I had never even heard of Warhammer until just over a year ago. I had never seen the army pieces you could paint up or even played any Warhammer PC games. So when a fellow World of Warcraft guild member said it was going to be the best MMO ever because it was being developed by Mythic Entertainment, the people that made Dark Age of Camelot, I shrugged it off. I was too busy playing Ultima Online and never got into Dark Age of Camelot. He kept babbling on and on about "Realm vs. Realm" and capturing keeps with siege weapons. World of Warcraft was my game of choice and addiction at that time; I couldn’t imagine playing any other MMORPG. Time traveling forward to the present, my love of World of Warcraft is done. It was a great game, but it wore me down to a nub. All my time in the game was spent chatting in the trade channel, waiting for the arena queues to pop and raid groups to fill up. So, I didn’t hesitate one second when I received that golden ticket in my email that told me to come join the WAR.

You can bet that I played through Warhammer Online comparing it to World of Warcraft. I played WoW for years, and my recent burn with Age of Conan had me approaching Warhammer Online even more cautiously. The first thing I noticed while playing Warhammer Online was that the graphics do have a cartoony feel to them, similar to World of Warcraft. While the style of the graphics have similarities, the detailing in Warhammer far outweigh those of it’s predecessor. Whether it’s the massive buildings and cities, the vast environments or the armor and weapon graphics, the detail is everywhere in WAR. I kept having to tell myself this was beta and not the finished product.

Mythic has split the game into two main factions, Order and Destruction. Order consists of the Dwarves, High Elves, and Empire, while Destruction is made up of Greenskins, Dark Elves, and Chaos. This type of setup is identical to World of Warcraft as well. The differences are in how these zones are played out. Dwarves and Greenskins, for example, share the same zone and are constantly at war with each other throughout the game. It’s not uncommon to see other factions aiding you in your battles, as no one is limited to only one zone and can take advantage of the flight masters at the war camps.

The character selection in WAR is unmatched. You have ten unique classes per faction to pick from; that’s twenty for those who aren’t counting. Let me repeat this, ten unique classes available for each faction. The closest thing World of Warcraft has to this is the forced lore classes, the Tauren and Nightelf Druids. Just the idea of never running into my same class on the other faction had me tickled. The customization of characters is limited by the Warhammer IP and so you won’t find any characters with pink or blue hair. My most recent character I tested on was the Dwarf Engineer. He’s a stubby guy with a twisted love of guns and explosives. I gave him a long, braided beard with black hair, a couple earrings and nose rings and named him Engie (catchy, huh?). I loaded into the game and found myself in a massive, stone and metal area. Massive doesn’t really do it justice. If big is a White Castle burger, this was definitely the Hardee’s monster burger. It looked like I was in some type of juiced up siege weapon factory, with large explosions and machinery running. After taking in the sights and sounds, I wandered over to the initial quest giver and started my leveling.