Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning E3 Previews
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Another nifty feature is a journal that tracks everything that you kill in the game. The more times you kill a certain creature, the more info about that creature is revealed, such as spell and weapon weaknesses. Mythic is using this "tome" with a sticker book mentality as a way to collect all of your kills in one handy place. Every quest that you have completed also goes down in your journal, just to show you how much time you have devoted to the game. for better or for worse.
The second is at GameSpot:
The game's third tier of combat is the "morale bar," a meter that gradually fills up over time while you're in combat (and fills up more quickly when you're grouped with other players--one of the game's many incentives to join up with others online). The meter is marked by several special morale abilities that can be used once the meter fills past each one; the strategy behind using morale abilities will come down to deciding whether to quickly use your weaker, lower-level abilities immediately or hold off until your meter is completely full to use your most-powerful attack. Since your morale meter depletes when your character isn't in combat, you'll be encouraged to make frequent use of these powerful abilities, which will appear onscreen with bright, colorful particle effects, such as hovering runes for dwarf priests or cascading meteor showers for goblin shaman.
The third is at IGN PC:
In one of the quests shown off an NPC challenged the main character to a duel as a test of strength. After a short battle the NPC was defeated and fell to the ground. Now, there are some options here, one of which is to deliver a killing blow even though the fight wasn't supposed to be to the death. This naturally provided a terrific moment to start demonstrating the reactive AI. Once the killing blow was delivered, all of the people watching the fight freaked out and cried murder. It was not a good public relations move but considering one of the ways to play the game is to help the orcs subjugate humanity, it's not that big a problem.
The fourth is at GamersInfo:
Keeping with the Warhammer theme of constant and eternal WAR there'll be quite a bit of PvP in the game. There's no death penalty Priestly believes dying is penalty enough but there is a time delay in getting back to the game, in order to keep people from trying to zerg each other. Mythic is using what it's learned in its years of running Dark Age of Camelot coupled with the (rule of 3) and the Warhammer tradition of point values for units to help balance PvP.
The fifth is at MMORPG.com:
Besides morale abilities players can also use Tactics on their characters to enhance combat. Tactics are passive abilities which can be chosen before the fighting gets underway. Some will boost damage, some defense and other may increase your attacks against a specific race. You can also stack your tactics for a boost to one ability. The abilities themselves can take up multiple slots and the players both earn new abilities and new slots as they advance.
The sixth is at 1Up:
If we were on the dwarf side, we probably would have been excited about the chance to wreck some vengeance on the greenskins. Even in this pre-beta, the game manages to capture the jingoism and sheer bloody-mindedness of its races and marry that to a very satisfying set of combat options. The use of tactical points is excellent, letting you balance combat options in a deeper way than most MMOs. The variety of quests -- such as public and private -- seem to be working out smoothly as well.
And the seventh is at BlueAlien.org:
I was unable to get complete details on each of the faction but here is a quick rundown on what I did find. Careers, the terminology for Warhammer Online instead of classes, for the Dwarves include Ironbreaker, Hammerer Runepriest, and Engineer. Goblins will have a "pet class" - the Squig Herder. Squig Herders are goblins that are followed around by their pet squig, a sort of semi-intelligent fungus with lots of sharp and pointy teeth. Squig Herders will have the ability to order their squig to swallow them whole and control the squig from the inside, becoming a massive killing machine. When the ability expires the squig herder will be spat out, along with the remains of anything else the squig happened to swallow.
