Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning

Graphics

Developing an MMO must be a hard job becaue you need to make sure your game will run on the maximum number of systems to allow even the most oblivious PC user to play, but you also need to have at least a little bit of graphical advantage over older competitors. Age of Conan struck the balance too far towards the graphically intensive, and its low user population and recent realm merging is likely caused by this.

Warhammer Online though seems to strike that fine balance between looking good, and being playable on even the most junky of systems. Admittedly it’s not going to win any beauty contests, but characters are well detailed when set to high detail, certainly more so than in other fantasy MMOs, and the environment is similarly well detailed. You even get full character shadows, although only on your avatar – everyone else just gets the standard shadow blob beneath them.

Sadly there are some blatant omissions, namely the support for any anti aliasing or anisotropic filtering; meaning that general image quality in the game is very limited, although this means the game runs extremely smoothly on a whole range of hardware, and an 8800 GT was more than able to run the game maxed out at normal desktop resolutions.


The three pre-sets focus mostly on disabling lighting and draw distance, with the core texture quality unchanged from the very lowest to the very highest. At minimum settings the game is still playable, although the improvement in draw distance and shadows at high is certainly worth it if your hardware can manage, which is almost certainly should as EA lists the minimum system specs as just a 128MB Shader Model 2.0 graphics card, or even an Intel GMA X4500 integrated graphics chip!

If you want to go manual on your settings, there really isn't much to play with to squeeze extra performance out of the game, and only lighting, draw distance and shadows are manually configurable, although this does have the benefit of making the game very mainstream friendly.

However, we can’t help but feel that graphically Warhammer Online has missed an opportunity to put one over on its competition. World of Warcraft is getting on for four years old now, and rumblings of a significant graphical update have been floating around for a while, with Blizzard itself admitting that it’s on the to-do list. In comparison to Blizzard’s world beater, WOAoR doesn’t really offer a great deal more graphically other than more character and scenery detail, and it’s certainly not going to convert many users on its graphics alone.