaign in Dawn of War II takes place in days. While there’s no actual deadline in terms of number of days you need to take to defeat the game, the days themselves are important due to the way the game handles saving: only after a mission. There is no manual saving/loading, and whether you beat a mission or lose during one, that generally means a day has elapsed and the game has saved. For each mission you get a particular score, and scoring highly on a mission will sometimes allow you one or two more mission deployments on that same day. This can be a big deal after I explain the signficance of the days.

As you progress through the game, there are generally storyline missions that are always around until you complete them. But along the way, there may be optional missions such as defeating certain “high value” enemies or defending regions. Each of those has a time limit of about three to five days. If you don’t complete those optional missions, something negative generally happens. In the case of defending regions, if you don’t go to the region’s aid before the time is up, you will lose that region’s special abilities. The more regions you “own” on a planet means you can use more special abilities like artillery, deployable turrets, and invulnerability shields.

Finally, as you get midway into the game, the alien race known as the Tyranids make their full apperance. Since this species generally eats through anything and can eventually consume planets, it’s possible to actually lose a whole planet if you don’t spend time defending against their invasion and they take over every region on the planet. Apparently once that happens, you lose access to that planet forever, which sound like pretty serious consequences.

Multiplayer
The best part about multiplayer I would say is that the entire campaign can be fully played co-op with another player. Just invite a friend in, and the two of you each command two squads as you go through the whole game, playing off the host’s game save.

The adversarial modes in the game are more of a mixed bag and not for everyone. I didn’t really enjoy it as I prefer base building and engaging opponents as the primary objectives for RTS games and I’m guessing that perhaps fans of the first Dawn of War game may have a hard time with it as well. There are simply inherent limitations on multiplayer that came with the way the game was designed , making multiplayer not as enjoyable as it could be for fans of the series. But for those with an open mind and a fondness for capture and hold type gameplay that is more prevalent in FPS games these days, you may very well enjoy the multiplayer.

To start, each player can choose a race and one of three unique heroes for that race, with each hero playing differently from the others due to special abilities and such. The main mode generally has two teams of up to three players competing to capture and hold important points to reduce their opponent’s tickets from 500 to 0. There are also other capturable points on the map, allowing the team holding these points to earn money and power, which in turn allow them to buy squads. As you gain more money and power, you can buy better equipment for your hero and unlock tier 2 and tier 3 units. The hero unit also levels up by gaining experience from enemy kills, so by the end of a match, you’ll most likely see high level heroes with strong gear accompanied by huge tier 3 units walking around. It’s not a bad mode for people that prefer tactics over strategy.

In between missions, you can view the map to determine which regions you need to deploy to.

Achievement Design
Two thirds of Dawn of War II’s Achievements can be earned through the campaign, while the final third is only available from multiplayer. Again, I will reiterate here that I have never really been a fan of multiplayer Achievements, as they generally force you to either play a certain way or others to play a certain way rather than how you would usually play just to get the Achievements. Dawn of War II is no different.

Some of the single player Achievements were innovative, and I was relieved that the Achievements for beating the game on each difficulty were stackable. What annoyed me though was that there was one Achievement where you had to capture every resource node in the game, and while it’s generally easy to capture resources by going into the region, there was one region I was never able to enter after the beginning of the game. The only way I was able to get the Achievement was to start the game over after I beat it the first time and not make the same mistake.

The only way you can play as the advanced Eldar race is in multiplayer.

Final Thoughts
While Dawn of War II differs from its predecessor in many ways, it’s still a quite an enjoyable game in its own right. The campaign is the biggest reason to play the game, and I would recommend playing it at a relatively high difficulty level since the lack of saving anytime you want makes any skirmish you participate have consequences (unlike the brainless reloading everytime something goes wrong). The shift from RTS to more “RPG” style gameplay made the game difficult to implement multiplayer for, but Relic has done an interesting job that may have certain types of players enjoying it.

I rate the game a B+. I played the campaign for over 40 hours alone, which goes to show how much I liked it. Of course, there are things that I felt could have been better and raised this game’s score. First of all, the general premise has a bit of repetitiveness to it. Whether it’s defending the lands you own over and over again to mostly every level having you capture objectives on the map before fighting a boss, those that are looking for more “adventure” will not really get it. This is honestly the first RTS game that I’ve played where this is actual “grinding” – replaying the same levels over and over to either gain experience or loot. Whether you enjoy that or not is up to the player, but I can’t help but feel like at least half of my 40 hours playing was just grinding. I also would have liked to see some sort of campaign from the other 3 races’ perspectives, but I won’t fault the game too much for that.

It seems like in order to fully enjoy Dawn of War II, there’s a ton of hoops to jump through: the willingness to have a Steam account, an Xbox Live account, the realization that Dawn of War II will not play like Dawn of War I, the understanding that the campaign is more like an RPG than traditional RTS missions, and the multiplayer is more like a FPS mode with RPG elements rather than straight up RTS. I feel like many of those hoops have scared off potential buyers to the game, but if you’re new to the series like I am, you may very well be happy with it if you know what you are getting yourself into.

Perhaps one of the best GBA games most people will never get to play?

Mother 3
On my new commute to work these days, I am now playing Mother 3, which is the sequel to Earthbound (Mother 2) here in the United States. Apparently, the game was never released in America due to several reasons such as it being a bit too controversial for children (it looks cute but its storyline is mature), too many potential copyright infringements (the music team behind the Earthbound games love the Beatles, among other things), and it is a Gameboy Advance game that released in Japan when the DS already took off in the States. Suffice to say, the only way to actually play this game is by downloading a fan translation that patches the Japanese version of the game. It’s a stellar translation and Nintendo isn’t telling the group to cease and desist because the company decided not to release the game in the US, so no one holds the copyright. The translation group has even gone one step further and put together a 240 page full color guidebook with tons of original art and is selling it for $20. I almost want to buy the guidebook just to support their effort, but the thing about guidebooks with me is if I buy one, then I will have to depend on it as a crutch the rest of the game since I’ll worry I’ll miss something so I’d rather just play it freely. Plus, I’m in the subway and I’d be a little embarrassed reading a strategy guide and playing the game at the same time on my way to work.

Dawn of War II
I spent most of this week’s gaming time finishing off the campaign for Dawn of War II, but I haven’t had a chance to try out multiplayer enough to warrant a review. I’m surprised though that Steam is telling me I’ve already logged 40 or so hours into this game, so suffice to say, the game is pretty lengthy on the hardest difficulty. Review will definitely be out next week as this weekend should give me some extra needed time to spend with the multiplayer.

Defense Grid
Been playing this a bit this week since it’s on sale for $5 and I’m actually enjoying it a lot. It does a great job in the first few levels of keeping things simple and slowly adding more enemy types and towers to use. I also like that there’s a feature for speeding up the enemy movement, so you’re not always sitting around waiting when you don’t have enough to make/upgrade towers. Great deal at $5 and I’ll try to write some detailed impressions up for it next week.

Starcraft
Starcraft rounds out my heavy PC gaming week, as I’ve gotten back into the PC gaming side pretty strong thanks to Steam’s sale, Dawn of War II, and the impending Starcraft II release. Now that the Starcraft II beta is imminent, I’m continuing to play the game to brush up on its mechanics. Having completed the Terran campaign, I’m now knee deep in the Zerg campaign. All these memories keep coming back as I play this game – one of my more memorable aspects of playing Zerg that I got to experience again is having 4 Hatcheries next to each other and spawning a full hotkey of units at once.

Apparently it’s PC gaming week for me this week, as I’ m in the midst of moving and my 360 is packed so I’ve spent my hours this week with the following:

Starcraft – Believe it or not, I have gone back and installed Starcraft and Brood War on my PC. (I also re-installed Diablo II and Warcraft III as well, but for now I’m just sticking with Starcraft.) After watching the new Starcraft II Battle Report that was released recently, I’ve gotten totally excited about the game and decided I want to play through Starcraft’s campaign missions  to “get back into the game” before the inevitable Starcraft II beta releases in the months to come (which I hope I get picked for). It still holds up today, and I’m already almost done with the Terran campaign. Man those siege tanks bring back memories. I don’t know what it is, but building clumps of a siege tank, a turret, and a bunker full of marines really makes me happy. It doesn’t look like siege tanks are in Starcraft II though, which make me quite sad.

Dawn of War II – I’m really enjoying the campaign mode for the game. I think I’m almost done, but I must have spent over a dozen hours of gaming already since I’m playing at the hardest difficulty. And it is honestly pretty difficult. But after playing Starcraft some and realizing that there’s no difficulty setting in the campaign, the difficulty of Dawn of War II was a welcome change as now I’m actually being challenged rather than steamrolling the AI. This is the first game that has challenged me in a while – maybe not as crazily as Left 4 Dead on Expert, but this is a game I do need my full concentration for. Hopefully I get around to the multiplayer at some point next week.

I started playing Dawn of War II this week, a PC RTS/role playing game hybrid that is turning out to be pretty good. This is the first PC game that I’ve started seriously playing ever since Blizzard’s Warcraft III & World of Warcraft, so it’s actually a little bit jarring coming back to keyboard and mouse after years of using the 360 controller. I mentioned last week that I was having trouble playing Left 4 Dead on the PC using a mouse and keyboard after being so accustomed to the controller, but luckily, Dawn of War II keeps things pretty simple. Read on for my thoughts on this PC game that is the first Windows game that has Achievements and uses the Xbox Live matchmaking servers.

I’m a fan of Relic, but more of a recent fan after having played through the original Company of Heroes game a few years back. I haven’t played it in a long time, but from what I remember, the game really shook up both the RTS and WWII genres. Company of Heroes has gone on to release two more sequels, and Relic is also behind the first Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War. That game was so popular that it had three expansions. I bought the first few Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War games, but never got a chance to really get into them.

Controversy
When I heard that Dawn of War II was going to take the best of Company of Heroes and Dawn of War, plus be a Windows Live game, I decided to pick it up. Dawn of War II has seen a lot of polarizing opinions, mostly due to its implementation logistics and its gameplay changes. The first real issue that people have with it is that it authenticates through Steam. Steam is probably the most popular PC game digital distribution system out these days, and I already have several games on it. I’m a big fan of Steam, since it keeps track of any PC games I’ve purchased on a particular account, and I can log onto that account anywhere and redownload games I’ve already bought like Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2. In fact, when I got my retail copy of Dawn of War II, I didn’t have to even put the disc into the PC – I just typed the CD key into Steam and it started downloading the game. Seems almost silly to own the physical copy now, but I guess we are on the cusp of physical to digital gaming. So honestly, the Steam hurdle was no problem to me but for those that aren’t on Steam, I can see it as being annoying since you’d have to sign up an account and download the application just to play the game. But honestly, I would argue that if you’re a PC gamer (you must be if you’re trying to play Dawn of War II) it would be in your best interest to install Steam.

The other big logistical hurdle that is more of a dealbreaker to some than Steam is that it requires you to have an Xbox Live account. Back when Windows was rebranded as a gaming platform, Microsoft decided to try to handle gaming the same way, and charge certain games under the Windows for Gaming platform $50 a year for multiplayer like the Xbox 360. That didn’t fly well at all, and ever since then, the ‘Windows Live’ initiative has killed interest in Live features for PC gaming. Microsoft has had to backpedal and now make Windows Live free, since PC gamers were not prepared to pay for multiplayer when they never have. Fortunately for me, I have an Xbox Live account so being able to log into it on the PC to play the game was really no hassle to me. It’s kind of neat to be on a PC game and access the Xbox dashboard from my game by hitting the Home key. But I can obviously see the problems people may have with it if they’re just PC gamers and don’t want to have to deal with Live features or the matchmaking. Luckily for me, I had no problems with these two hurdles and have actually gotten a chance to play the single player for several hours.

Single-player impressions
Dawn of War II takes a serious departure from the first Dawn of War game (and consequently, practically all other RTS games) by getting rid of base building and unit production. The game focuses solely on you controlling 4 squads consisting of 1-4 men each. The game looks like a RTS game, but plays more like a Diablo/RPG game. It’s almost like playing as solely the heroes in Warcraft III, with sidekicks for each hero as you go from stage to stage killing enemies and bosses to gain experience and loot. Your heroes level up, and you can pick particular skill trees you want them to go down, and enemies randomly drop loot that has different rarity levels. So yeah, it’s a great combination of games that I enjoy, but for fans of the original Dawn of War games, they will obviously be disappointed. There’s not really much strategy behind the gaming now since you’re set with particular heroes, but in a sense, it has more of a tactical perspective due to you focusing on a few smaller squads. It really is Company of Heroes + Dawn of War, or more accurately, Company of Heroes in a Dawn of War skin but with Diablo loot and skill trees. That works for me.

While there are several races in the game, it’s sad that you’re only able to play as the human race (Starcraft II?! Dang it what kind of trend is this…) but the campaign is pretty good. I’m not really a huge fan of the artwork and character models in the Dawn of War universe (too blocky for me), but the storyline and stuff works. It’s pretty cool that you travel to different planets trying to take over areas or defend areas from other races attacking – a lot more indepth than any other RTS campaign I’ve played. The only issue is the level themselves get a bit derivative. Sometimes you’ll be sent back to the same level you beat earlier, but for a different threat, and while the levels themselves are quite big, it seems somewhat cheap. The gameplay itself can sometimes be a bit mundane too, since you’re fighting wave after wave of enemies where you pretty much do the same thing every time – and this is because you don’t have control over what units you’re making.

What you do have control over though, is what skills and items each of your “heroes” can use, which gives it a bit of variety. Units can use skills and items like warcries, deploying turrets, artillery strikes, etc. but most have only limited use so you need to plan when to use them. There’s also a big cover mechanic in the game that seems borrowed from Company of Heroes, and while it worked well in that game, it seems a bit odd in this one to see an insect-like alien race taking cover behind a fence and rocks and shooting you with projectiles. In any case, it works fine from a gameplay standpoint. Being so used to the 360 controller made playing with the keyboard somewhat strange at first with the hotkeys. I remember in Starcraft and Warcraft III there’d be hotkeys to make units, use abilities, etc., and the key itself generally corresponded to a particular word that had to do with the unit/skill. But in Dawn of War II, using a particular item has no relevance to the key, and I’ll find that while the first ability for every unit is the letter Q, the next hotkey for using an item will differ for every hero, whether it’s an M, an I, a P, etc. It would have been much easier if the next items/skills for every hero were simply lined up, like Q, W, E, R, T on the keyboard. Making me look for the right key on the right side of the keyboard when the rest of the left side is completely empty just seems like bad planning, but honestly it’s not a big deal. I just notice it more since I’m used to the 360 controller where everything is mapped so neatly and compactly. Dawn of War II’s keyboard shortcut mapping seems lazy and bloated!

One of the major deals in Dawn of War II, which surprised me at first, is that there’s no saving at all during missions. You can only Save and Quit in between missions, or simply Quit your current mission. Most PC gamers will know that in any FPS or RTS game, you can save before some boss or something and then if you die, you can just reload that save. Not so in Dawn of War II. In this game if you die at a boss or anywhere on the level, you will get an emergency extraction and pulled out of the level, and then you will have to play it again but an in-game day has progressed. I’m not sure how the days work in the game, as I’ve yet to play it to completion, but I actually like that you can’t save in-missions. It makes playing them a bit more skillful, since you need to actually worry about dying and planning accordingly. What sucks is I’m playing it on the most difficult level, and I have to admit that it sometimes is no walk in the park. I have had to restart missions because I have been overwhelmed. But honestly, I’m happy that it’s challenging me so much.

Parting Thoughts
I haven’t had a chance to play the multiplayer yet, but from what I’ve heard, it is a bit derivative since while the campaign is enjoyable, there doesn’t seem to be much depth for online games when you can’t make bases and units. I’ll get to it eventually and hopefully by then I’ll be able to put out a full review on the game. There’s also co-op, and it looks like by playing with someone else each of you gets to control two squads, instead of one player controlling all four.

I like the game a lot though so far, and am actually interested in getting right back into the campaign as soon as possible. For those that enjoy classic PC games like Diablo and Company of Heroes, you should definitely check this game out, provided you are willing to get past the Steam and Windows Live signups. The campaign alone has had me pretty engrossed, and I’ve stayed up late a couple nights already just because I’ve been having so much fun.

To celebrate the new free Scout update on the PC version of Team Fortress II, Valve has put it on sale for $9.99 on Steam from now until Friday. This new update brings new weapons, maps, and 35 Achievements for the Scout class alone! Expect others classes to follow. Also of note is the new Dawn of War II game on sale for $35.90 as part of GoGamer’s Madness sale. Ugh…my backlog now extends to PC games too -_-

Team Fortress II [$9.99 Steam]
Warhammer 40k Dawn of War II [$35.90 w/ free shipping GoGamer]

Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 – cmfl3x and I have continued to make our way through the campaign, just finishing off the last two missions on the Allied campaign late last night. We must have retried each of those missions 3-4 times, as it gets pretty hard on Hard difficulty. The last Allied mission is rough – there’s a timer and we ended up destroying the last building when the timer hit 0:00 (maybe it even hit -0:01 heh). It was funny because both the Victory and then the Defeat videos started playing one right after another, but luckily we got the Victory endscreen. Talk about a close call!

Left 4 Dead – Just when I thought I was done with it, the PC version has to go on sale and I ended up picking it up. Expect a write-up with my thoughts comparing it to the 360 version at some point.

Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War 2 – Never considered picking this up since it’s a PC game, but the fact that it’s tied into the Live system and has its own Achievements has me interested. Maybe I’ll wait for a price drop.

Onechanbara: Bikini Samurai Squad – Campy Japanese zombie beat-em-up playing as a girl in a bikini sounds like it could be enjoyable as I like zombies and I like Japanese developed games. A girl in bikini doesn’t hurt either but since my wife may not like the idea of seeing me play as a scantily clad woman throughout the game I’ll hold off on this one for now.

Sins of a Solar Empire – Picked it up since it was on sale at Best Buy this week. I think it got lots of 2008 PC game of the year awards, so I’m curious to check it out. Supposedly it’s a cross between an RTS and a Civilization game, but in space. I’m not the biggest space strategy gamer, but maybe this one will turn out ok for me.

I recently decided to give Warhammer Online a try since I needed something to do while grinding the 56,000 kills or whatever in Left 4 Dead. I didn’t think I’d get back into the MMORPG scene after World of Warcraft, but figured the $10 price I paid for the game was not too big of a deal as long as I didn’t continue the subscription after the first free month. Granted, I only leveled up to rank 6 and never saw the end game but if you’re curious how it is, check out my impressions. In many cases I will be using World of Warcraft as a comparison, since they’re actually quite similar.

The first thing that sort of confused me was the number of classes in the game. There seems to be a lot more than in WoW, and I had no idea what was up. There are six races, and 3-4 classes per race. The classes do fall under four particular types: tank, melee DPS, ranged DPS, and healer, but it seems that each race’s classes had different skills. For example, the dwarves’ ranged DPS class is the Engineer, while the humans’ is the wizard. I guess there’s no differentiation between magic damage and physical projectile damage.

The races on the Order side include the Dwarves, the Empire (good humans), and High Elves. Destruction side has the Greenskins (orcs/goblins), Chaos (evil humans), and Dark Elves. Having a 60 female mage in WoW as my main, I figured I’d roll the same class in Warhammer Online just to make easier comparisons. While WoW’s graphics were a little more cartoony and comical, Warhammer Online’s classes seemed to be more gritty and realistic. The Destruction side was definitely more evil, so I figured I’d go with the evil Dark Elf Sorceress. After all, it looked like many of the servers in the game were imbalanced in favor of the Destruction side, so I might as well follow the flock since I don’t expect to be here long.

My computer is pretty old. It’s a P4 with one gig of RAM and a GeForce 6800 (256 megs of RAM). I had no problem playing WoW but it seems that it chugs a bit with Warhammer Online. I can’t run WO in a windowed mode since it stutters far too much but WoW was fine in a window for me. The thing is, it doesn’t look that much better than WoW did. Maybe because many of the settings were turned to the low end to accomodate my rig, but I actually preferred both the look and speed of WoW to WO. If I had a better system, I’m guessing WO could have looked nicer.But I’ve never really cared too much for graphics, or else I’d have already bought the next $500 video card.

After getting started and accepting the first few quests, here is what I discovered. The first thing I thought was pretty neat was all of the hand-holding for each quest assigned to you. I’ve been skipping quest texts since WoW, so I wasn’t going to stop now with WO. There have been times in WoW when I would still have to go back and read quests though, just because not everything would be clear when I skipped through everything. But in WO, everything is quite skippable. This is because when you open the map, the region the quest is in is highlighted for you, so you know exactly where to go. And I’m not talking about the huge zones like in WoW, but just a region of the map that’s maybe the size of Goldshire in WoW. It’s even better when you have like 5-6 quests at a time, because then you can see when multiple quests overlap in an area, and you can be more efficient in your questing.

The questing itself, at least on the low levels, was ultimately no different than WoW. You pull mobs to fight you and if you get a couple guys on you, it’s certainly possible to get killed. I guess I’ve gotten used to action games as of late where I would be able to take on several enemies at once, but in WO, when 3 enemies are attacking you of equal level, you’re basically dead. If you die, you come back to life right away but have a rez sickness similar to WoW but you actually spawn. There’s no ghost form like in WoW where you can run back to your corpse – you’re automatically resurrected with the rez sickness but are able to pay a healer to get rid of it.

One of the reasons I liked being a mage in WoW was more in response to all the downtime – you’d have to eat and drink after every fight to restore your health and mana, and it was handy to be a mage since you could make your own food and water. In WO, this isn’t necessary as it seems that all classes automatically regenerate health and mana when not fighting. It’s much more convenient, as it seems like everyone is basically regaining health/mana between fights in WO without having to sit and eat/drink.

Also new to WO that I didn’t see in WoW was public quests. These were simply optional zones where everyone in the area could participate. One quest may be to have 100 High Elves killed, and anyone in the area killing them would count towards the total. Once the 100 are reached, the top 3 contributers to the kills would get a random probability to get the top rewards with the higher spots having a higher chance. I didn’t even know where the treasure was the first time, since I was the top contributor of a public quest and it said I won but I was back in town. Apparently the chest was at the public quest zone, and I couldn’t make it back to claim my top prize (it was another bag to carry items) before it despawned and the public quest reset for the next people.

This may have already been implemented in the current version of WoW with Achievements and all, but WO has a pretty extensive list of Titles you can unlock for your character. If you kill a certain number of a particular enemy, you are awarded the ability to give yourself that title so it prominently displays with your name when others look at you. There are even Titles that get unlocked that are more shameful, like when you get killed by enemies and the like.

Finally, I also got to experience the PvP a little bit in my time too. It’s basically the same as in WoW – you queue up for a battleground and you just go about questing on your own until enough players are collected on both sides and the match starts. The battleground I played was a simple domination gametype where there were two nodes that had to be captured and held by either side to score points (with 10 players per side). Once one side captures both, they get points and the two nodes go back to neutral and both teams battle again to get them. To me it seemed like a big zerg-fest (but I guess that’s how it was in WoW’s Alterac Valley also) where people would just run in and I wasn’t having too much fun. I think I was level 6 and the range went up to maybe level 11 or something, and obviously I couldn’t take on those guys. I went after the level 2 guys heh. My team completely dominated the Order side, and I think that it’s usually like that on every server since the Destruction outnumber the Order. What’s neat though is that I think you gain experience playing the battlegrounds too, so it’s entirely possible to level up to max by simply playing battlegrounds all day and skipping the questing.

The game was actually not bad. It was a little rough graphically (moreso because my machine is old) and the world doesn’t seem as charming as it did in WoW but it’s still much easier to get into than say, Everquest or Final Fantasy XI. I liked that there was even more handholding in this game than in WoW, and that game already panders a lot to casuals. The biggest problem with WO though is that it didn’t differentiate itself enough from WoW for me. I played it for several hours, and then actually had an urge to go back to WoW. With the Lich King expansion out now, that’s obviously not a good thing for Warhammer Online if it’s getting people to go play the competitor’s MMORPG. Maybe the only thing that can stop WoW now is another MMORPG by Blizzard…