Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning

There is, of course, one other crucial side to a massively multiplayer RPG's content, and that's its classes, skills, and the depth and feel of its combat. Here, we have to confess to not having delved particularly deep into the game, but we can give some basic impressions across several of the game's 20 careers. These belong to four standard archetypes: ranged damage, melee damage, tank and healer.

Levelling is fast, especially if you keep yourself rested for the WOW-style XP bonus. With no inns, all you need to do is sit or log out in a friendly encampment to rest. You also get an XP bonus for killing multiple enemies in quick succession - a "killing spree". Skills come at the rate of one or more per level. Most use action points, but many have no cost beyond their cool-downs; this is a game where you use skills a lot, and your choices are limited by your class's particular combo system. For example, the Black Orc tank moves through three tiers of skills in a cycle, while the Witch Hunter damage-dealer builds up combo points and then spends them on finishing moves.

On top of this, you get a morale bar which builds up gradually the more time you spend in combat, and can be spent on a series of increasingly powerful morale skills; you get the first of these at level 8. Just as in the over-arching systems of adventuring and realm warfare, WAR's combat design is complex, split across multiple fronts. At level 11, Mastery - the game's quite simple talent-tree specialisation system - comes into play, as do Tactics, the system of permanent, equippable buffs earned from the one-size-fits-all career trainers, or from increasing your RVR renown, or from the achievement system of the Tome of Knowledge in-game encyclopaedia. You can set up several preset Tactics builds to switch between quickly.

It's too early to say for sure, but we get the feeling that WAR's combat is designed for breadth, not depth. In an MMO, that's not necessarily a bad thing at all; more systems means more long-term fiddling and obsessing to do. But it's a shame the design of the very basics - the skills themselves - aren't a little stronger. Without clearly defined animations or conceptual hooks, you often need to remind yourself which of the wide selection of "does x amount of damage plus this buff or debuff" strikes you're using. It's all a bit woolly, and that's not helped by slightly lumpy pacing and lack of strong feedback.

That said, the basic tank and melee damage classes are solidly satisfying to play. Ranged damage is probably the weakest link; these classes, including the pet-based Squig Herder and Magus, can feel quite repetitive and detached to play in the early stages. Few of WAR's classes present particularly novel or flexible takes on their tried-and-true archetypes, it must be said, although the White Lion (a melee pet class) and Disciple of Kaine (a front-line healer which builds up healing power through combat) are both interesting.

Warhammer Online's crafting system is a more definite departure from the norm. Trying out Apothecary, we discover that it's not recipe-based, but reliant on experimentation. You'll select a main ingredient that will give the potion you're creating a certain effect - an armour buff, say - and then combine it with others that modify the length or strength of the effect. Volatility is an issue, too, with some combinations more likely to fail than others, so "fixer" ingredients can be added to stabilise the mixture. It's an odd system, a little frustrating, and seemingly designed to relegate crafting to a mini-game rather than a complex career path of its own. That's fair enough; Mythic has always maintained that the Warhammer universe is all about the fighting.

Warhammer Online isn't just about fighting, though - it's about everybody fighting, everywhere, all the time, and together. It's both thoroughly and accessibly massive: you don't need to join a guild or even a group to find yourself warring against or alongside dozens of other players. At this stage of the closed beta, it's halfway to pulling it off: all it needs, we hope, is more players, to spread the war out across more fronts. We'll report back in the coming weeks from the open phase of the beta, and the later levels of content, to let you know how it's getting on.