Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Preview

EA Mythic’s Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is the subject of a brief hands-on preview over at IGN PC.

The demo let us play as the forces of destruction as we rampaged in an area called Troll Country, mainly because it was infested by dozens of trolls. Stopping by a destruction camp and talking to various NPCs, not surprisingly, gives you quests, and one of the nice things about the map system is that it highlights the quest range in red. So if you’re told to find the grave of some long lost hero, the map will give you a general area of where to search. Or if you have to kill X number of a certain creature and you can’t find the last one to kill, you’ll at least know the range of its boundaries, so you won’t go too far astray in search for it.

Since this was troll country, a lot of the quests involved killing trolls. One required our four-member party to knock off 12 trolls on a hill, but in the process of pursuing it we discovered a boss troll and a public quest, basically a way for different groups of strangers to join together in a cooperative battle. In this case, the public quest required killing 75 trolls to be able to engage the boss troll, a very dangerous and difficult high-level opponent. Inflict enough damage on him and he’ll pull back and call in some mid-level henchmen that you must defeat in order to engage the boss troll in a final battle. Take him down and the loot system basically ranks participants in order of contribution, and rewards are customized for each character class. For instance, you can get an option of loot drops, but everything you can select is something that your character can actually use; if you’re a spellcaster you won’t pick between warrior armor and weapons.