PC Gamer's Ultimate WAR Guide

Whether a promotional issue or a genuine guide of sorts, the PC Gamer Presents The Ultimate Guide To Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (whew, typed that out without fainting!) called to me in dark, urgent tones: "Buy meee... buy meee..." And thus it was so.

After the extreme disappointment of the lackluster Prima Guide and Atlas -- their motto was "Useful Info Prohibited, Tresspassers Will Be Shot" -- this 96-page mag actually filled in the gaps as a decent WAR primer, along with development stories, RvR guides and some useful tidbits. Plus, you get a weird deck of cards item in game for buying the magazine (although the cards, when used, lower one stat and boost another randomly, which doesn't make it useful for much).

In reading through it on my way down to Indiana over Christmas, I highlighted a few points of interest I thought I'd share -- but go ahead and pick it up if you find it, it's a good buy:

• I really liked the "Development Moment" sidebars -- little stories from some of the lesser-known devs about how they made the game.
• "Four classes will be added to the game along with a rather big surprise scheduled for he spring of 2009." This quote from Mark (presumably written prior to the Black Guard/KOTBS addition) really peaked my interest. Big surprise? What could it be?
• Mark Davis shares a few well-known "secrets", such as the IC portal that sends you to weird places, like the Chaos Moon.
• Really neat concept art... can never get enough of this stuff.
• Love this classic Barnett quote: "There are some other worlds you could use, but in one of them the little Irish midget throws the wedding ring into the volcano and it's all over. In the other worlds, your dad turns out to be dressed in black and you blow up the great big sphere of doom."
• Jeff Hickman: "For us, we have 8,000 different things we can do. The world is there for us. Should we do Skaven? Should we do Lizard-Men? What about going to the Tomb King areas? There's all of these different places we can go."
• Jeff Hickman: "We are working on our first expansion. It's coming and it's going to be awesome."
• Jeff Skalski: "The Order side tends to be the side of preference of newer players coming into the game."
• Jeff Skalski: "Battlefield 1942 is one game we talked about a lot. We were even talking at one point about respawn points and holding objectives and even though we didn't go down that route, we talked about it a lot."
• I really appreciated how they had charts showing you granted rewards for Renown Ranks, and shared renown tactics.