Why I am looking forward to Warhammer Online Age of Reckoning

I am very excited for the Warhammer Online Age of Reckoning release in a couple weeks. I have been a closed beta tester for over a year and like what I have seen from the game. I have played quite a few MMO's, although I am not quite the veteran others are. I have played WoW, COH/COV, LOTRO, Perfect World, DAoC and beta tested Tabula Rasa. I feel like Warhammer has a lot of features that make it stick out from the other games I have played.

1. Being able to gain XP and level through Quests and PVP. To me it's hard to under estimate the freedom this brings to the game. You can get to the level cap of 40 anyway you want. If immersion into story line and quests is your thing that is the path you can take. War does a great job with their story lines from what I have seen in the beta. You quickly feel like you are being drawn into a War effort, from collecting ammo for giant siege weapons to finding and killing spies. The hatred for the opposite faction is strong among the NPC's and it helps draw you in. If quests aren't your thing and you just want to go pwn some noobs, then you can hop right into RVR combat and level your character that way. Or if your like me and want to use a combo of both to keep things fresh than thats an option to. It's great to not have a linear path to the level cap, you can get there anyway you choose.

The Leveling guild is a big draw for me. In most games your guilds just becomes a place to hang out and chat with your friends. Loyalty to a guild is always fleeting. People jump to the one that can help them get their epic item the fastest. In War, guilds themselves level, unlocking abilities for the guild along the way. This combined with the coordination it will take to lay siege to an enemy capital city, should return the days where people were loyal to their guilds and cared about working towards a common goal. This is something I have been missing in guilds lately and I hope it lives up to the hype.

3. I feel War has brought some innovations to the MMO genre that will most likely be copied by other games. First is Public Quests. The best way to describe these are Instances that take half the time and you don't have to wait around for a group for. Basically you stumble into an area and it has a public quest which is a three wave fight against npcs. Each wave is progressivly harder until the last wave unleashes a boss. Everyone in the area gets to take part and the boss drops a chest of loot. You get to roll on the items based on your contributions to the fight. I have to tell you from the beta these were a blast and there was never trouble enough players to complete the PQ. The other big innovation being the Tome Of Knowledge, basically this is a book you carry around the documents everything you do, see, and kill. It's great for information and there is a lot of cool achievements to unlock. It helps a lot with immersion into the world.

These things are what have drawn me to Warhammer and I hope will draw a good number of players. To be successful War doesn't have to be a WoW killer. I find it funny when people call games WoW killers. WoW is lightning in a bottle, it will never happen again, no MMO will have 10 million subscribers but plenty of games have carried on with 100,000- 500,000 subscribers, some even less. If War gets 1 million subscribers, which I think is more than possible than it will be the 2nd most successful game ever. There is never going to be another WoW, for a lot of reasons. I just hope Warhammer can live up to the my expectations and I am really looking forward to finding out and I hope many others join me.