Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Preview

Tags : E3 Warhammer preview, Warhammer Preview, E3 preview

Following the recent announcement that Mythic Entertainment was cutting a few classes and a few cities from their MMO, we were anxious to chat with the team to see how things had progressed. As was said before, the team decided to eliminate some of the content in order to better meet their own expectations. Given that the game still has twenty other classes and two massive capital cities, it seems hard to complain about the missing content. Though we've covered the game in detail throughout the development cycle, there are still plenty of surprises in store. The team was willing to share a few of them with us during our recent demo.

First up is the announcement of the final High Elf class, the White Lion. This tactical fighter is a particularly unusual class in that he also makes use of a summoned pet. The White Lion fighter calls forth his War Lion to help tackle enemies in a much more tactical way. Each lion will grow in size and ferocity as his fighter levels up, and you'll also have the chance to personalize your lion with new armor sets and hair styles.

But the real way to personalize your lion is through the unique training packages you select. Each of these packages opens up new abilities and interesting buffs for both the lion and his owner. If you train your lion to Threaten, for instance, he'll lock down aggro from monsters, leaving you free to come in and blindside them. If you train him to Kill, the roles are reversed. The lion even has one particularly cool ability that should be useful in PVP; if you're facing a player who likes to fight at a distance, you can send the lion in to grab the enemy and toss them over to you so you can strike them with your own melee attacks.

While viewing the War Lion, we had the chance to check out some of the new pet states that will also be applied to the Squigs. Just above the main ability bar you'll find an entirely separate bar just for your pet's actions. You can set him for aggressive, defensive or passive behaviors, which can free you up a bit to focus on the way you want to play.

And in case you're worried that the War Lion gets all the cool tricks, the White Lion has a few of his own. We saw one particularly cool pouncing power that lets the fighter leap over an enemy's tanks to get at the more vulnerable opponents in the rear.

We also saw some of the new abilities for the Chaos Magus. He's recently been upgraded with the ability to summon demons and is now a sort of parallel for the engineer. The demons he summons are confined to a relatively small target circle and will last for just a few minutes. He can now summon pink horrors to serve as long-range attackers and blue horrors to fight in melee. Even more impressive, he has a new fourth-tier morale ability called Indigo Fire of Change. If you manage to kill someone with Fire of Change, it will spawn a giant uncontrollable demon that will run about killing everything it sees.

In place of the contestable cities that are now off-limits, the team has included RVR gameplay in three different fortresses around the capital cities of the dwarves, greenskinz, and both sets of elves. Though not as large as Altdorf and the Inevitable City, these fortresses provide players with plenty of content and competition for the different realms.

The new build includes plenty of new functionality as well, from pillars of light to mark battlefield objectives to a layout editor for the player interface. The most interesting new function in the game is the new open party system. This is basically a large and open-ended grouping function that allows players to jump in and out of parties during public scenarios. All a player has to do is open up a list of available groups and then click on the one they want to join.

Mythic closed out the demo by finally offering us official access to the beta, so you can be sure that we'll be bringing you even more information soon.