Ever since I started playing Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning with the intent of reviewing it in mind, I struggled with how I’d tackle it, since MMOs (as well as episodic games) are far different beasts than your average gaming fare.

This is largely because they’re the very definition of moving targets-– constantly evolving and morphing to correct missteps as best as they can. Take a gander at any review from World of Warcraft at release, and tell me how applicable it is for the World of Warcraft that we have now.

Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning owes a lot to World of Warcraft. To be the facetious, sadistic human being I am, I’ve been likening it to World of Warcraft 2.0. When questioning WAR’s populace about how they felt it stacked up to the behemoth that is WoW, the most coherent response I got was, “[World of Warcraft] felt like a job, this game blows it away in every aspect.”

When I asked the counterpart of that question in the counterpart game, I was met with an equal amount of coherence.

Warhammer Online owes a lot to what Blizzard has built up in the past 4 years, and bears a striking resemblance to World of Warcaft, but is that really a bad thing? The formula has already beckoned 13 million players in, and many of the ones I personally know don’t partake in any other sort of videogaming.

Having spent quite a bit of time with both, I think WAR may be the first to actually give WoW a run for its money, in terms of quality, if nothing else. Blizzard has done great things for PvE (Player versus Environment) combat– creating unique, intense encounters that seem almost insurmountable without a helping hand.

What few dungeon instances there are in WAR, cannot hold a candle the downright science and clockwork that Blizzard has gotten to through years of practice. Thankfully, PvE wasn’t EA Mythic’s ultimate focus all along: PvP (Player versus Player) combat.

Throughout WAR’s development we were told we’d experience a world with a constant full-scale war. Coining the term RvR (Realm versus Realm) combat back in the days of Dark Age of Camelot (EA Mythic’s previous MMORPG), the idea of RvR is that you and your faction will be deadlocked in battle with a common enemy.

These battles take place virtually everywhere in the overworld, in objective-driven battlefields, point-based scenarios, and campaigns, which are generally large-scale battles that involve attempting to capture an opponent’s capital city.

Smartly, there are checks and balances in place so that a high-level, fully decked out sadistic dude won’t ruin your play session. A good example is that the very same high-level player will be polymorphed into a chicken after stepping into a zone predetermined to be too low for him to walk through with evil intent.

At the same time, it’s a game that centralizes on PvP, and you should expect to have a play session or two where you’ll be trying to fend off a cretin who’s made it his goal for the next hour or so to make your in-game life hell.

With a level cap of 40, Warhammer Online has two factions with three races in each, with a multitude of classes within each representing a different archetype. Archetypes are one of two DPS (Damage Per Second) classes, Healer, or a Tank (a player that’s meant to be in the thick of it). For the uninitiated and utterly lost, this may be a little tough to follow. For convenience I made a table to make it a bit more understandable:

An innovation in WAR that I really fell in love with was the Tome of Knowledge. It serves as an encyclopedia about the Warhammer universe and your adventures in it. In addition, it also serves as a repository of information of your specific individual progress in-game, including things you’ve met, seen, discovered, killed, overcame, and achieved. That in conjunction with a mini-map that did an almost inconceivable amount of keeping me on track kept me from having to constantly Alt+Tab out of game to look something up on a wiki.

That wouldn’t have been too fun of an experience anyhow, considering how taxing WAR is on my 8800GTS-powered computer. It’s not taxing without good reason, though– with settings cranked to the max, I found WAR to be aesthetically and technically more pleasing to the eye than many other games that have thousands in-game at any point of the day.

Although it’s impossible to tell what the future will hold for Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning without my handy-dandy crystal ball, if its evolution from Beta until retail release is any indication, it’ll be around for a long time to come. If it’s not in direct competition with World of Warcraft, I feel it’ll definitely be mentioned in the same breath.