Trial of the Endless Trial - Part Three

This morning I decided to log onto my Choppa, with the goal of finally trying out the RvR combat, and I'm happy to say the experience was quite satisfactory; almost on par with the first time engaging in PvP in World of Warcraft, but on a much larger scale. Well I wouldn't entirely say that but my reaction was similar, there were a few impediments that threw it off being the same great experience, but I'll say them as I go.

The absolute first PvP related situation that I tried out was a scenario which are basically instanced combat zones with objectives. It lets you choose which group you want to be in and if you want to be, designated as the Main Assist target, I chose a random group and went on my way. I didn't see anything related to a main assist window or anything of the sort while actually fighting however. The first scenario was one I queued up for individually since I had a quest for it beforehand, it was Nordenwatch where the basic back story of it is that the forces of order are using artillery from Nordenwatch to destroy Destruction vessels, in response to that, Destruction sent a small attack force to take it over. It's objectives were fairly standard, we had to capture and hold nodes for points, and it was a small map too, so 3 nodes overall. In the end however the first match didn't go so well, I had gotten into it while the match was ongoing, and when I did manage to get into combat I hardly could scratch the enemy, it took me sometime to figure out how that actually worked, and to this moment what I don't entirely understand is that while the game (generously if I might add) levels everyone to a single level, and adjusts their stats accordingly to that level, it also does not take away the advantage of gear, or skills that one would obtain during that level. As I entered at level 8 and I didn't have level 9 or 10 abilities, as well as my gear wasn't the best, I felt like that I had a significant disadvantage. I also noticed while everyone is the same level, there were people with different ratings on them. I'm not entirely sure how a player's rating is decided against your own, my guess is that it either has something to do with renown against your own, or items and stats against your own. While I can't ever say that not being able to kill someone was the best first time experience I ever had, it was definitely intriguing enough to see how strong my character could become in the first tier.

After losing my first Scenario I went into the queue again and did a new public quest while waiting since it was near the chaos encampment. The quest was fairly similar to the one I did previously in fact, but it was different enough and in a different situation making it stay really enjoyable. The objectives were to kill 60 zealots of the empire, at which point the prophet leading them sacrifices himself, and then a few of the zealots who spoke of their doom were hailed and became the stronger prophets of doom. These are champion level enemies with a few normal guards, so they weren't very hard to dispatch. Finally at the end we fight the final prophet who had two guards, although both of the guards were champion leveled and the prophet himself was hero leveled, the guards were able to be pulled separately, making the fight itself fairly painless. I did this a few times with the same people who were probably there as the same reason as me, to either do the quest for fun ,or to do the quest for additional items, which I was glad for later on when I tried to do the public quest with a few other new people, and it resulted with a lot of the people leaving. The rewards for the public quest still pulled me in, while the crafting material rewards were always seemingly the same, there's usually a green and white quality item at the top that was different from one public quest to another.

Hard rated public quests also existed that I had tried to do but no one else was around, and the objectives were definitely meant for a large group of people. In fact I wasn't able to complete the second phase of the quest, the first was to kill around 90 villagers which wasn't very hard with AoE abilities even though the villagers themselves did do a respectable amount of damage. The second and the last one I saw was to put 12 houses on fire, the main problem with that is that it also spawns 2 hero enemies that put the fires out quickly afterward, I presume the only way to prevent that is to just kill them, but it wouldn't be possible without a greater amount of people. I ended up just running away and moving on to other things.

After doing public quests for awhile, and not getting into any Scenario queues I decided to join a queue for all of the Scenarios to see if that made a difference, and tried out some RvR areas finally in the mean time. I was immediately and amazingly differently pleased by how the RvR experience was within the first few minutes. The first thing I noticed is that I was able to kill a enemy fairly easily on my own, and that's definitely not only fun but relieving after experiencing the few neigh invincible enemies in the Scenario. The second was that the RvR areas felt a lot like confined world PvP combat. The not so obvious things are like how the players handled the battles themselves, while all of the battles are in the end for the objectives and the objectives are regulated to being in the proximity to capture, and then hold it for a few minutes to actually solidify your faction's reign on it, often times battles were more around the enemy camps because one side managed to push the other back that far. While no battles as far as I saw ever escalated into the camp itself mainly because both war camps have extremely strong guards although still level equivalent, so it is possible in my opinion at least, to push the enemy back and invade their camp. Even still, while I said there was a lot of combat that is basically fighting near the camps, making it feel a whole lot like days of World of Warcraft before Battlegrounds were implemented, there still was enough fighting around the objective itself to have the original concept still be in place. At the same time against that same concept, the game system itself acknowledges that you will be outnumbered, and it gives you a buff that is named something along the lines of “your faction has engaged a larger army” and then it gives you additional reward factors, but extra XP and renown is not exactly enough to be able to make a difference against the said larger army, so in the end it's more like saying that losing will probably be inevitable, but it's still worth your while to fight.

While the RvR was going on, the Scenario queue of course popped up, and since it felt like I got more renown points from there, I decided to take it. This time it was the Blood of the Black Cairne, which I later found out was only accessible due to it being a holiday weekend, and that renown and experience points were increased here. The experience I had itself here was a vast improvement, the Scenario again was a capture and hold to deplete points deal, this time there were 5 nodes instead of 3, making the initial rush a lot more spread out. I didn't do anything exactly creative the first round, and decided to go straight up the middle, I ended up being able to hold my own with the other numerous people who fought in the middle. We still ended up losing the Scenario but it was a very close game, on subsequent forays into the Black Cairne, I had won quite a few battles, and went to other nodes just to see how they were, usually it was only a few people who also went to the said nodes, resulting in small 2-3 on 2-3 battles, with the main core of forces engaging in the center.

After all that was said and done, I had gained enough experience to level from 8 to 10 in a matter of a few hours, and my renown level was raised from 2 to 9. PvP is most definitely (and not surprisingly) WAR's strong point in almost every way. It even has features that makes PvP very accessible like leveling everyone to the same level, or giving comparable XP as if you were doing quests or any sort of PvE activity. Finally, it has standard rewards and a progression system that makes wanting to get to the next level very doable, and more importantly, it makes you want to do it.

That about wraps up my day in WAR for today. I'm going to continue to see how far my Choppa can advance gearwise and go for the last level the trial lets me get, but as far as I can tell even after that point, PvP in WAR seems like it would be fun at any time.

Singilized Experiences - Server Firsts

One very controversial aspect that's most often associated with MMORPGs but still overshadowed enough to prevent any permanent damage are “Server Firsts”. They usually involve doing something that a lot of people do, before anyone else on the server does it. Despite the accomplishment, server firsts usually are not looked upon very favorably by the majority for a few reasons differing from person to person. One is the obvious bragging rights that having done the server first and having proof of it, would give a person. The other is that in the end, except for the satisfaction of accomplishing a server first, the person who accomplished this doesn't end up with anything else, they come to the exact same spot that everyone else will eventually get to, just having gotten there faster. Because of how small of a impact server firsts serve for the entire game as a whole, usually they aren't much of a big deal, that is until the game itself decides to make it a bigger one, this leads us to World of Warcraft, and also where I have my first hand experience with server firsts.

In WoW, server firsts take a more visible form in Feats of Strength achievements. Since the achievement system released there are Server First achievements that reward the player for doing just that. While it was definitely possible to achieve a server first before the system was ever released, it was never actually given any sort of acknowledgment except through third party means by taking a screen shot, or something similar. Implementing them as achievements however has resulted in them becoming very widely known within the WoW community, and thus resulting in server firsts having a bigger foot print than it had before. This isn't exactly to the game's advantage, as for some people who have previously played the game for fun, if they had a desire to get attempt the server firsts themselves, all of that fun switches over to efforts to prepare, and achieve the server first. At the same time, server firsts are usually set in stone within 40 hours of a expansion going live, again since it's not possible for most people to do something about them, and even the people that do them themselves will move on and enjoy the game as it was before, it does still have it's lasting impacts.

I personally have been one of the people who attempted to get a Realm First level 85 achievement at the release of Cataclysm. This was actually coincidental, as the original goal in mind was to simply level to 85 within a day so that the people with time restrictions placed on by one reason or another in real life would be able to experience the end game content as soon as possible rather than spending excess time leveling.

The group we took was composed of a few guild mates, Cortegos (Warrior Tank), Ampedup (Warlock), Me/Kreszentia (Paladin Healer), Presitus (Shadow Priest) , and my girlfriend, Belahn (Hunter). To prepare ahead of time we didn't really do as much as other people with similar goals have done. I spent the day preparing 25 quests to turn in because I heard of it, as much as I felt like that was cheating, it was to our advantage so, so be it. Cortegos spent the day slept in preparation for staying up all night, I'm not entirely sure what Ampedup and Presitus did, but I believe Ampedup was at least at work because I remember him coming on a few minutes late, and finally Belahn was at her last day of work before her vacation. All 5 of us had pretty much played through the entirety of Wrath of the Lich King, so at least I felt like I had enough of Northrend. Even so, doing the same quests again in Icecrown for the last time was pretty fun, maybe it wasn't the quests themselves but rather the situation I was in, but I enjoyed my time while being anxious. I had also prepared a lot of supplies, mainly flasks and healing potions since my characters had those professions, and it was the last day to really get some usage out of them before stronger versions were released. We were in a raiding guild, so we had plenty of supplies to use from the guild bank too if we wanted too, I ended up not taking any of those but I think we got permission to use a few fish feasts, and other kinds of buff foods. In any case, the day felt like it passed fairly quickly and before I knew it, I had all of my quests ready to turn in about an hour before midnight, so I spent the rest of the day doing last minute preparations.

Cortegos, and Belahn were the first ones to be on, our plan was to instance grind essentially off the information that Ampedup had heard from a blue post stating that xp from instance grinding, and questing should be almost the same. We planned our group ahead of time, for all of the members except for Presitus, who as rude as it is to say, we took because he was on (although I wouldn't really say any bad things about him, even though I'm pretty much a loner, and I hardly talked to anyone besides Belahn, Presitus was funny, and fun to be around) and we never actually added a 5^th member to our group ahead of time. Finally, by the time it was actually midnight everyone was on and ready to go, Cortegos, Ampedup, Belahnrelogging, we quickly did that.

Getting back on the server proved to be our first ordeal, one that we couldn't really do anything about but hope that it was working. I presume because of the server traffic, everyone was having a hard time getting back onto their characters. I ended up being the first one in the group to be on (which I thought was funny since I have the slowest Internet connection amongst the group), there were only a few people in the guild who got in too, although we weren't a huge guild, so it's not much of a representation of the server. I quickly turned in my quests, and realized I didn't get any xp for them, when I told the others they were considerably and vocally bummed out about that. I felt somewhat of a relief though, since I didn't like it much to begin with, only a few minutes later everyone was able to get on, and after turning in our quests simply because they started to give us guild reputation, we headed off to start the grinding.

Our plan was to start in Black Rock Caverns and grind to 81 then check out Throne of the Tides' XP gain. Ff it wasn't high enough then we would hearth back to BRC, and then at 82 we would see what it was like at Vortex Pinnacle. From then on we would either quest or grind Grim Batol.

We had some experience from being in the Cataclysm beta where we were able to pretty much see everything the bosses were capable of and develop strategies for them. A few things were changed from beta to live as we found out, and we forgot a few other things but the experience in general was pretty much spot on for what we prepared for. In BRC we were able to quickly burn through all of the trash mobs which felt surprising to me, I had put a few points into talents that would let me contribute to DPS to speed up the process. The first boss didn't present any significant problems, and with how weak the chains were, I was able to break them on my own letting the others focus on the boss, because we had a gear advantage, we were able to kill the boss sometimes before he even did his ability that he casts after he chains the party together, I can't remember the name of the ability at the moment. As with anything new, we were surprised to see some good items drop from the boss that we could use, but we still over leveled the items, while it was nice, we didn't really take anything in BRC until later. After some trash we reached the second boss which I especially enjoyed because she couldn't hurt our tank at all, and since we had Ampedup, and Belahn handle the beams, I was pretty much regulated to doing nothing and standing there; the experience we've gotten from fighting her on the beta proved very valuable here since without it we probably would have wiped. The third boss was one that we forgot the strategy to for a attempt but we figured it out quickly. The fourth which we decided to do for fun was easy because she was essentially just a hard hitting boss with fears, and a little bit of CC management. Finally the last boss was probably a lot more stressful for the ranged DPS since they had to kite for the first time in the instance, but again all I did was pretty much get rid of snares, and heal the tank, and sometimes the kiter.

We were surprised at how much xp we got from the instance and it didn't take much convincing for us to keep doing that over and over again, even on level 81 because we deducted that it would take too long to go to Throne of the Tides. It was around this time where we realized we were the highest levels on the server, and no one was close to us, and that was when we decided to try to go for the server firsts . It sped up our runs considerably, while it was pretty much the same thing over and over again, it was enjoyable to me because it was like being in a race constantly. We also had a few malfunctions to make the instance more interesting, although somewhat time costly; the first one was when the second boss' mechanic didn't work, and he constantly did fire novas when he wasn't near the fire, resulting in him quickly killing all of us, despite my best attempts to heal through it, although if they didn't make any changes to healing mechanics I probably could have. The next we found is going back a bit, somehow the others in the group found out that the xp for quests wasn't working properly or was disabled, and quests done in older areas were working properly now, this was way after we turned in our quests though. Finally we had a few of the mobs that a friendly NPC was suppose to kill come after me, resulting in me dying.

Despite all of that, by the time we reached level 82 we were excited to move onto VP and try it out. I got somewhat confused on the way over there, since I couldn't find the entrance, but other than that it was exciting to transfer to a new area after hours, and see a little bit of the questing zones that we were skipping. The first thing I noticed in VP was that the trash was considerably harder to kill, and did more damage, it wasn't anything too uncontrollable but it definitely woke me up. I had also never done VP before the live release of Cata, but a few of the others had. The first boss I thought was neat because of the strategy we did, even though I was somewhat bewildered by having tornadoes go into us, and not being able to see my character, but by then I played WoW enough to know that most of the time you can't see your character. The second boss was kind of troublesome for me because I couldn't get a hang of avoiding the tornadoes, but luckily every time I got caught in one, I had everyone already topped off. I also was very confused about how to recognize “which way the wind was blowing”, in-fact all I did for that part for every time I fought the boss again was just move around until my buff changes into the “good” one, and I was happy every time I was lucky enough to still be standing in a good one after the winds changed. On the way to the final boss was probably the most interesting and frantic part of the entire instance, to survive the astral stars (which we accidentally pulled when we weren't ready and while Cortegos was explaining how the stars worked) I was pretty much forced to hitting my fast and strong heal until all of them were dead, when I figured that out I was able to stabilize everyone's health rather than trying to conserve mana and leave everyone in a pretty bad situation, when I tried that it ended up with a few people dead, actually I think everyone died except for me and Belahn. Finally, the final boss wasn't too difficult, on more than one occasion we did overestimate how much protection the lightning triangle makes, resulting in a death but all in all, it wasn't that bad.

Around this time however it was when real life interfered with our progress, a few people had some sudden things that they had to take care of and we were forced to resort to questing for a bit, this is the part that ultimately put things not in our favor however, as questing with a large group was a lot slower than we predicted, and at the very least, it was much slower and less efficient than instance grinding. We went over to Deepholm, and did a few areas of quests while we waited for everyone to come back, we had most of the group together except for one person, but then even still questing was rather slow, and not the high point. On the other hand as planned, there wasn't any horde resistance other than maybe 3 people, and we still were pretty much ahead of the entire server except for a few other people in other raiding guilds. I also had some RL chores to take care of at this time that I did quickly, so we decided to take a short break while I did that.

Eventually after about 2-3 hours of questing, the entire group was back together, and we started the instance grinding up again, but at this point we were behind others, so we tried hard to catch up, but the mood was generally disheartened. I personally didn't mind so much because we were still on track with our goal of getting to level 85 quickly, I think about 10 hours or so had passed by then, and people were getting drowsy, especially since most of the group had been up the entire day before, and were working. It was around this time after a few more runs that Presitus decided to drop out because he was too tired, since we had a few guild members on who at least logged on to see what the release of Cata was like, if not level like us for a little bit, we ended up bringing in Marrak (Shadow Priest again) since he got to the start of our level by questing, and he wanted to come. With having a new person around, it was fun to show him around the instance, we were able to continue on our way to level 83, at this point we tried to go to Lost City of Tol'vir but it proved too tough for us with most of the enemies being in the orange level, and doing too much damage for me to heal through reliably, especially the second to last boss. It was also at this point where I noticed the Cata mode of mana management coming into place, it was very hard to get used too, and it didn't help much when I needed to use strong healing spells. From then on we went back to VP and grinded a few more rounds, but it was also at this point that we were noticing the impacts of being behind and this caused Ampedup to want to drop out. Since Belahn and I were still on track with the other people on the server for the highest level Hunter and Paladins the group as a whole decided to stop instance grinding and switch to questing in small groups while Ampedup went to bed, since it was possibly a lot faster that way, and decided that that questing in a large was too much of a time hindrance.

From then on it was just me and Bel, and we quickly noticed how fast the xp gain was, also how interesting the quests were. I didn't really read much of the quest descriptions for time reasons, but it was still fun to be involved through cut scenes, and the sort. We quested at a good rate, and got 84 a little behind the people who were ahead of us. We hardly had any horde problems still, the only ones that we did we were able to take care of easily. A lot of the quests were also super easy to get through until ones that involved being in a tomb with Harrison Jones, since there were other Alliance there as well it took more than a likable amount of time to complete the quests since they also had a slow spawn rate, I was almost considering moving to a completely different area. In the end, we did just do that however, as we were getting to the point where quests weren't numerous, and since everyone else was 84 went to Twilight Highlands, we decided that's our next stop.

Getting vendor trash was definitely more noticeable as we quested, but we had plenty of ways to quickly sell to move on without having to take a selling break at a town. Twilight Highlands was quite an experience for me, as it was probably the zone I was looking forward too the most as well mainly because of Grim Batol, I didn't really look up much information about Cata other than playing on the beta, and the zone wasn't open when I was over there anyway. We found maybe more less group friendly quests in TH however, most notably the ones in Thundermar that involved getting beer, and foodstuffs, it was also slow enough to make the drowsiness for both of us start to feel evident. We also saw quite a bit of yelling in the zone chat from the new Ring of Blood, The Crucible of Carnage, it was also very tempting to try to get a group for it, but we decided against it.

Unfortunately it was around this time, and ourselves being about 40% into level 85 when we saw the realm announcement for someone getting the Realm First Paladin go off, while I was little bit bummed because of it, I didn't mind it in the end, and kept on going. The Hunter Realm First however went to someone that we didn't really expect since we used /who to keep track of people, and that didn't account for the Horde side, we didn't think the Horde was much of a threat to our achievement anyway. At about 70%ish if I remember right, another Hunter got the first level 85 achievement, we both didn't get our achievements but we wanted to finish off our hard work; around 20 hours or so had passed by then, so we were both very tired, but luckily for us, the quests started to get more exciting too, we ended up getting our level 85 achievement with another achievement and I very well remember it being in the mouth of a old god. Needless to say, after that we got some praise from the few people who were still online, and then we quickly went to sleep.

Normally that would be enough of experience to end my want for a Server First but I kept on thinking about them, and I decided on the next day that I would spend the entire day getting my professions up to 525, I was a Jewelcrafter and a miner. Belahn decided to work on professions as well, so we ended up farming, I did some research online from beta testers and found out that Deepholm was the best place to get ore. First though, I had to get to a point where I could mine Elementium, so I circled around Hyjal for a few hours, and eventually reached the skill level where I could move on, I was also annoyed at mining by the time I got there since everyone was in the zone, and it was hard to find ore anywhere because of that. The mining experience in Deepholm on the other hand made any annoyance fade away, I literally in all of my time with WoW have never seen ore so close together as it was in Deepholm, it made getting ore super easy, but at the same time the difficulty of getting 525 Jewelcrafting made that balance out. I did other things while mining, mainly going back to Stormwind to prospect, and do a few of the higher level instances with my guild, but even then I brought tons of ore to the instance to prospect while waiting around.

When I cut gems, I had tons of them, and I was happy to put them into the guild bank for others to use, especially since with all of the gems I ended up cutting. I was even, able to fill up an entire tab with nothing but things I made, I even moved a few of the WOTLK gems to a bank alt to put back later. It was nice and enjoyable to get to around 520 since I like making things in bulk, and prospecting ore by the dozens was fun too, past 520 however was a different story. I was forced to make rings out of a specific gem, which by itself isn't very hard, however it was a green leveled recipe with a very low chance to raise it up, I believe I spent most of my ore working on that, I even asked Cortegos who was also mining to lend me a few ores which he did so I could have another chance at leveling up before I headed back out. Eventually after a long time I did get 525 but one thing that I did consider and I thought it would bypass was that I was a Draenei, with a 5 JCing bonus which allowed me to get to 525 literally, but not technically resulting in it not registering as a server first so I thought someone got it before me. I did realize that I also didn't get the achievement for reaching 525 with 2 professions, so that gave me hope, and I decided to save my jewel crafting tokens to get a recipe that would let me get to the actual 525.

The recipe in question was a meta gem that required a transmute, I decided to make 50, I would ideally only need 5 but since it was a yellow leveled recipe I didn't want to take any chances. Since making a uncut meta gem required one of each green quality gem, I went out again and mined tons of ore to get 50 of each, one thing I didn't consider however is that it made more than one, and the alchemist I had made it, Ampedup, was a transmutation master, so I got a ton of extras from him. I also had a long talk with others about which meta gem I should get first, since I was also the first one in the guild that was capable of it, and wanted to make one that was helpful. I decided on a tanking one that reduced magical damage (I believe it was stamina, and magic reflect specifically).

Eventually it was the time when the daily would reset, I would then quickly complete it, and then get my skill level to 530 (or 525 normally). Belahn stayed with me, and we waited with a bunch of gems. I was super anxious for the dailies to reset since it was possible that no one else got the server first as I never saw the notification come up. When it was time the JC quest was something that I didn't plan ahead for, I kept a bunch of the green quality gems, except for night stone, and of course to my horror it was one that required night stones, I currently only had 2, and I needed 3. We quickly went to the auction house and bought a ton of ore, and prospected it. Luckily I got a night stone fairly quickly, I turned it in and started to cut the meta gems. As anticlimactic as the action in general was, it felt like it took forever to cut the gems, and even longer when I was at 529. Finally at 530, I got the achievement for getting both skills to 525, and the realm first. I was extremely happy to be able to get an achievement like that, especially because I felt like all of the crafting achievements should have been done by then, but even still I didn't care at that time since I was super glad and relieved. I also received a ton of PMs from people saying congratulations , I was happy and surprised for that too, so I thanked all of them.

In the end, while all of that was a ton of work, from leveling as fast as possible at the start of Cata to farming thousands of ore (I believe by the time I got to 530 I had cut nearly 4000 ores, mostly Elementium) I think it was a fun experience but tiring experience, being with friends was a big part of it, and actually having a chance at the achievement was another. It is also a completely different mindset than just leveling, it almost completely replaces the normal procedure of leveling with being a frantic race. So in the end, I personally don't believe server firsts are much to brag about, but then again, I don't think anything is; I do however, think while Server Firsts do lead to competition, and competition leads to unordinary things, sometimes often unethical ones, Server Firsts in general ,left alone with hardly any planning ahead of time are a unintentional incentive for a unusual and exciting type of fun, and at least a rare experience.

After notes : The spawn rate of the ore deposits in Deepholm have significantly decreased since the release of Cata.

Trial of the Endless Trial - Part Two

Promises of power, and more is a reoccuring theme in the Chaos quests, which is what I spent most of today doing with WAR for about an hour, or more specifically more public quests.

When I logged in today I decided to turn in a quest that I had completed yesterday, but on the way using WAR's fairly confusing-at-first but very comprehensive and soon easy to use map, I spotted another public quest area. Still eager from yesterday's experience with it I quickly ran to it and joined the fray.

This time the quest involved a lot more killing, 3 phases of killing to be precise; first up was 50 militiamen men which fell easily before me and the rest of the forces of destruction, and then things got harder. Duelists appeared afterward, all of which were “champion” ranks so they were super hard to solo, luckily most of the players around me were willing to lend a hand, but in all honestly I mostly just looked around for people to assist rather than killing on my own, and with good reason too, the duelists softened up a lot of players, including myself, and as I haven't really found any sort of regenerative out of combat food so far, it's impact on performance was noticeable. Finally the third phase was something else, a hero ranked defender came out and joined the fray, and as expected he was much much stronger than any of the duelists. My first experience of him was pulling aggro and him laying waste to me fairly quickly, luckily the only real penalty for dying was a 15 minute debuff that lowered my stats for abit, however I also died enough repeating the quest in consecutive attempts that I found out that it stacks to 5. At 5 stacks I was super weak, but still able to fight, a lot easier than death penalties I found in other MMOs that I've played at least (Lord of the Rings Online, and of course World of Warcraft).

As I still really enjoyed the public quest, I kept on waiting for the next session to start. The wait was somewhat longer this time however it was hardly noticeable as well, since normal enemies spawn in the area in the meantime, allowing for some quality grinding time for a few minutes before the real thing started. I ended up doing the public quest about 3-4 times mainly to fill up my influence bar, and then I decided it was time to move on. I headed back to the main camp to find the rally master, and received a few new upgrades from the influence points, and the loot bags I received during the public quest itself. A lot of these items had talisman slots, so I did some looking around at the nearby trade skill trainers, and I was definitely surprised not to find the standard ones such as blacksmith, or mining. However I also didn't really look into all of the trade skills in depth; from what I gather there is Scavenging which takes additional items from dead bodies, Salvaging which allows you to break down items into magical components, Cultivation which I was curious about but ended up not taking, I don't entirely know how that works, and finally there is Butchering, which is probably the most standard, but it still is a new take on “skinning” animals. There is also of course still trades that let you make items, although these seem to be fairly minimal as well. Apothecaries make potions and work hand in hand with Cultivation, and Butchering. While Talisman making creates magical talismans and gets supplies from Salvaging, and Scavenging . I ended up taking Talisman Making mainly because it was the first thing I chose at random, and Salvaging with it, I ended up really liking my decision because a few pieces of the new items I got had talisman slots on them, and I was able to fill those in with “weak” on the talisman “power meter” that displays while you create talismans, but way better than the normal quest reward talismans.

While I didn't do much today, that concludes the second day of WAR; to be honest it was a much more positive experience than the first day for some reason, and I'm even more eager to jump into it tomorrow.

Trial of the Endless Trial - Introduction & Part One

For awhile now I have been curious about Warhammer Online or rather WAR as it's short hand would be. I'll admit that I'm somewhat one of the types that a lot of people would label as a MMO jumper, or I would have been if not for my own decision. After quitting World of Warcraft a few years ago before WAR came out, I was looking for a game that would have a emphasis on PvP to my luck WAR was starting to be announced around then and I decided to stop WoW for WAR. However eventually after a long series of waits I decided to go back to WoW and then from then on I forgot about WAR entirely, now after a long period of time (if I remember right, WAR was in the stages of near final and final development throughout Burning Crusade to the WoW player's timeline) and because of the interest in finding out what the Endless Trial is about, I decided to go check it out.

My first few hours with WAR

From the start I thought I knew what class I wanted to play since I spent, quite literally, days of staring at the classes of WAR while it was only a website, but when I got into the character selection screen itself, I was quite fascinated by all of the classes and how they have different animations when they're selected and high lighted. After simply just watching the small animations play over and over again, I decided to go with my first choice of class before looking through the others, the Orc Choppa; although it was very hard to choose against playing as a Black Orc after thinking the selection animation for him was funny (he hits his blade into the ground and has trouble getting it out for those who haven't seen it).

Unfortunately right at the start I was already kind of disjointed from the game as I expected to start out in a racial zone where I wouldn't see anyone but other Greenskins, and maybe a few Dark Elves and Chaos players around, instead I was apparently summoned through the warp by the Chaos directly to be a part of their army. While this part was unexpected it was definitely not entirely unwelcome as I thought exploring the Chaos would be interesting too, and since the characters are predominately Chaos there's plenty of exploring to do, infact I only saw one Orc npc so far.

The style of questing from what I gather is very similar to the post Cataclysm expansion style of questing in WoW, where you actively move with the quests rather than going to a quest hub and picking up dozens of quests, and doing that for pretty much your entire stay. I personally prefer the Cata style as it's more attention grabbing, whereas the other is definitely more classically MMOish.

The combat is very interesting on the other hand, as a Orc Choppa it seems like a lot of abilities are meant to hit hard but also increase the damage I take to the point of being super easy to hurt. To me this in turn means that it would be a overarching factor to deal with as a Choppa as there are some abilities that would exhaust my berserking and thus reduce the damage I take, but also increase the chance to get a critical strike on myself. While all of this sounds counter productive, it remains to be seen if the game's balance is enough so that my offensive power makes up for my vulnerability. On the same note, I enjoy how flashy and decisive most of the attacks are, that's alittle strange coming from a Orc Choppa I know who is suppose to redefine wild and undisciplined, but it's still true, a lot of the strike skills leave a stream of fire from the swing which makes it easily identifiable which attack is just a auto attack and which one is a used attack. At the same time the animation is often so fast you won't gain a appreciation for it the first few dozen times you use it, instead it takes awhile but it still doesn't at all detract from the deserved attention it gets when it's really looked at.

After doing a few quests that mainly involved going to a location of undead or minor daemons and killing them to prove my worth, I came up to the first actual quest hub of a small outpost where the forces of Destruction were mounting an attack on a village, I at first thought this was very neat because it reminded me of the Death Knight intro sequence where pretty much the entire thing is about raiding a town called Havenshire and New Avalon, in WAR however this is where I first encountered public quests.

The addition and style of public quests really drew me in, the set up was that players in the town would have to defend cultists who were preparing to summon a daemon to aid in the further razing of the town. The first thing I noticed is that you never had to actually be in a group during the quest, a window simply popped up that said you were in the vicinity of the public quest and that allowed you to participate in it, even if it was ongoing, the main and only problem with that part of the system is that there really is no visible boundary of the quest, but there still is a boundary, so leaving it would remove you from participation. It does however keep your progress in that session, making it a minor point. The quest itself had multiple short stages making the quest overall fairly fast and painless, the first was to kill milita men that threatened the cultists, moving onto gathering nearby stones from the tombstones to aid in the summoning, finally there was a small scene of the beast coming forth, however as most could suspect the beast itself isn't controlled, and it soon turns on it's chaos controllers, from then on it has to be put down by the players. At the end of all of this a scoreboard pops up ranking your contribution against everyone else, I'm not entirely sure what the contribution scores on but I assume it's based on completing objectives, there are of course other factors like for slaying objectives in terms of how much damage I did to a particular enemy against someone else, but again the scoreboard gives no representation of what it actually scores contribution on. In the end, while that part isn't specifically stated, generally the contribution score is right on the nose. Another factor in a player's score is called the “persistence bonuses” which are awarded if a player participated in the last match but didn't win anything. Finally at the end, everyone does a random dice roll seeming to range from 1 to 999 and that adds to a player's overall score which determines the quality of loot bag they get, and if they get a loot bag at all. I'm not entirely sure if the amount of players participating scales with the amount of loot given out, but I was able to get at least a minor loot bag each time, and sometimes a green quality loot bag. On one occasion out of maybe only 4 attempts in the public quest, I scored the highest on the contributions but ended up being in 5^th place because of the roll. All in all I think the public quest system is a super fun and innovative addition to simply questing, they're more like instances but not entirely as they take place in the world itself; the addition of loot, and competitive ranking helped make it quite easy to come back a few more times.

While I was redoing the public quest just to see what kind of ranks I could get against other people, there were a few Empire players that came by, they were of course level 10 while everyone else around me was level 3-4ish so they were in a clear advantage, however after the current session that was ongoing, everyone decided to team up on them. After a short while the Empire was able to easily kill a few of my allies including myself. We were able to kill them, and as a result I got my first renown points even though I had died. Although I haven't really looked into renown, it seems like it's simply a ranking of how much PvP, or rather RvR that you participate in; success probably also plays a factor into it, however even as a causality I was still was able to gain a degree of points, so it seems like a fairly lenient system, but only time will tell.

Public quests also have another role to attend too as well, the gaining of influence points. Currently I'm not sure if public quests are the only way to gain influence points but it was the only noticeable increment point for me, not that that's a bad thing. Influence allows players to gain “Influence Rewards” which are simply just extra items, you are limited to only one item per tier of influence because as I found out once you use up influence you are not able to gain more of it if you've already reached the maximum amount.

That's about the end of the first few hours I spent with the Warhammer Online Endless Trial on the side of Destruction. There are quite a lot of ways to advance your character from what I've seen so far, from achievements, to stat tracking which is definitely a hook for me. However it remains to be seen if I am able to handle it's all too familiar MMORPG conventions and game play. While WAR definitely has new takes on those said conventions, and game play, it still doesn't separate it enough from the feel of familiarity of other games I've played for me, but I guess the same can be said for every person, and game out there.

Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six : Vegas 2 - Review

Rainbow Six Vegas 2 brings more of what people love about the Rainbow Six series, with more rigid character progression.

Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2 is the sequel to Rainbow Six Vegas, the introduction of the Rainbow Six series onto now current gen gaming. It is a tactical shooter with the game play backings of realism, and although it has a lot more action than most stealth focused games, it still manages to strike a fairly good balance between combat and stealth game play, all of which is done from the same perspective.

You are placed in the role of Bishop, a team leader for one of the squads of Rainbow. The game starts off with events before the first game that allows the player to see the escalation of the terrorist attack, as well from a different team’s view point. This type of story telling of course raises the issue of if you would need to play the first game to understand the story. While it isn’t completely needed, playing the first game would greatly enhance the ability to know what is happening in the game, and for the most part the game is so clustered together and put together a way that almost consists of you getting into a firefight immediately without any real small sessions of the characters strategizing, or discussing events that took place. In the end it would help leaps and bounds to play the first game if only for it’s story if you’re looking for Vegas 2 in that regard, however with that aside, the game has numerous improvements, and additions over it’s predecessor.

As you start the game off those who have played the first game will immediately notice that the character creation screen, previously only accessed directly through the multiplayer menus, displays right after the intro logos, while the facial customization is fairly limited in terms of default face selection, it does have a passable amount of variety. Armor and clothing customization is also included and displayed on your character, which has a in-game effect, as wearing heavier armor will offer more protection, whereas wearing light armor would allow you to move faster while not being as protected as the heavy armor provides. This of course brings up the issue of “How much protection would heavy armor provide?” it’s actually a sizable amount, while still staying in line with the super fragile feel of the game. While you won’t be able to soak up bullets ever, and taking a bullet to the head will always result in death, the protection improvement is definitely noticeable as you get into combat, and on the other hand, mobility is also noticeable when you need it especially to rush a enemy’s position, or to quickly get into cover, however on both ends even the most dramatic maximization and minimization for one stat for the other won’t make a huge difference in game play, it is a very slight feature in all but appearance wise where someone who has a lot of protection looks very armored, where as someone without it would look less bulky. The armor options still also give off the look of a militarized special ops unit even when going out of your way to try to outfit your character to look as wild as possible.

Thankfully all of the customization with your character isn’t waylaid to the side during single player as many games do, your character completely carries over to the story mode of the game. Another new improvement to the game is the A.C.E.S. system, standing for Advanced Combat Enhancement Specialization, basically it is a way to further improve your character. You gain experience points for simply shooting someone which leads to you leveling up, however you also gain additional points in other aspects depending on how you kill enemies, for example if you kill a enemy with a grenade, you would get 2 points in assault, where as killing someone at a long distance would give you points in marksmanship. The way the system is included in single player, and multiplayer makes it a very good incentive to play the game a lot more than one round through the story mode, besides for progression reasons, it also handles how the game unlocks weapons, and additional clothing, and armor pieces for your character, as you further improve your rating in one of the system’ categories, it’ll give you rewards from additional experience to a brand new rifle.

After you finish the campaign, there quite a few other game play modes to keep your attention for awhile, starting with the returning Terrorist Hunt mode that let’s you take on the smart AI by yourself or with a few friends. While the AI can be cheap at times, sometimes spawning enemies in convenient locations that would allow them to flank you easily, Terrorist Hunt remains a fun and challenging mode. Finally there’s the competitive multiplayer component which for the most part remains the same, with new maps. All of these modes share the same character that you create when you first start the game up, in fact the only thing that doesn’t carry over is your weapon load out which lets players select different weapons for different occasions.

The game play itself is almost identical to what one would have come to expect from the Rainbow Six series, it’s a mixture of a tactical shooter with a lot of realism, in short you won’t be soaking up bullets without dying for very long. The movement is also a lot more weighted than most shooters giving it a further realistic feel, and finally the graphics and sound are brilliant. As gunfire rings through the Las Vegas strip you can see fantastic spectacles of light that are more than muzzle flashes, the buildings and the environmental lightning is very pleasing to look at, and the character models are realistic looking, and look much smoother than the first game.

All in all, Rainbow Six Vegas 2 is a improvement over the first game in every way except story, where it provides a very interesting concept, but it lacks the presentation to follow through, as well as having little to none “previously on” semblance to catch players up who either don’t want to, or haven’t played the first game. The game is definitely not for everyone, if you approach it like a fast paced shooter like say (Unreal Tournament or the more recent Call of Duty series), the game doesn’t pull any punches having the AI teach you why that’s a bad idea right off the bat; although if you can get used to the way Rainbow Six handles the shooter genre, it can be a very rewarding, and at the very least, a unique feel to the genre, making this game stand out amongst the crowd.

Concept Implementation - Great

-As with all Rainbow Six games, Vegas 2 provides a very satisfying realistic feel to the FPS genre that is done well.

Gameplay - Great

-All of the game’s mechanics gather together to make you feel like a special forces soldier.

Presentation - Average

-There is a severe lack of story line coherency in the game mainly because it goes off the idea that the player has played the first game, however this is not rectified in every a small way that would allow someone who hasn’t played the first game to ease in. There are also a few technical gimmicks that are extremely noticeable.

Graphics - Good

-While not much of an improvement over the first time, the variety of new art assets the game adds makes up for that, and in general the game still is a good looking game, particularly in the effects of combat.

Sound/Music - Great

-The sound goes a long way in Rainbow Six games, and Vegas 2 isn’t any exception; the music is also an improvement over the first one, while it doesn’t exactly add any groundbreaking scores, it does add a memorable theme.

Singularity Score : Single Player - 2, Multiplayer - 3

Overall Score - 22/25 Great

Warhammer 40,000 : Dawn of War 2 - Chaos Rising - Review

An additional, and popular faction in the Warhammer universe, as well as a new and much more intriguing story make Chaos Rising a great expansion, and even a fantastic game on it’s own.

Warhammer 40k Dawn of War 2 Chaos Rising is an expansion to the well received RTS game Dawn of War 2, it adds a huge amount of content, making the game even more appealing than it was before.

The first and probably the most obvious inclusion that comes with this package is the addition of the Chaos to both the single player and multiplayer game modes. These evil servants of the dark gods of the Warhammer 40k universe were former members of the Imperium, but were turned either by the corruption of chaos energies, or willingly allowed themselves to be corrupted in a lust for power. However the humans aren’t the only units in the legions of Chaos, they are also supported by Daemons sent by the dark gods to aid them, these evil creatures take the place of more traditional members of a faction, and are generally stronger than the standard Chaos Marine, however like everything in the game, the units are balanced fairly well, and the Chaos will still have to fight their hardest to harvest blood for the blood god.

Speaking of fighting, despite the fact that Chaos is the addition to the game, it is to either no one or everyone’s surprise that they are the primary antagonists of the new single player campaign. Set about 1 year after the events of Dawn of War 2, as the characters attempt to cope after the events of the original game, a mystery occurs; a formerly prosperous planet Aurelia that  had been assaulted and thought to be destroyed by the warp, returns, and the Blood Ravens receive a signal emitting from it at which they proceed to investigate.  It doesn’t take too long for things to turn sideways, and the events that follow thrust the Blood Ravens into a full scale war against the forces of Chaos. On this second tour of duty however many things have changed, the only thing that remains the same are the characters of the first game reprising their roles.

Despite being the same people, Chaos Rising goes leaps and bounds to improve upon the personality and involvement of all of the characters in your squad, and the treatment is even applied to your Force Commander somewhat. Many of your squad mates will speak their mind, and give tactical advice based on the mission, this is greatly altered by how the mission is going, and there are a few different ways it can go with the inclusion of choices. While many of the choices are fairly black and white, or rather corrupted and pure, the choices that would lean you towards corrupted are fitting, because they are truly evil and cruel to perform and more align you to the side of Chaos rather than the Imperium of Man. As your squad mates have developed a trust for their commander, they may not enjoy committing such acts but will allow it, and in the end the acts corrupt them as well.

Besides the outcome of simply being evil, there are also benefits for being corrupted that can be unlocked in the way that additional skills or abilities are unlocked by allocating points into a stat path, this is probably one of the most alluring parts of the corrupted side, as there are many powers of corruption while only one pure benefit. Even still, the pure ability for each character is powerful in it’s own right, and either side won’t disappoint. There are of course, stat path expansions for all of the characters which further increase the customization of the first game, as well as new war gears including a new and powerful level of rarity, and a level cap increase to level 30. Despite all of this it won’t be very hard for the player to get to the cap before the end of the game.

There are numerous additions to the cast of Dawn of War 2, mostly on the Chaos side, however the Blood Ravens do have a ally in Jonah Orion, a librarian who joins them, and provides a new point of view, as well as being a powerful fighter himself. While he’s not the toughest member of the Blood Ravens, he has the potential to specialize in almost any stat path in the game, and have a completely different playing style depending on the selected path. His skills and abilities that are altered depending on the chosen tree are drastic in comparisons to the other characters, making him a highly customizable but still fun new character.

As of course with the first game, there is the multiplayer component as well. Multiplayer is largely unchanged but rather improved with the addition of Chaos playable forces, the forces of Chaos themselves have a fairly high amount of customization starting with the hero selection screen proceeding into actual game play. Each of Chaos’ 3 hero units dedicates themselves to a particular god of Chaos which strengthens certain upgrade paths, and limits others, such as the Plague Champion who will be able to build shrines of Nurgel but will be unable to build shrines to Khrone or Tzeentch. They all have unique benefits that greatly change play styles, but also compliment their hero’s already distinctive play style; for example, the Shrine of Nurgel allows the Defense specialized Plague Champion to heal their units, and reinforce if heretics are worshipping it, this allows them to further fortify a position and take on an attack.

Chaos Rising has also added two new hero characters to The Last Stand, the Hive Tyrant, and the Chaos Sorcerer. These heroes like the others have their own abilities that separate them apart, such as the Hive Tyrant while being a impressive brute of force on his own, can also call upon minions with the appropriate war gear to assist him. While the Chaos Sorcerer can take hold of a enemy and use them as a ally for the battle. In the end the Warbands of Chaos still fit right in with the other races, and are a welcome addition to the Dawn of War 2 family.

All in all, Chaos Rising is a fantastic expansion to the Dawn of War series, and while I wouldn’t entirely recommend it as a stand alone it is definitely possible and worth it if you want to just see all of the additions of Chaos that it has provided, but it’s strong point is still taking a great game, and putting massive additions to it, creating a interesting, and vastly improved campaign, and a improved and even more diverse multiplayer experience.

Concept Implementation - Great

-Improves upon Dawn of War 2’s already fantastic focus on the action of RTS games, also successfully plants the Chaos faction right in with the original 4.

Game Play - Great

-Playing the Chaos will seem familiar and different at the same time. While everything else is largely unchanged, the new additions to the single player and multiplayer are fantastic.

Presentation - Good

-The storyline is much more interesting this time around than the first, however there still is no addition of any tutorials for any races besides the Space Marines.

Graphics - Great

-All of the new units look just as good as the old ones, and the forces of Chaos look as dark and threatening as they should.

Sound/ Music - Good

-The voices of Chaos Marines on the field is unmistakable and unique, while most of the sounds in combat sound the same, there is enough added to make the sound distinguishable. Music on the other hand is largely reused, but as it is reused it retains the same quality, maybe not the same amount of excitement however.

Singularity Score : Single Player - 3, Multiplayer - 2

Overall Score - 23/25 Great

Warhammer 40,000 : Dawn of War 2 - Review

Amazing battles, a new placement in Relic’s style of RTS games, and a decent story make Dawn of War 2 worth checking out.

Warhammer 40k Dawn of War 2 is a Real-Time Strategy game developed by THQ and Relic, and another installment in their long running series of Dawn of War games.

The game is set in the Warhammer 40k universe where the basic premise is that it is standard fantasy taken to the future where all of the standard races that make up what people think of when they think of fantasy such as humans, Orcs, and elves, all have guns. The unique twist on what would be kind of a standard setting is that they all retain their archetypical traits such as Orcs are bloodthirsty but they also add additional quirks such as how the Orcs spell their racial name, the Orks, which displays their intelligence, as well as how the Orks can be considered the comic relief of Warhammer 40k. In what is a fairly dark, and grim universe the Orks are seen as uncontrolled, bloodthirsty, can still be considered comical in ways such as how they do a poor imitation of their gun sound as they shoot, or simply being unaware of things that the more intelligent races would easily take note of.

Now, I know this is a lot of information about the universe the game is in, rather than the game itself, but this is also where a lot of the game’s charm is at. In all honesty, as with all of the previous Dawn of War titles, Dawn of War 2 excels are bringing the table top game to your computer screen, and this installment pushes that implementation even further with the campaign.

In Dawn of War 2’s campaign, you play as a newly appointed commander to the Space Marines of Sub-Sector Aurelia, there is little to no introduction however, as the planet Calderis is assailed by Orks which you are assigned to aid in the defense of. Along the way you’ll be joined by Space Marines and their squad leaders such as the Tactical Marine, Tarkus, and Cyrus of the Scout Marines. If their titles sound like unit types, that’s because they are, many units of Dawn of War 2 act as a small group rather than an individual, and when there are individual units, they are usually balanced in a way that would allow them to be stronger than a small unit group. Squad leaders don’t simply serve as a recognizable character in a squad however, they are also the main characters of the game, all of the dialog done by the space marines is through the squad leaders, and a few extra supporting characters, while many of the characters seem generic at first, they all have their back-story quirks, motivations, and developments that will end up making many players warm up to them. Despite this, there is almost no player interaction with the supporting cast (all of it is done before the game starts essentially), and the force commander simply serves as a avatar for the player.

There is quite a bit of customization in Dawn of War 2’s single player campaign however, as a player advances through the campaign they will come across war gear which can be sorted through in a after mission screen which takes places on the player’s flagship, and although it’s just a screen, it gives a good impression of being on the ship without actually showing what’s inside the ship. There the player can level and equip war gear to improve a efficiency, as well as be aesthetically displayed on that character. On the topic of leveling up, Characters can spend points in 4 different stats, in general terms they are health, firearms, melee skills, and energy which allows a character to do more special abilities; all 4 stats improve upon the specific stat, but also give the character an additional ability as they further advance into that path. All of the paths are fairly balanced, and allows players to customize their characters in unusual but still effective ways such as giving someone who would normally be seen with a bolter, a chain sword, there are very few limitations on the customization system, and although underrated, is quite a interesting part of the game.

The game’s single player campaign removes all forms of base building, and has very minimal structure interaction in general, the game very much focuses on getting units into the battle, using their skills, and cover to overcome the enemy, and possibly finishing them off, I say possibly because the game includes a feature that will allow your units to retreat if they are in a losing position, which will relinquish all control of them to get them to the nearest strategic point.

That brings us to the high-light of Dawn of War 2, the battles. While the game play has it’s own way of striding away from the standard RTS formula, it still very much displays it within the battles, the combat is fairly fast paced, and tactical with management of units being key in both single player, and multiplayer. Every unit is designed to do something very specific, while at the same time making it vulnerable to something else, for example a Space Marine Devastator squad uses a lot of heavy weapons to well… devastate the enemy, however at the same time that squad requires a degree of setting up, and if engaged quickly by flanking, or through melee combat, the space marines will be at a noticeable disadvantage, this situation can be applied to almost every unit in the game in different ways, and it is only when they all collide together, does quick unit management, or finding a flaw in the enemy’s strategy and utilizing it, turn the tide.

The graphics and sound in Dawn of War 2 are also extremely well done, the environments, and units are very well detailed, with their models rivaling almost every non-RTS game in the market to this day. The environments that range from war torn to breath taking are all very detailed as well, and as war ravages it, the changes on the environment are noticeable thanks to many of the buildings, and walls being destructible, which of course provides new strategic opportunities besides simply wrecking the landscape.

In terms of balancing, the battles take very different spins in multiplayer and single player, in single player while there is definitely a element of tactics, the enemies are balanced to either be cannon fodder for the player, or to provide a challenge, the enemies do not scale to the same way as they would if you faced them in multiplayer, and that alone provides a very different take on the two modes of game play.

The Multiplayer itself takes a completely different approach to the game, the first thing most people will notice is that it allows you to take control of all of the game’s factions instead of just the Space Marines like the campaign does. It features the standard annihilation game type which is is the standard destroy your enemy’s base to win, and the other game type is different variations of “victory point control” where you win by controlling victory points on the map, as with most games that feature this style of goal, the fighting is very pinpointed and can be chaotic and fun in it’s own right. For practice or for people who simply want to play or try out the multiplayer modes alone, Dawn of War 2 also features bots, while the bots don’t seem to be the smartest things ever, they can get the job done, and are more than suitable for a easy to set up and fun alternate way to experience the multiplayer aspect.

In the end Warhammer 40k Dawn of War 2 is a fantastic RTS game with a focus on action that you’ll love if you like actions, or are looking to expand into the RTS genre but never enjoyed the aspect of base building, or even if you’re a Warhammer 40k fan looking to see how the game has translated to the computer, while the game isn’t for everyone, it’s a fantastic game that will capture many people in one way or another.

Concept Implementation : Great

-Foregoes most structure building to get the players into RTS combat, and focus on it very well. It also stays true to the Warhammer 40k fiction, and essentially transitions the normally table top experience to a RTS game.

Gameplay : Great

-The controlling and management of units are fairly standard RTS fare, much of it’s charm being placed in the combat itself, which is both tactical, and fast paced.

Presentation : Average

-Lacks any form of tutorials for controlling the other factions besides Space Marines. Other than that the storyline is fulfilling and coherent but a little on the lacking side in terms of being compelling.

Graphics : Great

-The unit models, effects, and environments are all stylish, detailed, and just in general fantastic.

Sound/Music : Good

-All of the sound effects in DoW2 simply make the battles even more enjoyable than watching them directly, the music somewhat sounds like slight alterations of the same score, but often times than not, it is around to add some atmosphere without being the main focus.

Singularity Score : Single Player - 2, Multiplayer - 3

Overall Score - 22/25 Great