This month for MMO Co-Opportunities we’ll be looking at Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (henceforth simply WAR), developed by Mythic Entertainment who also created MMO Dark Age of Camelot. WAR recently celebrated its 2-year anniversary and is currently running a free 14-day re-enlistment for past subscribers (up until October 11) as well as offering an endless trial (play up to rank 10 for free forever), so I thought this would be a good time to jump back into the game for a little while to remind myself of what WAR had to offer in way of co-opportunities.
Like some other MMOs, there is a fairly even amount of concentration given to the PVP as well as PVE systems. Though there is much that can be said about the PVP, as usual we’re only going to focus on PVE cooperative aspects, as opposed to PVP team competition. Fortunately, WAR supports a good amount of co-op mechanics and game systems. The two we’ll be focusing on in this issue are Public Quests (PQs) and grouping/community tools.
WAR’s Public Quests are something pretty unique to the MMO market (though other developers have seemed to take notice, and are implementing similar systems in other MMOs, like Guild Wars 2), and they definitely have a great co-op feel to them. There are multiple PQs in every zone of varying difficulty which encourage players to get together (and they don’t even necessarily have to group if they don’t feel like it) and meet the objectives of three stages of increasing difficulty. Objectives of the first two stages are often things like killing X number of rapidly spawning enemies, or destroying/collecting X number of objects. The last stage is a boss fight. Helping advance any of the three stages gives you influence for whatever chapter the PQ is a part of. You can gradually fill your influence meter to gain rewards, which can be things like weapons, armor, potions, etc. While you’re doing a PQ whoever tapped (hit the mob first) or killed the mob first doesn’t really matter; if you helped kill or it healed someone who helped kill it, you will receive some influence for its death.
After a successful completion of a PQ, there is a chance to receive an additional reward. Players who helped advance the PQ are each given a ranking based on their overall contribution. Then all players roll randomly with their participation ranking boosting their random roll. After this roll, the top 3-7 (or so) players, depending on each particular PQ, will receive loot bags of varying rarity from a chest. These bags include items like armor, crafting materials, or if you don’t need anything that’s in them, simply a chunk of money. If you’re really gunning for a particular item from a bag, you can stick around for the reset of the PQ another time or two (they take about 5-10 minutes to reset) and you’ll receive a bonus to your rolls for being there multiple times. PQs often only take about 10-15 minutes (though this again may vary from PQ to PQ) with good chances at pretty decent rewards, so they give players a good incentive to hang out and work together with their fellow realm-mates. It can be a fun way to take a break from the grind of standard questing and meet some new people.