A few days ago i was just randomly browsing some gaming sites and I saw something pop up about Warhammer: Age Of reckoning, this game evokes both feelings of happiness and sadness for me as it was such an amazing game that was handled in the worst possible way by a great team that was basically bullied into killing a game that was competing with the world number 1, being World of Warcraft, I spent so much time in Age Of Reckoning it's my most played game ever, at it's peak i was averaging around 14-16 hours per day in game.
So when my friends and I found Return of Reckoning, a private server that brought back Age Of Reckoning after it was shutdown in 2013, we decided to go back and recapture some of the glory, lately iv'e been playing about 10 hours a day, so suffice it to say i'm still horribly addicted to this game even 10 years after launch and the fact it doesn't exist in an official capacity anymore, this game was such a huge part of my life and even though it's gone now I feel it still deserves an official review from me and a exploration of why it disappeared.
So join the warband and form the WAAAAGH! as we review Warhammer: Age of Reckoning.
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#### Premise and Story.
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Warhammer: AOR takes place in the aptly named Age of Reckoning, after a rising tensions across the world, the inhabitants have formed into two factions to fight each other, the forces of Order and the forces of Destruction, both of which are desperate to destroy the others in hope of stemming the tide and capturing their main cities and putting them to the sword, this is the base line of Age of Reckoning, pure all out warfare in every zone, town and major city that can range from simple skirmishes over towns, all the way up to capturing the enemies capital city itself and enslaving it's inhabitants should you make it that far.
Warhammer has a rich history and Age of Reckoning wanted to build on that by making every race and class unique and focusing primarily on what makes warhammer so amazing, the war, the wars themselves take place over massive objectives across numerous maps, ranging from literally when you first enter the game right up until you have the very best gear available, AOR was built around the RVR(realm vs realm) mechanic of having all players from all levels and all zones actively contribute to the war effort by taking certain zones so that others can be attacked as well in a trickle up effect.
This eventually culminated in a full on capital city siege that could last days to finally capture and required hundreds of people to both attack and defend the city which would lead to not only bragging rights but the best possible gear that was exceedingly rare to obtain, however this was a multi stage effort and it wasn't uncommon for a week to go past where the sides were too evenly matched and might even end up fighting over one spot back and forth for a week, but this is in essence what Age of Reckoning was about, non stop, continual PvP that the entire server could join in on.
But instead of just giving you an overview of all these things, lets take a more detailed look at the game below.
#### Forces of Order.
The forces of Order comprise 3 races, the human Empire, the Dwarves and the High Elves, each race had 3-4 classes each, which by MMO standards was huge for a first launch, having 12 unique and distinct classes at launch meant there was something for everyone and that seeing a certain class on the battlefield would be unique and you would know what to expect but at the same time be weary and sometimes confused by how they worked together in warbands and parties, the forces of order were a little less destructive than the forces of destruction(no pun intended) and were largely racially unique classes that functioned in different ways.
While the Holy Trinity existed(Healing,DPS,Tanking) Mythic did a fantastic job of balancing and creating these classes from scratch that were unique from each other but were still inside the realm of the trinity for example, while a Knight of the Blazing Sun is a tank character and a Dwarven Ironbreaker is also a tank they're completely different in nearly every way they're played, where as a KOTBS would instead cut massive swathes in the enemy lines and debuff them and control them, an Ironbreaker would simply control a crowd and mark specific players out and hinder them greatly to the point they would have to leave the battlefield to recover or just simply die to restart.
I'll be covering this more below, but it's important to distinguish the two sides and how unique and different they were to each other but also somehow extremely balanced to a point of disbelief.
#### Forces of Destruction
The forces of Destruction are comprised 4 races, The Greenskins being Orcs & Goblins, The Dark elves and the followers of Chaos, what separates the two factions is the unique class differences, while like I said the holy trinity is still there and some classes may seem similar to each other they're usually pretty different in numerous ways, most destruction forces work in a more brutalist kind of way and while some classes may be a lot stronger than their counter parts they have trade offs that can change how battles are fought.
While the classes of Order also have some of the differing abilities and effects it's more prevalent on the Destruction side such as sorceresses causing some pretty severe damage to themselves to gain more power than their Bright Wizard counterparts and Witch Elves being a lot easier to kill than their Witch hunter opposites, ultimately though the forces of Destruction work a lot better in a horde setting, steamrolling over order forces in massive waves as opposed to the more organized and methodical way Order is built up for.
Likewise there are 12 unique classes on the Destruction side and some of them are just as cool as Order, again this will be further discussed below in the classes portion, so lets jump right into that now.
#### The most Unique and Balanced classes iv'e ever seen
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Anyone who has played an MMO in the past 20 years will know one thing rings true for all of them, Class balancing is an unending hit and miss nightmare but Mythic however somehow managed to get it right almost immediately, for every class and every spec there was an equal counter to it and even that counter could be countered if your skill level was high enough, unlike most MMO's, the classes were unique in their design and had very specific and effective methods of how they were played.
For example, in an MMO environment, and a PvP environment, you put a tank up against a pure DPS class, 9 times out of 10 the Tank class is going to win based on their survivability and different abilities that tanks have for absorbing damage, however in Warhammer Online the most effective and strongest tank's (Chaos Chosen) weakness was actually a pure DPS class that revolved around your skill and manipulation of the battlefield, this was the Witch Hunter, while the Witch Hunter was primarily used to obliterate magic casters and healers, a skilled Witch Hunter could tear down a Chaos Chosen if done properly in a matter of seconds.
However as I said, everything has a counter, i played for around 4 years and was in the hundreds of thousands of kills range for PvP and i'd wager to say maybe 0.5% of them were 1v1's, the game revolves around the warband and how effectively it can do things, so if a witch hunter jumps a chosen and doesn't get the job done, they're going to obliterated by either Witch Elves, Marauders or Choppa's, this can spark a chain reaction which is essentially what the class/pvp system was designed for in Age of Reckoning, alot of the time i would just sit back and watch the chaos unfold on a battlefield and it's almost impossible to follow the action since there is so much happening at all times on every part of the map.
Coupling all the unique classes and paradigms together is what made Age of Reckoning such an amazing success in terms of class development, even World of Warcraft, a game that has been out for 14 years hasn't reached the base level of classes that Age of Reckoning launched with on one individual side, while I never played all the classes i'm told they're all unique, even the classes that are the same archetype like Witch hunter's and Witch elves play completely separate, something I haven't really seen in an MMO since then.
#### Non stop PvP
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There is primarily one objective in Age of Reckoning, pure, unrelenting faction warfare that starts the moment you enter the game and never stops, the PvP in Age of Reckoning is split into 4 tiers each with a corresponding level requirement, T1 is usually 1-19, T2 is 19-29, T3 is 29-40 and T4, the final tier is reserved for level 40 players, unlike most "world" pvp games, AOR truly is an open world inclusive PvP game, while T1 is largely reserved for new players and only has battlefield objectives that require you to fight over, once you reach tier 2 is where the game really begins.
Starting in Tier 2 there will be the usual battlefield objectives to capture, but they're also accompanied by siege castles that can host hundreds of players, whoever captures them holds the zone for a specific amount of time and can then attack the next tier of content, it's really a trickle up effect where the entire server is fighting over the exact same thing at all levels which led to huge warbands of 500-1000 people on some battlefields that would crash servers and go on for days on end sometimes which always culminated in attacking the enemy capital city.
Once you have locked down all of the tier's and attacked the capital cities defenses you begin a sort of "raid" on the capital city itself which is reserved for level 40 players as you're literally attacking the capital city where people hang out, before they changed it to 40 only you couldn't go near a conquered city for days on end and just ended up ruining the leveling experience, but the raid itself would usually be fought by hundreds of people at a time, with the objective of enslaving the main faction leaders and getting a chance at the rarest loot in the game.
I can't explain enough of how big these wars were, while other MMO's will have "open world" pvp of say a 50v50 nature, Age of Reckoning was all in as many people as you can fit onto the battlefield, couple this with the unique classes and the advanced tactics of the game and battles could get to the point as I said that it would crash the server, once had a bright wizard firebomb a massive warband sieging a castle and the server crashed for a few minutes, obviously this was fixed over time but god damn it was the most impressive and enjoyable PVP experience iv'e ever had in any game.
But sadly, now we have to come to the part of what happened to WAR:AOR.
#### So what actually began the downfall
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When WAR was first launched it was labelled the "WoW killer" and in many regards they were right, Blizzard was losing subs to Warhammer at a time when WoW was extremely popular, but this had a bad effect on the development of the game and the developers, like I said i was obsessed with this game so I knew every scrap of information there was too know, including the rumors, so while an official timeline doesn't exist of what happened let me give you my version of what I observed.
While the game was packed with content it was rumored that Mythic rushed the game out of development to compete with Wrath of The Lich King, cutting 3 tiers of content which included levels, abilities, sieges, raids, maps and even the Blackguard class that got released later, while it wasn't a problem at the time it very quickly became apparent that chunks of the game were missing and they were doing the best to stop gap the flaws in the game like the rampant disconnect between fresh level 40's and geared level 40's as well as having to squish the class abilities a bit.
From what I heard this was either going to be patched in the future or released in it's first expansion that would of probably came out around 2010-2011, now you ask 10 different warhammer players and they'll give you 10 different stories but the best one I know is that Warhammer was competing with Blizzard in terms of subs, a developer even answered a question of how fast the game was growing and said "A million subscribers is a milestone we're closing in on" and for a time things were great the game was alive and what little fixes that needed to be had were had, but then in 2009 something strange happened that's never quite been explained.
EA, the publisher of Warhammer:AOR had a terrible year and lost over a billion dollars, now for some unknown goddamn reason, EA decided to target Warhammer to recoup their losses, cutting their development team in half(more like 3/4's) and shutting down a huge amount of servers, this was also at a time when people were beginning to ask "Where's the new content", this happened in tandem with the staff being cut and the funding for AOR being slashed by a large margin, so now it was at a perfect storm for everything to go wrong, and it did go wrong, very quickly, it had been a year since they added anything to the game and once the staff was cut down they had to drastically scale back what they were releasing in a very short time.
This led to the infamous "content of the dead" patch where after a year we got a patch that was basically just a desert to fight over, coupled that with them releasing characters and classes that were meant to be in the base game, people were quickly wondering what the hell was happening at Mythic, given their terrible standard of public relations we were essentially left to guess what was going on and after a few months with basically no content they began to hemorrhage subs very quickly, going from roughly a million players to well under 200,000 in the space of a year and 4 months, coupled this with the Wrath of the Lich King expansion picking up and like i said, it was the perfect shitstorm for everything to go wrong.
But the final deathknell came when we learned what had happened with EA, they had apparently pulled the development team to work on a Warhammer 40k MMO that never saw the outside of the office development and quickly morphed into Warhammer Heroes, a MoBa game that never even got out of the beta, to explain it a bit better the conditions for Warhammer AOR to overtake WoW were almost perfect, but nearly every step of the way was completely fucked up and mishandled.
In 2010 Blizzard released one of the most hated expansions in Cataclysm and people were looking for something new, the only problem was AOR had began to fade into obscurity with an almost invisible development team and no real content, couple this with EA basically sabotaging the game and trying to salvage something out of it instead of putting more funds into it, the game just kept declining and people kept logging off for the last time to better illustrate just how easily they could of taken the MMO Genre lead from Blizzard i'll explain it below.
Catacylsm was pretty universally hated, that went into Mists of Pandaria, another expansion that was also hated.
During this time from 2010-2013, nothing was there to fill the void, hence Blizzard automatically won by default, had EA not pulled the plug on Age of Reckoning, there is a very very possible scenario that they could of overtaken Blizzard in that time period and really established themselves, but this is were the infamous "EA" connotation began, they had seemingly sabotaged a great product for no other reason than they had to answer for this missing money, which was insane given how much money they were generating from the game in terms of subs and how much more they would of made if they had of held on even a year longer.
So if you couple all of these things together, the lack of infrastructure, no content, an invisible rapidly diminishing development team and a game that was just left to lament, and a company that would in the next decade reveal themselves to be money hungry vultures that would sell their grandmas for a few coins, that is what killed Warhammer: Age of Reckoning, it was the perfect storm to kill a game and it succeeded when it didn't need to and could of taken on the crown very easily.
#### Critical Review and Reception.
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So that's the awesome and sad tale of Warhammer: Age of Reckoning, a game that was destined for great things but ultimately was pulled down piece by piece before it even got a chance to get really going, and was sadly shutdown in 2013 because of a dwindling fan base, and before you ask "Well why didn't they go free to play?" You fucking guessed it, EA didn't want to pay the licensing fee for the game anymore, obviously Mythic has a role to play in this but this was just a clusterfuck that was never going to fix itself because of an overbearing company that was hellbent on making money from any source.
But thankfully there is still a server out there to relive the glory days of Age of Reckoning, Return of Reckoning has been up for a few years now and has a fairly active playerbase and runs rather smoothly for being a private server, obviously you'll not get the full experience we did over the years, but it's still good to see that home still exists out there for us hardcore fans of this game and still managed to capture the awesome nature of Age of reckoning.
It's doubtful we'll see the game come back in any official capacity or even a reboot, but regardless of it now being gone, it's a very interesting story in the history of PC games where two paths diverged, where the conditions were perfect for two games to come out on top but how two different companies handled it and the other one faded into nothing, like I said, glad it happened, sad it's gone.
If you guys do want to check out the game though find your way to google and search ReturnOfReckoning, if you ever decide to jump on give me a shout on Destruction, i play a marauder called Amenthes and the more the merrier!
##### Thanks for taking the time to read my review, if you enjoyed it feel free to up-vote, resteem or follow me for more content, any of you guys and girls have any stories about age of reckoning or your time in it? leave me a message below and i'll get back to you, thanks guys!