Warhammer Online, eh?

To be brutally honest, I'm not particularly excited by Warhammer Online. I used to play the miniature based game when I was about 13 (though I played the sci-fi equivalent), so I do actually know the world quite well. It's certainly quite a detailed world, and it has probably more premise than most of the MMOs today are gifted with. It's just what they're doing with it that doesn't really convince me. Mostly because I think it looks horrible. I don't want to play a game that looks crap, basically. The screenshots I've seen really don't impress me. The two below, at full screen, both have horrible texturing. If you're going to the trouble of making an MMORPG, you may as well make it look nice.

There were concerns among the beta testers that the dwarves had an unfair advantage.

I'm also not sure I want to play a game that's so heavily geared around PvP. For the uninitiated, the idea of the game is to sack your opponent's city. You choose from one of three races on each side, and one of four classes in each of them (presumably they all play differently, giving you a total of 12 classes per side). You then engage your opposing faction - Empire vs Chaos, Dwarves vs Greenskins and High Elves vs Dark Elves - though you are allowed to move fronts and fight in a different area to your starting city. It's kinda like a big campaign, and the lines off battle ebb and flow depending on how well the PvP battles go. You also have integrated PvP and PvE on the same maps (on all the maps, possibly - I'm not sure on this). The combat seems interesting enough, though, as it's quite tactical and involves a lot of blocking. You can't move through someone, friend or foe, so the big tanks literally do act as meatshields for the casters and archers behind them. It could work very well, if done well, but I'm not convinced.

Van Helsing gets ready to make another god-awful movie.

What doesn't convince me is not the combat, however. I can't predict how that'll turn out, it could go either way. What concerns me is what you'll do in Warhammer Online. I get the impression the game may be very shallow, as PvP might get old quite quickly. I'm not sure what they're doing in the way of raid content or tradeskilling, if there is any. Their site is not as comprehensive, informative or well designed as the site for Age of Conan, which annoys me too. I might revisit this game in more detail when I get some gameplay movies of it, or a more comprehensive FAQ, but right now I see it as a gigantic Alterac Valley. And while I loved the concept of Alterac Valley, I wouldn't buy it as a stand-alone game.

Let's hope I'm wrong.

Hektor.