Warhammer Online redux

Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning was released last month and I feel I've now had a fair period of time to play the game. But to be fair, it seems that the game world itself is really empty. You very rarely meet people in the open, which makes it very hard to get a couple of people together for a Public Quest.

Apparently everyone is hiding in the so-called Scenarios, WAR's version of WoW battlegrounds. And it seems they are there for a reason: leveling in scenarios is a lot quicker than regular WoW-style questing. Which is a shame, because it's obvious that Mythic spent a lot of time polishing the outside world and dedicating a lot of time coming up with a good story for the many many quests, public and otherwise, in the game.

For the moment it seems I'm just playing a glorified version of Guild Wars. I'm sure most of you who actually play the game would excuse for thinking Tobold's post about WAR Light was real at first.

Anyway, the scenarios themselves are fun enough for a while. But unfortunately it seems that there's always one scenario at each tier that pops all the time, while the other two get played very rarely. So it does get boring after an hour or two.

I hope Mythic can address these issues, because there are a lot of nice features in the game and it shows a lot of promise. I'd hate for it to go down the same way as Age of Conan.

WoW patch 3.02 love

Preparation for the Wrath of the Lich King expansion has began for real now, with the arrival of patch 3.02 on the live servers. While I'm mostly joining my fellow warlocks in crying over the changes which hit the class quite hard, at least the patch brought something I really enjoy: achievements.

In an earlier post, I already commented that this new system would probably feed my OCD, and I was right. I especially enjoyed completing my "Classic Raider" achievement. Revisiting old instances is always nice, as long as it's a one-off. And for me personally, it was the first time I ever got past The Prophet Skeram in AQ40 and the first time I killed Nefarian. Nostalgia was never this good.

And of course completing achievements is a nice way of killing some time when you got nothing better to do. Obviously it's not going to last very long. I'm already running out of "easily achievable" achievements, but I'm having fun while it lasts.