Warhammer...Biotch!


NextGen Player Feature Article
By Nymity

Spoiler Alert: Female Gamer Talking – She probably won’t be discussing the same things you are interested in. Deal with it!

Warhammer: Age of Reckoning

A new MMORPG is out and the servers are filling up fast.

Let me walk you through our household character creation process.

Husband – I’m not going to play any goody-goody races! I want to be a Greenskin. Chaos rules.

Me – Okaaaay, but are the evil females ugly? I don’t want an ugly character.

Husband – You can be a Dark Elf. They’re sexy and I don’t think they’ve invented clothes yet.

Me – I’m fine with no clothes, but I do get armour right?

Husband – Yesss.

Result? I’m a dark elf or Druchii with Witch Elf skills, the equivalent of a rogue. And, since they run around in next-to-nothing and they are very sexy looking, there are an awful lot of them at the moment. Unfortunately that means that there are a high percentage of men behind those avatars, who can’t think up a better character name than Fivedollabj. I’m soooo happy =/

Having pre-ordered through direct2drive, so that I could start playing last week, I had to reset my account key after the full launch on Friday. It might have been clever to read all the way through the instructions they sent me -- instead I buzzed my husbands cell phone and begged him to walk me through this strange new process. Techie husbands are the best!

So let’s get down to the game. I’m now rank 10 so I have a lot of experience to share.

Of course the focus of Warhammer, is team RVR … that’s when you and another player are involved in killing each other’s characters for the good of the realm. Specifically it is Order vs Chaos. I have never been a big PVP (player vs player) gamer. That may be because at heart I just want everyone to love me.

Warhammer eases you into the idea that RVR & PVP are fun by giving you XP for your time spent killing each other. Woot! The systemauto-groups, for people who don’t already have their own group, and auto-balances the player levels so that anyone can play together.

This was so easy to manage that I’ve already killed 13 other players! Yay! This is of course no comparison to my husband’s 300+ kill log but it’s more than I’ve ever killed before and I’m damn proud.

The only problem that still remains is my scream. When I get hit by players in-game, I scream. When I scream, my husband has a near death experience that costs him at least 1 day of life. I’m having so much fun that I don’t care (although I may increase his life insurance coverage).

Warhammer also promotes team play during PVE (player vs environment). There are public quests where you and anyone else who happens to be in that area can work together as individuals to achieve the various steps in the quest. Along the way, each person working on those goals earns influence.

Once the quest finale has been reached, the game makes two calculations:

1 – how much effort did you put into all stages of the quest, and
2 – a random dice roll.

These two numbers are added up and a loot bag is assigned to you. You get to choose 1 item from your loot bag of 6 or 7 items, 1 of which is cash. There is no loot stealing! No more 1 good piece of loot to divvy up between 6 cranky people! The worst problem I’ve seen is to have so many people helping on the quest that the value of the loot decreases (because of the lower difficulty of completing the quest). But, you can do the public quest as many times as you want to; to try for better loot, a greater portion of the work.

I haven’t talked about influence, renown or what you can buy with them and I haven’t touched on crafting.

Let me know if you are interested and I’ll try to write more.

Happy gaming to you!

- Nymity