I woke up late today (8am is late for me), and went out to Target to purchase Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (WAR). I've just barely played it; mostly I created new characters just so I could get names I like... I mostly succeeded.

Everything I've heard about the game has said that most players choose Destruction (one of two factions; the other is Order), and, well, I did the same. I ended up creating characters on one of the low population servers for almost all of the Destruction classes. I did create an Order char on another server (a Dwarf Rune Priest), but I think I'm going to concentrate on being the bad guy for now. I'm mostly planning to focus on my Witch Elf and my Disciple of Khaine, but we'll see how that goes since I've only been playing for a day now.

Every time I jump into a new MMO, I feel like there's a ton to digest: the official game material is usually pretty weak, and new players really have to put in time to scan through blogs, forums, podcasts, etc. to get up to speed. That's currently where I'm at; hopefully I won't screw up my characters too badly.

One thing that struck me right off the bat were the graphics. It's pretty clear that this game is targeting the low-end PC owner in the same way that WoW is. I have a decent graphics card (9850) and things definitely don't look as good as other recent MMOs like Tabula Rasa. That might very well be the way forward, given that most players don't have high-end PCs, and MMO gamers tend not to care about graphics if the gameplay is good enough.