I'm assuming you've got some familiarity with MMORPGS here. While I'm not going to start using heavy lingo, I may toss around a few words that seem abstruse if you haven't at least played an MMO once before.

So, if you haven't been following Warhammer Online in any way, except for maybe seeing a preview about it here or there, then there's a couple key points to know about it: While it may look a lot like World of Warcraft, it's not exactly the same game. Think of it this way: If WoW is Rambo: First Blood, then WAR is Rambo IV. It's gritter and chocked full of the stuff people dug about the original Rambo but with its own crazy, awesome and bloody twists. The other thing to know is that while some people may tell you WAR is only about PvP, it's actually not. There's a lot of competitive play, certainly, but there's plenty of PvE (running around completing quests and such) content to be played.

Now here's the big secret: WAR's PvP is so accessible, creative and fun that you'll end up playing it regardless of your original intentions. You may not believe me now, but it happens to just about everyone who plays the game. What really gets you addicted to this whole thing is that you can level up by doing it. Not only that, but there's also an alternate set of PvP-centric levels to gain that give you more ways to design your character's abilities. Oh you also get good loot from PvP, too. It'd be fair to say that what WoW did for PvE gameplay, WAR does for PvP.


Even the PvE content has some awesome tricks up its sleeve, though. For starters you've got Public Quests. These are staged quests that are automatically given to any player upon entering a specific area. Sometimes you fight a huge dragon while other times you're raiding an enemy temple to stop some weird ritual. What makes these even cooler is the open party system that removes the whole annoying process of having to type "Looking For Group!" in a chat window. You can make your groups private but if you don't, anyone within the same zone as you can just pop in and start playing. It seems like a small thing, but it's actually pretty awesome.

What really makes WAR so great though is that it's removed a ton of dead weight from MMO design. You're gonna die a lot of in these games, it's just inevitable. So in this one when you die, there's no corpse run. There's also no item decay, either. Another example would be bag slots: If you've played any other MMO, you know that to expand your inventory space you've got to spend a ton of money buying extra bags. In WAR, you start with 32 bag slots and every time you've gained ten levels you'll automatically get an additional 16 bags. Finally, the huge grind you typically feel in an MMO isn't even noticeable in WAR, because you're always able to do something different. PvE questing, Public Quests, open world PvP, instanced objective-based PvP, crafting and gaining Xbox-style achievements are readily available at all times and make it so there are tons of ways to play at any given moment.

So what's so great about Warhammer Online? Almost everything, actually. That's not to say the game is flawless, but it's a sight better than any other MMO out there right now.