vs. 
An elephant was born November 23rd, 2004 and her name was World of Warcraft. On September 18th she’s getting a baby brother and his name is Warhammer.
It’s inevitable. Comparisons will be made from now until one of them flops and sinks into obscurity where the public at large stops talking about them. World of Warcraft is the elephant in the room and she’s impossible to ignore. With 2.5 million subscriptions in North America and 2.0 million subscriptions in Europe she’s eclipsed every expectation possible. Do you think Sebastian Hammer ever thought it would get this popular?
The year of 2008 has seen a few challengers come and go but no one has been able to stand up to the challenge. Come September we will have a new comer to the MMO market. His name is Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. Now you may ask, “Why is this one different when all others have failed?” It’s a good question but there are some distinct differences in the history of each IP. Other lauded challengers such as Lord of the Rings Online and Age of Conan had rich backgrounds in popular literary works and films, but Warhammer has a background primarily in games. This is a major distinction. This lays an important foundation for the inherent fanbase’s mindset that is inherited with the franchise. Hell, everyone quotes the infamous Penny Arcade comic every chase they get when you discuss WAR vs. WOW so you can see the mentality. That mindset is a good place to start and it’s very similar to what Blizzard Warcraft franchise brought with it when it released it’s MMO version.
Is that it though? Is that all the baby elephant needs to grow? No. You need things like gameplay, server stability, content and polish. How do you compare the full grown elephant to her baby brother? World of Warcraft has had 4 years of development. Is it fair to compare WOW of 2008 to WAR or do we use a four year old standard? After cycles of content patches, updates and fixes, with years to add content for not only the hardcore of the hardcore but massive amounts of content for the casual player where do you start comparing the two games?
With any DIKU game you can break down content to two fundamental types, PVE and PVP. On the outside you could categorize WOW and PVE focused game where WAR is a PVP focused. With that, let us begin with PVE.
Player vs. Environment Content
Where does each game differ? Let’s dive in.
Each game has “leveling content”, the content that you go through as you bring your character from beginning to end. WOW has levels from 1 through 70 consisting of large maps to explore. From levels 1-20 WOW has eight different starting grounds four for Alliance and four for Horde. After level 20 WOW converges cuts that in half into two tracks (one per continent per faction) up to an estimated level 45. At this point from level 45-70 each faction has one track to follow. So in summary, WOW is roughly replayable without any repeat content eight times from 1-20, four times up to around level 45, and twice up to 70. Granted you are experiencing the same environment on many occasions but you are following different story lines.
In WAR, the game is developed differently. WAR has ranks from 1 through 40, where you progress through different terrains to reach the end. You have three racial pairings, Order vs. Chaos, Dwarf vs. Greenskin and High Elf vs. Dark Elf. Each pairing is split into four Tiers. Tiers 1-3 have two maps a piece while Tier 4 ranges from six to eight depending on the pairing. Each Tier brings you through 10 levels. You can effectively replay this game six different times and only repeat content when you enter in the PVP environments.
Comparison:
In a numbers game WOW has much more leveling content in it’s entirety but WAR has more individual content from a repeatability point of view. Whether or not you find the quality of your experience is completely subjective. Given that I think it’s a draw.
Warhammer +1, World of Warcraft +1
In World of Warcraft, from beginning to end you have a large selection of dungeons and raids for you and your friends to fight through. If you count them up, you have roughly 35 dungeons and 16 raids. Most of them are driven by a few quests and world integrated story lines (See: Molten Core and Blackwing Lair).
In Warhammer the number is quite smaller. You don’t have nearly as many instanced dungeon environments, but you do have a few like Bastion Stairs, Lost Vale and Mount Gunbad as described in this preview.
Comparison:
World of Warcraft wins hands down, which isn’t surprising given their more PVE focused game, an expansion and the shear age of the game. Warhammer does make a amazing effort with their Public Quest system. It was a close call whether or not the Public Quests would count in this particular comparison, but in the end they were ruled out because they didn’t encompass the the scope and size of a standard dungeon or raid. So Warhammer gets an honorable mention for having loads of boss fights and other fun games sprinkled throughout their PVE (and PVP) landscape. World of Warcraft wins this round.
World of Warcraft +1
Player vs. Player Content
What can we compare here? World of Warcraft’s PVP landscape has changed several times in it’s lifetime. It’s gone from open ended world pvp without any objectives, to an open world honor system, to the battlegrounds and the fight for Rank 14, to current day’s Battlegrounds and Arenas. Do we take into account World of Warcraft’s landscape from beginning to end or do we use what’s being played today? I think it’s only fair that we use today battleground/arena content and compare it to Warhammers RvR system.
World of Warcraft:
The meat and bones of World of Warcraft’s PVP content can be summarizes as Battlegrounds and Arenas. We’ll also mention the open world PVP such as Halaa, sand collection in Silithis or capturing points in Terrokar Forest but we won’t weight them as much since they are very rarely the focus of the population at large when compared to the popularity of Battlegrounds and Arenas.
That being said, World of Warcraft has four different Battleground maps with unique objectives to each a long with three different Arena Maps. There are two different currencies for each, honor points and arena points. Each used to procure equipment. Honor points are gained immediately while Arena points are gained on a weekly basis based on a weekly scoring system. Your Arena score also dictates which pieces of equipment you can purchase. Currently World of Warcraft is in Season 4. With each new season new sets of equipment are available for purchase.
It should also be noted that time commitment for purchasing equipment can be measured in weeks, if not months, for a complete set. Newer additions have offered lesser quality equipment based on the WOW PVE reputation system with the cost of gold.
Warhammer:
Where World of Warcraft focuses more of their efforts with their PVE system, Warhammer bases their game on war. When the developers and the PR folks say “War is Everywhere” they are not lying to you. Trying to describe a whole game in a few paragraphs is a difficult endeavor, however an effort to keep it to a few major points will be made.
Each map in Warhammer has a designated Realm vs. Realm accompanied with a myriad of quests and objectives, some repeatable and some not. As you progress through the chapters and tiers the designated RvR grows larger encompassing more and more of the map until almost the whole map is engrossed in WAR. Each area is full of capturable structures like Keeps. Fighting toe to toe is not all that is expected of you. You also have to maintain and use rams, catapults and other items to lay siege to your enemies.
Along side the RvR areas you have Scenarios that are compared equally with World of Warcraft’s battlegrounds. Each RvR area has a warcamp, each warcamp has a Scenario. This means that at every stage of racial pairings you have one scenario. Right off the bat that is more than double the amount that World of Warcraft.
Instead of Honor counts and Arena rankings WAR has it’s own PVP leveling system called Renown Ranks. There are double the amount of Renown Ranks than there are regular Ranks. Renown Ranks, or RR’s are gained by winning scenarios, completing RvR objectives and killing your enemies. All of this in permanent, just like any other leveling system. Gear is purchased with money and you just have to meet the rank requirements. It is very accessible, gear is purchased at each warcamp and at the RvR Keeps if you are in control of them.
Comparison:
When you compare both games with World of Warcrafts shallow PVP system with 3 Arena maps and 4 Battlegrounds and Warhammers robust focus on the RvR system there is no contest, and this is without taking into effect WAR’s endgame city sieging. This is not a surprise however since Warhammer’s main focus in on PVP and not PVE. Warhammer wins hands down.
Warhammer +1
Elder Game or End Game
It’s been mentioned previously but much weight hasn’t been put into either when scoring either game. While Warcraft’s end game is well documented with raiding 10 and 25 man dungeons, arena play and daily quests with reputation work, Warhammer’s end game has only been described by game devs and PR people. The bulk of it is still under NDA so there are no comments on it as of now. However, from all reports, it’s in the game and has been rigorously tested in their Beta program. The elder game for Warhammer consist of territory control leading up to large grandiose city sieging and King slaying (the only reported PVE raid-like encounter). The full details are yet to be seen so right now no comparison can be made until the game is released and the content is played out.
Polish, Stability and Compatibility
You can have all the content you want but if it isn’t stable, polished and doesn’t run on almost any computer, you won’t win anything. Lets run through a few different points and award points accordingly.
Polish
Blizzard is known for polish. What else would they be doing during two year expansion cycles? It’s their forte, their trademark. Warhammer at this point is still in Beta, though it’s late. The game looks good however there are issues, namely animations, client syncing and a few other blurbs here and there. I say World of Warcraft almost wins this by default, but don’t count Warhammer out in a month or two.
World of Warcraft +1
Stability
Both games have been very stable in WAAAGH!Hammer’s tests. There have been some crash to desktops in Warhammer however not many. Both games are very stable on the server side. Warcraft gets the slight edge.
Warhammer +1, World of Warcraft +1.5
Compatibility
It’s almost impossible to compare both of them. You’re comparing a 4 year old game to a newly released one. By all account it’s been documented that Warhammer runs on video cards as old as the Geforce 6xxx series. A better comparison will be when Wrath of the Lich King is released for WOW and you can compare their updated dynamic lightning upgrade to Warhammer. So the jury is off, but let’s give each game a point.
Warhammer +1, World of Warcraft +1
Conclusion
Nothing right now can overcome the elephant in the room that is World of Warcraft. Their dominance in the North American and European market is solid. The baby brother in Warhammer has a very good chance of challenging. With their gaming background and fanbase, especially in Europe where Warhammer is extremely popular, they have all the tools to challenge in certain smaller markets in subscription numbers. Where Warcraft dominates with their PVE efforts, I believe that Warhammer will dominate comparatively with their PVP game. In the end, Warcraft is a better game mainly because it’s a four year old game with years and uncountable man hours in creating and polishing content that holds up to the Blizzard reputation. It has proven that it has staying power with enough content to keep maximum level characters engrossed and logged in on a daily basis. What’s up in the air is Warhammer’s ability to do the same, so we’ll see.
Final Score: Warhammer 4, World of Warcraft 5.5
Prediction
If I had to make a prediction on Warhammer’s initial success let me go on record for saying that I believe that in the first few months of release, Warhammer will sell at least 1 million boxes with an initial high retention rate. It will be an early success,
Winner for now: World of Warcraft
