WAR: We Are Harder, Darker and Heavier

The most frequently asked question we got now the WAR was "Is WAR the WoW killer?". People always likes these comparisons. EA Mythic have ervr responded their Warhammer: The Age of Reckoning won't be a World of Warcraft killer. "We're not going to hit the same numbers as WoW." said by EA General Manager Mark Jacobs. While EA CEO John Riccitiello said: "Warhammer Online will be a strong entry in the MMORPG space, but will not rival WoW." Recently, the senior designer Josh Drescher of EA Mythic reinforce this point in an interview with WAR by Destructoid. Also, this time Mythic compared the WAR to Led Zepellin, if WOW is The Beatles.



You recently said you weren't afraid of Warcraft. Although you are aiming to offer an alternative rather than compete directly, are you hoping at least to take some of the Warcraft user base for yourself, or are you looking to corner a different demographic altogether?

Josh Drescher: We're looking for people that are excited about co-operative, competitive gameplay, looking for a really immersive experience that they can enjoy for years and years to come. If those players come from another game, that's fine, if they come from a fresh base of users that have never tried an MMO before, that's fine. When we say we're not competing with World of Warcraft we really do mean that. I'm going to steal something from our creative director Paul Barnett, so imagine this is coming with a Northern English accent -- World of Warcraft is basically The Beatles, and if you set out to try and be The Beatles, you wind up as The Monkees. So, we really do just try and be a different type of product. We're not trying to beat them, we're not trying to replace them, we're not trying to destroy them, we're trying to be Led Zepellin.

We're trying to offer you a harder, darker, heavier sort of experience. We're trying to offer you the kind of music you'd listen to down in your basement with your friends, with a black light on and maybe some illicit substances. We are not trying to be the thing that you all slow dance to at your high school prom. If that means we take a couple of players from World of Warcraft, great, but if it means that we get a group of people that have been waiting for an experience like ours then we're just as happy with that.

There are a lot of MMOs on the market, not all of them successful, and quite a lot of them have been canceled. What are you doing to make sure Warhammer stays and holds its own against the big MMOs out there, especially World of Warcraft.

Josh Drescher:I'll come from that at a slightly different angle -- what is it that causes the MMOs that fail to fail, largely before they even get out of development? Part of that has to do with [it being] very easy to look at the MMO genre and go, "this is where all the money is in PC gaming at the moment ... obviously the MMO is the only way to go!" So developers that have a pedigree in some other area -- maybe they make console games or real-time-strategy games -- they look at MMOs and they go, "well we'll just make one of them," not realizing just how much more difficult it is to build an MMO than it is to do anything else in the industry.

These are games where you're not working with a team for a year or eighteen months to develop ten hours of content. You are working with a team of hundreds and hundreds of people, for usually two, three, four or even five years in the case of something like WoW, to build a game that is intended to be played forever. You're handcrafting hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours of content. In Warhammer there's probably around a thousand hours of handcrafted content in the game across the six different races.

That's a ton of stuff to be building, and so it's really easy to dive in and go, "yeah we're gonna make a massively multiplayer game based on football! It'll be real easy." The next thing you know, you're two-and-a-half years in, you don't know what you're doing, your server code doesn't work, you've never worked with thousands of players at once instead of ten or fifteen, the engine that you're working with is designed for first-person-shooters and doesn't scale when you put fifty models on the screen. There's just a lot of experience that we had that made it much easier for us to build this kind of game because we've been in the industry for a really long time.

Warhammer Online - RvR Combat System

Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning features Mythic's unique Realm vs. Realm (RvR) combat system. This takes place within three different racial pairings: Dwarfs vs. Greenskins, Empire vs. Chaos, and High Elves vs. Dark Elves. Although there are only two races per pairing, we may travel to either of the other two pairings to help fight with their friends and allies.
Unlike many massively multiplayer online games, Warhammer Online gives players the opportunity to engage in constructive RvR combat from a very early level. There are four types of RvR combat: Skirmishes (random world encounters), Battlefields (objective-driven battles in RvR-specific areas), Scenarios (instanced, point-based battles against the opposing faction), and Campaigns (invading enemy lands and capital cities). Here, you can provide your own RvR contribution through Player vs. Player (PvP) combat and (to a lesser extent) Player vs. Environment (PvE) quests so that you can assist your realm in their victory!

So You've Decided to Play a Goblin Shaman?

Creating your character in WAR is a very easy and straightforward process. There are no stats for you to tweak, just the look of your character to customize. So without further ado make your Gobbo as funny looking or serious as you like and enter the game on your chosen server.

You've chosen to make a Goblin Shaman, so before we go any further let me explain what you have taken on by doing so. You are a healing class and so people are going to expect you to heal, whether you want to or not, and if you choose to ignore healing you are missing out on a large part of your potential. In addition to aforementioned items you have to learn the basic class mechanic for the Shaman, how to harness the power of the WAAAAGHH!

An interesting mechanic and one that ensures as a Shaman you don't fail to neglect either path. To be the best healer out there, you are going to have to attack the enemy at some point to build up that bonus. Which leads me to one of WAR's nice little features: offensive and defensive targeting? You are able to have two targets in the game, and as a shaman you will make extensive use of this feature. You are able to target an enemy and friend at the same time, ensuring that any damaging spells hit the enemy, and all buffs and heals hit your friend.

So you'll start at Rank 1 and with three abilities already on your hot bar. Brain Bursta, Gork'll Fix It and Flee. Brain Bursta is your very first DPS spell and will be the bread and butter of your arsenal, dealing 53 Elemental damage to your offensive target. One thing I should also mention here is that abilities learned at this low level scale as you grow, so even Rank 1 abilities are useful to you as you grow. Gork'll Fix It heals your target for 43 and then for a further 114 over 9 seconds, so essentially a small burst heal with a nice HoT (Heal over Time). Now Flee, whilst it is described as a buff is really an ability, you can use it to run places faster or for its proper usage, escape from a battle if things go a bit pear shaped. However, there is a down side. By triggering this mechanic you will lose all AP, all WAAAGHH! and your Morale will start to decrease too. Morale is something that is built up gradually over time, but only whilst you are in combat, as Morale increases it will make certain abilities available to you but, since you aren't able to train the very first ability till Rank 8 we will explore this in more detail later.

Now would be a good time to introduce you to the groundbreaking and innovative feature that is the Tome of Knowledge (ToK). If anyone has ever played Lord of the Rings Online, you may have a slight feel for what this feature entails, but let me tell you now, it is so much more. The ToK acts as many things, an in-game Encyclopedia, quest log, titles earned, mob kill count etc. One of the best details is that the tome levels with you. It starts out blank and you fill all the information in, so many months down the line when you've hit Rank 40, it will show all you've accomplished during your epic journey.



At some point in this game you are going to fight in a Realm vs. Realm (RvR) environment. RvR contributes directly to your Rank through giving you experience, and as a Shaman you will earn experience both from attacking enemy players and contributing to their deaths or by healing your allies. You also receive Renown Rank (RR) experience too, which simply put, is an RvR Rank. You are given a rank title too, and the first one you will receive as a Goblin is Little Git. Your RR will be important as you level, as it will unlock access to purchasing decent gear from vendors in conjunction with your Rank. Not only this but you gain one RR point per RR Rank, which you can spend at a Renown Vendor NPC to further specialise and personalise your class.

Public Quests (PQ) are another exciting invention for this game, and they work very well and very easily. To take part all you have to do is enter the area, and you will know you have done so as box will appear informing you of the current stage and progress. All you have to do here is take part; just do what your class does best. Once the PQ has finished everyone is rated on their contributions and receives a medal which will grant a point bonus. Once that has been done, everyone that took part receives a random roll from 0 - 1000, and then those that received a bonus get that added to their roll. If your score then comes in the top three (or six for some PQs), you will receive a loot bag and should collect it from the chest. There are varying colors of loot bags and various levels of each color which is determined randomly it seems. As a Shaman you will get a better contribution score if you DPS as well as heal, and don't forget to throw your buffs out too.

From: MMORPG.com

Why Don't We Play Innovative Games?

A Tale in the Desert is an MMO without combat, but not a pure sandbox either, there are skills, a series of tests, and a complex social gameplay. Puzzle Pirates is a completely player-skill based MMO, where your success at anything is determined by your skill in various puzzles, not your level or stats. Wizard101 has more traditional levels and quests, but a completely novel combat system based on magic cards. And the guys from PixelMine just sent me a press release on how their MMO Ashen Empires won the Best Fantasy MMORPG award at the Independent Games Festival. And that is just a handful of examples I happen to know of. There are tons and tons of innovative MMOs out there. But each of them attracts only a few thousand players. Meanwhile millions of players play games like World of Warcraft or Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, and then whine loudly about the lack of innovation in these games.

Doh, guys! Most game companies produce games for the money, not because they hope to become critically acclaimed starving artists. They are always going to look out what kind of games seem to sell well, and then make that sort of game. If customers throw a billion dollars a year at Blizzard for World of Warcraft, and A Tale in the Desert is making peanuts, then of course other companies prefer to make a game more like WoW than like ATitD. They would be crazy if they didn't do it.

In the last open Sunday thread people were blaming the big companies to make games as bland as McDonalds bland food. I'm saying that the complaint would be a lot more valid if the complainers weren't actually sitting in the McDonalds restaurant and eating bland burgers, while right next door there is an empty, small gourmet restaurant with a varied, but foreign cuisine. As soon as about a million of you guys start playing innovative games, game companies are going to make more of them. As long as you go for games that offer small, evolutionary steps to a well-known concept, companies are going to make those. The question is not why WAR isn't more innovative, the question is why there aren't more people playing Wizard101 or other innovative games. Game companies produce what the customers want, and we only have ourselves to blame if we voted with our wallets for evolutionary approach. If even we as players are afraid to try something really new, then how can you expect a company to bet millions of dollars on really new?

Mythic Entertainment GM and VP Mark Jacobs writes his feelings on gold sellers on his personal blog.

I hate gold sellers/spammers. No, that's not strong enough, let me try again. I
HATE GOLD SELLERS WITH EVERY FIBER OF MY BEING. Ah, that's better. Now, why do I
hate them you may ask? I hate them for a number of reasons, most of which have
been detailed in various interviews I've done over the years. And now that they
have taken their obnoxiousness to new levels with gold service spamming, I HATE
GOLD SPAMMERS EVEN MORE NOW THAN EVER BEFORE. For years, lowlifes like IGE have told us, in defense of their behavior, that they a) are just providing a
service; b) don't interfere with players enjoyment of the game. Well, I can't
argue with (a), they are providing a service, just like maggots I suppose but
I've always argued that (b) is totally and complete BS. Now, those old arguments
aside, I can't see how this new generation of pond scum (new and improved, with
25% more scummy action!) can argue that their constant spamming of chat channels
doesn't interfere with players enjoyment of the game (I'm waiting for the whole
"Oh, you can always just turn off chat" argument). I hated seeing their messages
when I played WoW or any other MMO and I've been waiting for the day that WAR
launched so I could have the absolute pleasure of instituting policies to make
their lives more difficult so we could drive them out of WAR.

Since WAR launched we have been banning these jerks like crazy. As of Saturday Night, we had banned about 400 of them. My CSRs have a zero tolerance policy. We don't wait and let them stay in the game and ban them en-masse, my guys ban their
useless, time-consuming butts right away. We have a strike team whose sole job
it is to get these guys off our servers as quickly as possible. This weekend, we
unveiled a new wrinkle in the fight against them, the public ban message.
Players on our Phoenix Throne server have been treated to special messages when
a gold seller/spammer is banned. I've given them a wide leash to come up with
creative messages to tell the entire community who has been banned and we keep
it within the Warhammer universe.

Should Europeans Play WAR on US Servers?

A lot of European WAR fans are currently considering the option of playing Warhammer: Age of Reckoning on US servers instead of on GOA European servers. Can't really blame them, GOA hasn't done much to earn our confidence. Big announcements of how nothing could possibly go wrong, then things going wrong, radio silence followed by apologies, and the account site still not working: No wonder some people think the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. The US has a working account site, and an open beta which by all reports is running quite well.

But playing on US servers has serious downsides. One is ping, the time between something happening on the server, the information getting to you, and your reaction travelling back to the server. I have no actual measurements for WAR, but for other games I observed about 50 ms ping to Europeans servers, and over 200 ms ping to US servers. Okay, that's only fractions of a second, but in a heated PvP battle fractions of a second can make all the difference.

The other big downside is time zones, I blame Copernicus. :) WAR, much more than WoW, is a social game. You *want* to be online when everyone else is online, be it for public quests or for PvP. Europeans live 6 to 9 time zones ahead of the US, so unless you play day and night anyway, you're not going to be online much during US prime time. Your US guild plans a big keep raid event, but they'll schedule it for the time when they are all online, which is 3 am in the morning for you. Been there, done that, it's not a good idea.

Of course for me it is easy to be confident that WAR will run on launch day in Europe, as I have that free US account as backup (Side note: Anyone noticed that I'm the only one reporting to have got one? I can't believe Mythic created that service just for me. There must be lots of game journalists and maybe even bloggers out there who also received one of those and kept mum.). But I'm really hoping that the European launch goes well, even if the open beta didn't. I want to play on European servers, not only for the ping and time zone, but also because my guild and all my friends will be on the Euro servers.

Why I am looking forward to Warhammer Online Age of Reckoning

I am very excited for the Warhammer Online Age of Reckoning release in a couple weeks. I have been a closed beta tester for over a year and like what I have seen from the game. I have played quite a few MMO's, although I am not quite the veteran others are. I have played WoW, COH/COV, LOTRO, Perfect World, DAoC and beta tested Tabula Rasa. I feel like Warhammer has a lot of features that make it stick out from the other games I have played.

1. Being able to gain XP and level through Quests and PVP. To me it's hard to under estimate the freedom this brings to the game. You can get to the level cap of 40 anyway you want. If immersion into story line and quests is your thing that is the path you can take. War does a great job with their story lines from what I have seen in the beta. You quickly feel like you are being drawn into a War effort, from collecting ammo for giant siege weapons to finding and killing spies. The hatred for the opposite faction is strong among the NPC's and it helps draw you in. If quests aren't your thing and you just want to go pwn some noobs, then you can hop right into RVR combat and level your character that way. Or if your like me and want to use a combo of both to keep things fresh than thats an option to. It's great to not have a linear path to the level cap, you can get there anyway you choose.

The Leveling guild is a big draw for me. In most games your guilds just becomes a place to hang out and chat with your friends. Loyalty to a guild is always fleeting. People jump to the one that can help them get their epic item the fastest. In War, guilds themselves level, unlocking abilities for the guild along the way. This combined with the coordination it will take to lay siege to an enemy capital city, should return the days where people were loyal to their guilds and cared about working towards a common goal. This is something I have been missing in guilds lately and I hope it lives up to the hype.

3. I feel War has brought some innovations to the MMO genre that will most likely be copied by other games. First is Public Quests. The best way to describe these are Instances that take half the time and you don't have to wait around for a group for. Basically you stumble into an area and it has a public quest which is a three wave fight against npcs. Each wave is progressivly harder until the last wave unleashes a boss. Everyone in the area gets to take part and the boss drops a chest of loot. You get to roll on the items based on your contributions to the fight. I have to tell you from the beta these were a blast and there was never trouble enough players to complete the PQ. The other big innovation being the Tome Of Knowledge, basically this is a book you carry around the documents everything you do, see, and kill. It's great for information and there is a lot of cool achievements to unlock. It helps a lot with immersion into the world.

These things are what have drawn me to Warhammer and I hope will draw a good number of players. To be successful War doesn't have to be a WoW killer. I find it funny when people call games WoW killers. WoW is lightning in a bottle, it will never happen again, no MMO will have 10 million subscribers but plenty of games have carried on with 100,000- 500,000 subscribers, some even less. If War gets 1 million subscribers, which I think is more than possible than it will be the 2nd most successful game ever. There is never going to be another WoW, for a lot of reasons. I just hope Warhammer can live up to the my expectations and I am really looking forward to finding out and I hope many others join me.

Warhammer Online beta Impressions

Beta Impressions Part 1


Altdorf Slums

I'm going to start off these impressions by hitting a few key topics then I'll move on to some bigger stuff. I'll be doing a few entries today as well as happily answering any questions you have in comments or emails.

Realm Balance - Overall I would say that the two realms are fairly balanced on the whole. I definitely don't get the sense that one realm is naturally more powerful than the other. Population-wise it has been lopsided the entire time I have been in beta in favor of Destruction. On average Destruction will have 1300 people and Order will have about 800-900. *These numbers are examples. In terms of class balance there are still several issues that I will go into at a later date.

Zergs - The power of the Zerg manifests itself strongly in Warhammer Online. A group of 6 will not be able to take more than 2x their numbers even if they are incredibly skilled. Open-world RvR has proven, so far in my experience, to attract zergs. This is nothing new for those who have played DAOC. People tend to gravitate towards one another for safety. With the open-group system this is much easier. Is this a bad thing? Yeah, if you're one who likes to solo or move in small groups all the time. The plus side to the zerginess is that it brings about a LOT of epic battles... I'm talking 50 on 50 clashes. INCREDIBLE fun.

Crowd Control - In DAOC terms it's almost nonexistent. There are short stuns, knockbacks/downs and snares but nothing like mez. There will never be a time where you stand around waiting to do something. In some ways I miss mez... don't ask me why.

Stealth - Most of you know about this. It's in the game for the Witch Hunter and Witch Elf but it's not your normal stealth. When active it drains AP and lasts a short duration with a cooldown. It's enough to maybe sneak away or into a fight without being seen but it's definitely not the backbone of these classes in any way shape or form.

Bears Bears Bears - This is one of the things I feel let down about. When Paul Barnett discussed the "bears bears bears" stuff I thought this applied to 'normal quests' and not just "Kill Collectors". I thought that if I was out killing bears then I found a quest that needed me to kill bears then I could get credit for that quest. Unless I have TOTALLY missed something (and I doubt it) this theory of getting credit for things you've already done applies only to kill collectors who want you to kill a very specific type of mob and will reward you some experience for doing it. Color me disappointed on that one.

Siege Weapons - They are nothing short of awesome. I love using rams of doors and having multiple people participate in them. I love how they are so easy to take control of and use with a little interface that comes up giving the option to aim then, repair them, or release them. When aiming it's almost a mini-game in itself because you have to aim the thing - sometimes ground target sometimes reticule - and adjust for wind. Hellblasters and Catapults are downright nasty and oil that can pour down on people attacking doors makes me laugh hysterically EVERY time it kills people.

Questing - For the most part it's standard mmo questing. This is where the annoying "zomg it's just like WoW" crowd can actually speak without me wanting to force choke them through the internet. It's EXACTLY like WoW in this regard. So what? Are you going to try and justify that this is a BAD thing? It's a fantastic thing. WoW's questing-to-level was mostly polished. But wait! There's more! WAR takes it a step beyond WoW and introduces more types of quests, a much better tracking system including map waypoints that will tell you where to go (they can be turned off), and rewards you can actually use. But wait! There's EVEN MORE! You don't have to do them if you don't want to! Unlike WoW where the only alternative to questing is grinding... you can RvR in WAR or grind or quest!


Capital Cities - Inevitable City and Altdorf

Inevitable City

Both cities are nothing short of amazing. When Mark Jacobs told me to my face that he feels they have the best cities in any game he was not just boasting their accomplishments; he was stating a fact. Their capital cities ARE the best I have ever seen. There are people walking the streets, details on every building, and a sense of atmosphere that takes them that extra mile. "Living Cities" is exactly how I would describe them.

Of the two cities I would have to say Altdorf is my favorite. While Inevitable has a great atmosphere and really gives that "chaos" feeling, the level of detail put into Altdorf makes my jaw drop. They've captured something special in Altdorf; maybe it's the Empire lore. The city is divided into districts (seamless) like the slums and docks. In the marketplace you feel like you could actually stand around hawking your wears. On the docks you feel like you could actually take a ship to some distant land because it has that ... gosh what's the feeling I'm looking for? It feels like a real dock or an airport where you know people are coming and going from all over - although no one really is which is sort of a bummer. I wish I could take a boat to another continent or something just for the sake of being able to do it.

The cities have everything you could want. Quests (tons), shops (tons), banks (more than one), Auction Houses, DUNGEONS, Tome unlocks, legendary locations from Warhammer Lore like the Blowhole and Bright Wizard College tower thingy, and more.

While I'm a Destruction guy at heart, I have to give Order a small victory by saying their city rocks.


Crafting

Quest Hub

I have done some limited testing of the crafting system and have mixed feelings. Right now Talisman making is not in the game so the only real crafting is Apothecary. Mark Jacobs' vision of crafting is that everything you do contributes to the realm war in some way. Thus crafting is not a way to get rich quick, it's not a means of decking yourself out in gear, and it's not an aspect of the game that you can devote your entire playtime to like in some games where you can truly just be a crafter (EQ2 or SWG come to mind). It's not that crafting is an afterthought, although sometimes I truly think it may have been, it's just not an integral part of the game. You can make potions for RvR and they DO help... but they're potions. Talismans can be attached to armor and provide bonuses - how much of a bonus right now I'm unsure - and will definitely give an obvious edge against those who don't have Talismans on their armor.

The part of the crafting system that I really like are the gathering professions. You can scavenge, butcher, and that sort of thing. In beta this has been a really nice source of income, tome unlocks, and has been effortless. Everything I kill seems to be useful and everything I need comes from what I kill. There's no roaming around to find nodes or any of that nonsense that always turned me off of gathering. This information has been available to people for some time but I feel the need to confirm it for you becasue of how sketchy some of the past details have been.

More to come...

WAR kills AoC, not WoW

The most frequently asked question I got now the WAR NDA dropped was "Is WAR the WoW killer". Answer: No, it is not, don't be silly. WAR *will* take a large bite out of WoW subscription numbers, but not enough to cause WoW to die. In my opinion Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is of similar quality as World of Warcraft, doing some things better, some things worse, and having a different focus for the end game. Many people will enjoy both games, and then decide for one or the other depending on things like timing, what their friends play, or personal preferences between raiding and RvR. WAR will probably lead to a much decreased activity on WoW servers between its release in September and the Wrath of the Lich King release (probably around November). But many people won't cancel their WoW account before having seen both WAR and WotLK. Nobody knows how that will work out in the long run.

One big factor here, to which we don't have an answer yet, revolves around the quality of the WAR servers. Recent changes made at least the European beta servers more laggy, but as the release servers will be totally different hardware, it is simply too early to say how smooth the servers will run on release day. That is somewhat self-limiting the success of WAR: If WAR is too successful, the servers will have more problems, driving more people away again.

But while WAR won't kill WoW, it could possibly deal a fatal blow to Age of Conan. AoC fans were disappointed this week to hear that the latest mega patch still didn't introduce a PvP points and rewards system. Many players reached level 80 by now, and there simply isn't enough to do. Warhammer Online on the other hand already in the beta has a completely working PvP system, and more content for all levels than AoC has months after release. WAR is more mature in its lore than WoW, while avoiding the big nekid boobs kind of "mature" AoC has. So unless you are a huge fan of the more twitchy AoC combat, there really is no reason to not switch to WAR instead.

The current closed beta version of WAR albeit is not quite feature complete. For example the bank and auction house NPCs are there, but aren't functional yet. And as the crafting system depends on players exchanging materials, that part of the game isn't fully tested yet either, with some indications that the higher level recipes are still missing. There doesn't appear to be a system yet in place to balance server populations to prevent either Order or Destruction outnumbering the other side. Nevertheless WAR is already a lot more bug-free than Age of Conan, and could really hurt that game.

WoW meanwhile escaped into iMMOrtality, and will easily survive the next 5 or even 10 years, even if subscription numbers will probably decline slowly. I'd say not even Blizzard could really produce a "WoW Killer". There might be painful things ahead like server mergers, but I don't think it is possible that subscription numbers drop so low that it isn't commercially viable any more to keep the servers running for years. WoW lives forever, like it or not.

Warhammer Wiki Online - Age of Reckoning

One of the most anticipated games of 2008 isn't Wrath of the Lich King, and its not the already released Age of Conan. It is Warhammer Online, which has been delayed multiple times and really reworked from the ground up by EA Mythic.

This game is going to solely based on masive multiplayer PvP action, in clan versus clan and even World (read server) versus server embattlement. To a PvP lover such as myself, I love an ever changing battle, one that is not scripted, and requires players to make smart decisions with catlike reflexes. Warhammer seems to fit this bill quite nicely.

This is a game type that Blizzard has never been able to commit to with World of Warcraft, as the game is mired in PvE content... which I have also come to love over time. However no game has tantalized my senses as much as Warhammer, they have been teasing me for a year and half with this game... and the payoff is close at hand finally.

I had delayed taking action after hearing that players who purchase the Warhammer: Age of Reckoning Collector's Edition would get guaranteed access to the upcoming open beta. Finally yesterday I went in search of a copy... only to find that they were all sold out at the major retailers listed on the Warhammer website.

After a diligent search I did find a copy for myself. This has only been available for Pre-order for a mere week, and with an exorbitant cost over and above the normal game of an extra $40. So its easy to see I am not the only one very excited about this game.

Players will most likely flock to Warhammer, just as they did with Age of Conan... in fact I would venture to guess that Warhammer will break AoC's record of release date subscriptions and first month subscriptions!

Guess How Many Copies WAR Will Sell

Via Book of Grudges I found this interesting tidbit of information Mythic revealed the Warhammer Alliance forums: To go from closed beta to release, Mythic is adding 9 million Euros (USD 13.5 million) worth of server equipment to a new datacentre. And that is just for Europe! Big business, indeed, compared to most single-player games. Now I have no idea how many players fit on 9 million Euro worth of servers. But if I take the retail price of the Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning box, deduce an estimate of the cost to actually make that box, and then divide 9 million by that number, I come up with something in excess of a quarter of a million. WAR would need to sell a quarter of a million copies in Europe just to pay for the servers. Of course that is a gross simplification, as it doesn't take into account monthly fees, nor development cost, nor operating cost. But it shows the order of magnitude Mythic is shooting for.

And as predictions are a fun way to get egg on one's face, here is mine: Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning will sell over 1 million copies worldwide before the end of 2008. Note how I'm hedging my bet by just stating a lower limit, because the upper limit will be a lot harder to guess. I'm guessing the lower limit using parameters like the total size of the market, number of beta applications, and the boredom index of the average WoW player. The upper limit will depend a lot on early word of mouth, which depends on how smooth the release goes, and MMORPG releases are anything but safe bets. But just to increase the chance of looking silly by predicting something totally wrong, I'd say the upper limit is under 2 million copies sold worldwide before the end of this year. So, provided that Mythic ever lets us know their number, I'll post around end of 2008 whether my prediction of between 1 and 2 million copies sold worldwide was correct. Copies sold, not subscribers, because there will be some interference in subscription numbers due to the Wrath of the Lich King expansion release of World of Warcraft. And press releases more often cite copies sold, not subscribers.

So here is your chance to upstage me: Make a better guess than mine. Either if you think that my lower limit is too high, or upper limit too low, by guessing a number or range of numbers outside my range. Or, if you think that I am broadly right, by guessing a much smaller range. How many copies do you think WAR will sell by the end of 2008?

Warhammer Online will go gold in no timie

Creative director Paul Barnett told IGN that the client code, basically what customers will pay for in the box, will go gold sometime next week. With the big Games Convention in Leipzig scheduled for next week as well, it wouldn't be surprising to see Mythic make the big announcement there. Barnett also said that Mythic will work on tweaking and optimizing the server code right up until launch in mid September.

Aside from that, the game was on display, showing off its relative high state of polish as large-scale player-versus-player battles were under way. Warhammer Online has entered its beta testing phase, and Barnett said that 50,000 players were recently admitted to the game. Another number that he threw around was that apparently there have been 130,000 pre-orders for the game, which he described in classic Barnett style as "all the best bits of fantasy with all the crap bits thrown out."

WAR or WotLK?

We do not know the official release date of either Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, nor of the second World of Warcraft expansion Wrath of the Lich King. But all crystal balls and other scrying devices point towards a scenario in which both of them come out before Christmas 2008. And odds are that WAR will be released a month or two before Wrath of the Lich King. End of September for WAR and end of November for WotLK is one plausible scenario. And although this scenario could still change, it now appears extremely likely that at some point in the next 6 months you will have to decide which of them you want to play. You could try to play both, but that is likely to not work very well. Or you could play neither, in which case you'll be considered a minority in the MMORPG demographic. So for millions of people decision time it is. Most of these millions will go for Wrath of the Lich King. Not even the Mythic guys themselves believe that they'll outsell WotLK. But that's just statistics and finances, and it doesn't really make your personal choice much easier. How will YOU decide?

Knowing myself, I'm aware that I take decisions like that by gut feeling on a day-by-day basis. I can't even tell you what game I'll play next weekend, because I simply haven't decided yet. But I know I'm not playing a lot of World of Warcraft right now, because I'm burned out and bored. So I am looking forward more towards WAR, because it is more different from WoW than WotLK is. There is more new content to explore in a new game than in an expansion of an old game. WAR has 20 new classes, WotLK has 1. WAR has 6 new races, each with a line of zones and quests leading them from level 1 to the level cap, WotLK has no new races, and only new zones from level 70 to 80. So I'm absolutely certain that I will buy Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning the day it comes out, and will play it as soon as possible.


But as I said, it is likely that a month or two after the WAR release there will be the WotLK release. Mike Morhaime recently mentioned that an unspecified number of players left World of Warcraft for Age of Conan, but two months later 40% of them were back. And that was *without* Blizzard releasing much extra content for WoW. So the really hard decision will come on the day that Wrath of the Lich King releases.

My prediction for myself, although I'm not absolutely sure, is that by the time Wrath of the Lich King has come out, the new game smell of Warhammer Online will have worn off a bit. There will be still new content to explore in WAR, but there also will be new content in WotLK. And then the two games offer two distinctively different promises for the endgame: The RvR PvP endgame of WAR vs. the dungeon and raid PvE of WoW. And personally I still don't like PvP. And I love dungeons. So I think that I'll put WAR on hiatus, play WotLK for several months to level up one or two characters to 80, and do all the dungeons and raids my heart desires. And at some point I'll be as bored of WotLK as I was bored of The Burning Crusade, and I might go back to WAR.

WotLK for me will probably have priority, because I don't want to miss the window in time in which WoW players will do normal difficulty level Northrend dungeons. If you tried to find a normal difficulty level Outlands dungeon group lately, you'll know what I'm talking about: At some point months after release most people have gear better than what they can earn in a normal difficulty dungeon, and then nobody wants to go there any more. Everyone just wants heroics and raids, with only the fact that the "daily heroic" is different every day bringing some diversion into an otherwise very repetitive schedule. Looking back I don't regret I took a 7-month break from TBC, I just wished I had taken that break a bit later, and still played a bit more while people were still doing normal dungeons. With WAR I don't have the feeling that I'll have to play it at some specific point in time or lose out. You don't get kicked out of a PvP group for not having the same gear level as the other players. First of all it's not even clear that there will be huge differences in gear level in the WAR endgame (I still hope that not). And then PvP is either scenarios (battlegrounds), where you simply can't get kicked out, or it is open world RvR in which the more the merrier, and any added members can at least serve as cannon fodder, even if they don't contribute much otherwise.


In the long term I really can't say whether I'll prefer WoW to WAR or the other way round, or some completely different game. But for 2008 I'm pretty sure I'll still go for World of Warcraft, and only play Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning while waiting for Wrath of the Lich King to be released. Mythic still has a hard job ahead to convince me that I secretly like PvP, I just haven't seen it done right yet. For now I still think I prefer group PvE, and that means WoW. How about you?