Okay, I will review Warhammer Online, the newly released MMORPG from Mythic. Mythic is a subdivision of Electronic Arts and also produced the MMORPG Dark Age of Camelot, a pretty popular MMORPG for a while. You'll find many Warhammer Online Gold (from henceforth referred to as WAR) players are former Dark Age of Camelot (henceforth referred to as DAoC) players.

I have never played DAoC so I am in no position to compare it in any way to Warhammer Gold. Now, to start the review.

Tutorial/Introduction

As you start you'll find character creation very straght forward, choosing from a few heads, hair styles, so on so forth. WAR offers about 9 classes per side (Order and Destruction). Although the Destruction actually has 8 for male and 9 for female being the Witch Elf is female only. The tutorial is fairly well done and leads nicely (kind of seamlessly) into the start of the game.

At first you're introduced to basic combat and quest taking and completing . Then using cannons and collecting stuff and what not. By level 2 you'll be able to enter isntanced Player vs. Player (PvP) combat. Warhammer Gold has a nice feature, when entering PvP at a low level it will apply a Bolster rank to you and bost your level a bit higher. For the first Scenario (1-11) it will boost it to level 8. At level 7-8 you begin Open RvR (Realm vs. Realm, pretty much a fancy term for PvP). Open RvR is simply an area of the map where your RvR Flag is forced on no matter what. The usually have a flag on the Battlefield that you need to capture. They're fun encounters... if anyone would ever participate in them. Leading to...

Travel

Arguably one of the most important features of any MMORPG. The ability to travel the vast land at will and with speed. This is really something WAR kind of fails at. You can travel from one map to another by Flight Masters but there's no micro-movement in the maps to get you from city-to-city. This leaves you kind of hanging around a lot of the time if you want to go back to another city or place

One of the best examples is Troll Country. It's about a level 13-15 map, which means you have no mount. But, your starting area and the Flight Master is on the opposite side, which means if you want sell something in Altdorf you have some long walks. As well, the Warcamp that you go to when you die in a Keep Siege is also on the other side of the map (when compared to the Keep) which leaves you for another long walk back. In the end you are walking places a lot and crossing the map (a half-way decent sized map) a good bit.