Public Quests
WAR's most innovative feature could be its Public Quest system, which gets players involved in group-oriented encounters on the fly. When there are a lot of players your level around or you can get a guild group together, these can be a lot of fun. Loot is distributed automatically based on a combination of your contribution and a die roll, and there are also rewards for Influence, which is earned by completing chapters in the PQ system.
The biggest problem I see with PQs, and the reason more games don't have them, is because they rely heavily on player numbers. As players get spread out across the game's levels, it gets harder to find suitable groups for PQs, especially outside of primetime hours. It's likely that having an active guild will end up being the only way to experience much of this content, which sort of defeats the purpose of them being "public."
PvP Scenarios
Scenarios are instanced PvP battles with an assortment of objectives and a roughly balanced team sizes. These are available in WAR right from level one and, unlike most MMORPGs, they are a good source of both normal experience and PvP experience (Renown).
You can queue for a Scenario anywhere in the world, and you're returned to that point when the scenario is over. As of the first major patch, you can queue for all 3 of the scenarios in your tier at the same time. While this has helped reduce waiting times for Scenarios, it hasn't completely resolved the problem, and when the initial surge of players reaches the mid-levels, low-level Scenarios are likely to become barren.
Realm vs. Realm
Central to WAR is the realm vs. realm conflict between Order and Destruction, which is divided into three branches, each of which pits two of the game's races against each other. Every zone in the game has an area that is dedicated to RvR with several objectives in it which ultimately decide who controls the zone. Any player entering these areas is flagged for PvP and can proceed to capture enemy keeps and bases.
At the top tier this mechanic extends to a siege of the enemy's capital city, although it will be a while yet before anyone sees this played out in WAR post-launch.
RvR suffers from some of the same drawbacks as PQs. Mythic does give you a rough indication how populated the realms are when you select a server, but there's nothing in the RvR system that prevents one side from being hopelessly outnumbered. Of course, that's part of the idea behind RvR; the trouble is that the outnumbered side will typically just find something else to do, leaving the other team with no one to fight.
When both sides show up in force RvR can be very engaging, especially when keeps and other objectives with siege pads are involved, but the 2 on 1 type of blowouts are much more common. During off hours, it can be hard to find RvR of any kind in your level bracket. Hopefully participation will increase when a larger pool of players reach the level cap.
In fact, WAR is more reliant on the playerbase to make the game enjoyable than most MMORPGs. The dynamics of Public Quests, Scenarios, and RvR all depend heavily on a healthy and reasonably balanced player population. If the game can't sustain sufficient numbers, or the sides get too imbalanced, these features will simply go unused, something that seems inevitable for much of WAR's low-level content.
Crafting
There are currently 4 gathering skills and 2 crafting skills in WAR, allowing players to make potions and talismans. Talismans are applied to items to give them stat bonuses. Basic materials, such as seeds, drop from mobs or are rewarded for questing rather than being collected from nodes in the world. A skill is then applied to these basic materials to produce the materials you actually craft with.
Again, in what I assume is an effort to be different, they've dispensed with recipes in favor of having you take some ingredients, mix them together, and get somewhat unpredictable results. Although having an arbitrary aspect to crafting maybe more realistic, it doesn't make it any more compelling. It's hard to get excited about making something if you have very little idea what the results will be. Like so many other MMORPGs, I found myself making all sorts of useless stuff and unloading it on vendors just to work up my skill. I'd wager that Mythic will rethink this crafting system in the future, because as it stands really doesn't add much to this already ambitious project.
The Bottom Line
WAR may not be the most inspired game of its kind, but it's a sound offering with all the potential it needs take second place in North America and Europe. Mythic deserves credit for having an impressively complete set of features at launch, including a functional PvP system that grants both XP and item rewards, instead of leaving these things for future updates. I will reiterate that a lot of the fun in WAR is going to depend on who shows up for the fight, and when they show up, which could be the game's greatest weakness. If it's PvE you're after, other games do it better, but most PvP fans will find something to like about Warhammer Online - it just may require some patience.
