Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning

PvP, RvR, BRB

Warhammer Online’s real ace up its sleeve though is the seamless integration of realm VS realm combat into the game world. You’ll first encounter the system at around level six or seven, with a town or fortress in the game world split into multiple objectives for the opposing factions to fight over.

Once you enter it, you become flagged for RvR combat, and are thrown into the meat grinder of axes, swords and spells as the game world becomes a PvP scenario in itself, with factions receiving bonuses in the surrounding areas when all the objectives are held.

There’s much more emphasis on the RvR combat than there is in say World of Warcraft, with plenty of PvP based quests and you even gain XP from slaying members of the opposing faction, so much so that if you really wanted to you could level to 40, the game’s maximum level cap, just playing PvP.

The idea of the game world RvR combat is that the game world evolves into a ever changing war, with the conflict swinging back and forth between factions and over contested territory on a daily basis, culminating in an instanced assault on a particular race’s capital city, the first of which happened just a few days ago.


Sadly, while I was aware of the conflict going on thanks to occasional glimpses at my world map, I never felt more than a single character levelling up, and the wider conflict didn’t really seem to influence my experience of the game too much, other than occasionally ganking/getting ganked by members of the opposition, although much of the late game content does hinge on the ongoing war and large scale PvP.

In fact, PvP is so integral to the gameplay in WOAoR that unlike other MMOs, where you can choose to either join a PvE (player versus environment) or PvP server, in WOAoR there’s only a PvP option – you have to fight other players, and for many that’s going to be a turn off – no one likes getting ganked by a group of five opposition five levels higher than you after all (especially if you’re far from a resurrection point).


It’s a shame that for a game where PvP is so integral to the later parts of it, we saw so little of it in our time playing WOAoR. Other than occasionally bumping into a member of an opposing faction, the first RvR area and a couple of PvP scenarios, we didn’t really see a lot of the PvP potential of the game. And when we were in PvP content, it seemed a little disorganised and messy and was decided mostly by sheer force of numbers – a far cry from the organisation needed for an instance run in WoW.