Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning

Warhammer Online is a forthcoming MMORPG based on the Warhammer Fantasy universe. It is currently under development by Mythic Entertainment, the studio behind the popular MMORPG Dark Age of Camelot, and is slated for release sometime in 2007. The game's official acronym is WAR, standing for Warhammer Online : Age of Reckoning.

The central theme of the game revolves around the continual worldwide conflict most Warhammer settings are well known for, and almost every aspect of the game will be geared towards omnipresent, constant war. Mythic will be using their trademark Realm vs. Realm PvP system in WAR, which is the same system used in Dark Age of Camelot. Although not officially announced, the playable races are expected to be as follows : Empire, Dwarfs, High Elves, Dark Elves, Orcs & Goblins and Chaos. These races will form the two major alliances in the game.

History

The first iteration of Warhammer Online began development under Climax Online (formerly Climax Nottingham), but was cancelled in June 2004 towards the end of its development after Games Workshop decided the roll out costs were too high. Work on the game never actually stopped though as Climax Online continued the project using its own funding. Climax Online reported in late 2004 that it was closed due to difficulty securing a publishing agreement.

With the licence once again available, Games Workshop was approached by Mythic Entertainment, which was interested in acquiring the licence and developing a new project from scratch. The long standing relationship between several Games Workshop managers and Mythic CEO Mark Jacobs ensured that a deal was quickly reached.

As of May 18th 2005, the Warhammer Online license had been acquired by Mythic Entertainment. Unlike the Climax Online project, the current iteration is not a joint venture with Games Workshop. Despite this fact, Mythic's development has seen support from Games Workshop notables such as Rick Priestley and Alan Merrit.

Community

As with most other upcoming online games, Mythic Entertainment has an official monthly newsletter detailing the game's continued development to the public. Beta test participants are randomly selected from newsletter subscribers. Whilst the idea of holding forum contests on fan forums, has been suggested/hinted at by the Mythic Community Team who also go to considerable length to post on existing community fan-forums to mingle with their future market.

A fansite kit is also available for download from the official site. Mythic heavily impresses a fondness towards fansites, as they have officially stated that they dislike having forums on their own site, and fansites allow for them to get to know their community.

Development

Development of the Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning game began in 2005.

On the official site for the game, Paul Barnett's Video Blog gives insight into the development screens and concepts behind them for the up-and-coming game.Development Diaries are also available, and a long introduction into the pre-production process, which estimates that around ten thousand, (10,000), pages of finalized documentation will be produced by the content team before the release of WAR.

PvP PvE

PvP (Player versus Player) is a huge part of WAR, letting the players actually participate in and impact the great conflict of Order and Chaos as the seven (You can also play goblins, Chaos humans and Empire humans are too different to be considered the same race) playable races clash. PvP areas are clearly marked and present in every map, letting the PvE-only players look across a bridge or into a fortress and see the bloody fun their PvP mates are having without them. (Hopefully encouraging PvE (Player vs Environment) players to participate)

Given there are PvP and non-PvP parts of every zone you won't have to experience load times when entering a PvP conflict. All PvP is consensual in so far as you will be made aware of when you cross over into these zones.

You can gain Trophy Items from PvP to let you customize your armor for looks (and most likely not stats). For example, if you're an Orc and you kill enough Dwarves, you could get a Dwarf skull which you could place on your shoulder spikes, on your belt buckle, or perhaps on a chain around your neck. According to Mythic, you'll gain experience and items through PVP participation and become as advanced and as wealthy as players who exclusively hunt monsters and perform quests.

The End-Game content is a RvR (Realm versus Realm) campaign to take over enemy cities. If your side is totally outnumbered, as tends to happen in these types of games there could be PvP boosts to your alliance to try and balance it out, through stat bonuses or extra NPC spawns.

Even the PvE (Player versus Environment) aspect of the game follows the epic battle that rages on around you. Mythic had the foresight to eliminate the drudgery that plague a lot of MMOs. The pointless "grinding" of rats, fish and other lifeless creatures. One example of how Mythic is merging the PvE aspect of the game and the RvR aspect that rages around you was as follows "As an Orc, you can expect to be repelling a beach landing of dwarves who are coming over a nearby waterfall using barrels."

The PvE quests you receive will also be in direct competition with the PvE quests assigned to your opposite faction. In one example, "imagine a large amount of dwarves lay injured and immobile on the battlefield. The dwarves will try to heal other dwarves by giving them beer, while the orcs will be trying to kill them and take their beards."

According to Mythic they are planning on making it so that opposite alliances can't communicate, although that may change, its doubtful. Warhammer is known for its epic wars of light and dark, you wont see orcs holding hands with dwarfs. Mythic has taken great care to follow GamesWorkshops IP, this means they will follow it to the letter, some changes may be made but they will be very minor and only to balance the game. These changes will be aproved by GamesWorkshop from the go, and given GamesWorkshop's lore and background is so deep with such a large following, they wont flex much. The final product wont be a watered down version of their vision, it will be as accurate as possible.

Types of PvP Content

Mythic plan is to have four types of combat available in WAR:
* Skirmishes: Incidental combat of two or more players of opposing factions. From these fights you get money, experience and items. Although, while you can loot the enemy, you're not actually looting their real items. It is assumed the loot you receive from these fights scales with both your level and the difficulty of the fight. Specific information on how this actually works has yet to be released.
* Battlefields: Objective-based areas, where each side is engaged in a tug-of-war style battle, trying to take over points on the map such as towers, mines, factories and temples.
* Scenarios: Instanced based fights with objectives and a point system. To avoid queuing and balance fights mercenary NPC 'Dogs of War' will spawn. The point system works much like that of the tabletop version of Warhammer. A given Battle Zone scenario might have, say, a 1000 point limit. This could permit ten less-powerful players go up against five who are significantly stronger, while theoretically keeping things balanced.
* Campaign: The campaign system uses the above three to allow advancement, you cannot cut around your enemy and skip a zone, the front is the front. This is the PvP 'end game'. In the high level areas are five zones. At the extreme ends of each land-area are the capital cities for each race. Players wage a bloody war to push each other back and forth. The goal is to lock down a zone and advance closer to the enemy's capital city. Once there, you can sack the cities stores and npcs for great rewards. After an unspecified amount of time NPC guards will spawn and take back the city and the war resets.

Career System

Advancement in WAR follows a relatively strict class based system. Each race has four classes, for a total of roughly twenty-four classes. However, while all races have a few basic archetypes (healer), the classes are distinct to each race.

"What we need is a rule system we can follow," said Paul Barnett (Design Manager).

"A race is defined as much by what you leave out as what you leave in," said Paul Barnett (Design Manager).

The only concrete examples available at the moment are the dwarves and greenskins. They have two fighting and two academic classes.

Career	Race! Description
Ironbreaker	Dwarf	Heavily armoured defensive tanks.
Hammerer	Dwarf	Hammerer's use giant hammers and are offensive tanks.
Runepriest	Dwarf	Using rune magic, the Runepriest is the spellcaster and healer of this group. They can also enchant items with runes.
Engineer	Dwarf	They are inventors and use technology for ranged damage per second attacks.
Black Orc	Greenskin	Heavy melee tanks. Restricted to orcs.
Orcish Berserker	Greenskin	Melee career, this career seems to focus on damage. Restricted to orcs.
Goblin Shaman	Greenskin	The only greenskin magical class, they're the spellcasting muscle.
Goblin Squig Herder	Greenskin	Pet class, restricted to Goblins. Summoning one of several kinds of squigs, said Squig devours the goblin, after which the goblin controls the Squig from within, by prodding it's brain. Upon death the unfortunate goblin is hurled up, ready to get eaten again.

Customizing your class:Mythic has stated the following: "We allow you to customize your ironbreakerness," said Paul Barnett. He made it very clear though that while you can be an ironbreaker who likes pistols, you cannot be an ironbreaker who is secretly a speced as something else entirely such as magic. "Beard, stick, pointy hat. Wizard!" Barnett yelled during the recent press conference held at mythic entertainment, emphasizing that Mythic fully believes in silhouetting, which is to say that if you walk up to a guy in a full plate mail, he will be what you expect him to be and won't start casting fireballs at you.

Character Customization

Customization options will vary from race to race and the character model will grow and change as the player levels up -- Dwarven beards grow in length, Orcs become larger and more brutal looking, and the vile servants of Chaos will get "more vile." Character customization will also be available via battle trophies such as enemy beards, heads, skulls etc; these can be attached to selected points on the body. This is created so that there will be no need for a Con system in the game.

Where in other games you may see a 'Red' name above a characters head to know that he is more powerful than you, in WAR you will be able to look at that character and immediately be able to tell if he is tougher than you are. The character customization is meant to satisfy the brilliant but fanatic tastes of the tabletop miniatures game but also let MMO newcomers get enjoy a truly unique avatar. Customized characters color schemes will also be available in Warhammer Online, Mythic realises that In the Warhammer table-top game, painting your models added a large sense of personality to your army.

Players will also have the ability to change their characters appearance on the fly with completely animated faces that display emotion; you can choose whether you character looks happy, angry, mean, afraid, sad, lonely, etc. directly from your user interface.

Quests

There will be four types of quest types:
* Automatic group quests (ie, "everyone nearby feed the ogre")
* Non-PvP RvR quests (ie, "heal the hurt dwarves with ale" vs "kill the hurt dwarves and steal their beards")
* Branching Quests (ie, "Deliver the note to gain exp" vs "Sell the note to a spy for some quick cash")
* Christmas" Quests (ie, wandering though the wilderness you find someone who needs quick help with a big reward... encouraging world exploration)

There are three internal quest classifications:
* Green: Non PvP in PvE areas (ie, fedex quests)
* Yellow: Non PvP in RvR areas (ie, gather components for an NPC in a battlefield)
* Red: PvP in RvR areas (kill the dwarves!)

Each type of quest is available from level 1 on for all playstyles, allowing people to do any sort of playstyle from the beginning to the end of the game. Mythic is also making sure that you will always get a useful reward; even if you're a goblin doing dark elf quest, you'll be able to get something that will help your character progress.

Death

When your character falls in combat, you will be presented with a chance to use acquired 'Fate Points' to resurrect and continue the fight at the very same point that you died. Details on how you acquire 'fate points' have yet to be released but is assumed you will get these via PvE & PvP.

If you don't have any Fate Points, you will be resurrected and acquire 'Insanity Points' this will cause you to suffer temporarily from various negative attribute penalties. The only way to rid yourself of these 'insanity penalties' is to successfully complete PVE based quests.

Details on this aspect of the game are very limited at this point, this guide will be updated when more information becomes available.

Tactics

The Tactics bar allows players to tailor their abilities to a certain extent. A player's tactic bar is composed of a set number of slots, and you can fill up this bar with tactics that may take anywhere between one and all of your slots. You may modify your tactics bar prior to each battle but may not be modified once a battle commences. These tactics range from adding fire damage or frost defence, to increasing your ranged abilities or shortening your spell recovery time. This is useful in that you can strengthen yourself towards a particular enemy or just tailor your abilities to your own play style.

Tactics may be minimised so that they take up less space on the bar, but by and large, it's a matter of fitting the right tactics for the right situation. For example you may find that high elf heavy armies tend to favour magic, prior to the battle starting you can load up your tactics bar with added magic defence.

These kinds of adjustments have previously been either class locked, item based or require you to "retrain" your abilities at a monetary cost, but the game's ability to adjust these to any given situation will allow players a level of customization not seen in previous MMOs.

Morale

A unique feature of WAR is the morale system, which deepens combat significantly. Much like the tabletop version of Warhammer morale is generated if you have more players in your group or fight for longer periods of time. This generation of morale will build up in combat through five tiers. The first tier might be something like a cannon going off in the distance for a dwarf and taking out a small group of the enemy, while a fifth level morale action might be something more along the lines of Armageddon, allowing you to knock down city walls.

Players can gain additional morale actions for each tier as they progress down their career paths. Of course, losing a fight or taking a large amount of damage will lower morale, making it more of a coup-de-grace than something that you can use as a last-ditch effort. Morale will fade quickly when the player is not in combat

Zone Layout

Each of the six playable races will have their own unique adventuring zones, which will run in a parallel path with one of the opposition armies'. The pairings will go as follows:
* Empire versus Chaos
* High Elves versus Dark Elves
* Dwarves versus Greenskins (Orcs & Goblins)

Each of these pairings will consist of 11 zones, four of which will run parallel to their counterparts on the opposition's side. This will guarantee that players will encounter their enemies with great frequency on the field. This 11 zone setup per pairing will bring the total zone count to 33 on release.

Collision Detection

Unlike other MMORPGs currently available WAR will have collision detection turned on but only to enemy targets. This means that you will be able to 'walk through' friendly players and NPC's but will be unable to walk through enemy targets. This feature will hopefully enhance the role tanks play (Heavily armoured players) as it will make them far more efficient at holding choke points and allow them to protect weaker players in their group such as healers and casters

Thoughts of older PvP Style players

This is the game that will cater more to the hardcore Player versus Player. Many of said players are thought to be waiting diligently to leave another popular MMO World of Warcraft as it mostly caters to players who enjoy fighting a computer generated monster rather than against other player controled units. Warhammer has been out on table top and was invented before the first Warcraft game even was thought of. Thus they have had many years to perfect their ideas and thoughts of what a great MMO should be.

Screenshots

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