EA and Mythic Entertainment have announced that their hotly anticipated MMORPG Warhammer Online has completed development - well, completed in so far as what will be included on the game's retail DVDs.

"We've done our best to create the next great MMORPG experience, but it's the fans that will bring our world to life," said Mark Jacobs, vice president at EA and general manager of Mythic Entertainment. "The Day of Reckoning approaches and it's going to be glorious! It's time to go to WAR."

Based on the popular tabletop game from Games Workshop, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is an epic fantasy MMORPG featuring innovative Realm vs. Realm game play that pits the forces of Order and Destruction against one another on the battlefield to determine the fate of nations.

Warhammer Online is currently on schedule for a September 19th 2008 launch in Australia.

Open Beta also starts on September 7th for anyone who preodered it or if you have a fileplanet subscription

The game does its best to engage you into standing up for your realm. There is definitely a feeling that war is everywhere and your side needs you. Even at level 3 or 4 you can legitimately make a contribution to RvR.

is it me or does it seem that peoples general drive and enthusiasm has dropped on the MMO thing due to letdowns etc ?

Im a beta tester and this game just rocks my world!

couple of screen shots i took nothing special .
http://i137.photobucket.com/albums/q226/cogneeto/Grumlok.jpg
http://i137.photobucket.com/albums/q226/cogneeto/WAR2008-08-2523-13-59-45.jpg
http://i137.photobucket.com/albums/q226/cogneeto/WAR2008-08-2523-11-35-75.jpg


last edited by MADMAX at 12:26:48 27/Aug/08

last edited by MADMAX at 12:30:36 27/Aug/08

Why do they say RvR instead of PvP?

to promote/highlight the large-scale realm vs realm aspect of the pvp

sweet, now we can grind renwon ranks instead of honour, in exactly the same way as wow

yet somehow, the pvp in this game is "better" than wow

Why do they say RvR instead of PvP?

Yoinked from http://www.war-rvr.net/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=187&Itemid=31

Just in case someone doesn’t know, the terms below are going to be used a great deal in the coming part of the War Guide.

RvR is an abbreviation for Realm vs Realm.
PvE is an abbreviation for Player vs Environment.
PvP is an abbreviation for Player vs Player.

Players might assume that since RvR is all about fighting the enemies, it is simply PvP. However RvR consists of more then just hacking your enemies up with your weapon, or frying them with your spells. It is about opposing them in every facet of the game.

This is what makes WAR so exceptional. Even the most basic quests, ones that may not even have any interaction with the enemy; are all about building your realm up to prepare, or take part in the current war. Now whilst some quests might simply be more of a “story” theme to build up the atmosphere, a great many quests actually pit you against the enemy. So you may be competing to save a bridge, whilst the enemy is trying to blow the bridge up.

It has been hinted that as fights and quests are won and lost the actual in game territory will move back and forth between armies. This then brings us to the end game, which involves one side sieging the Capital city of the other side. So RvR is not just attacking another player, it encapsulates everything about the game, from simple quests through to epic sieges.

RvR is about war.

So what I'm guessing, its not all JUST about grinding pvp for 'honor' and badges, its has the greater goal of one day ending up at their place and burning it down around their ears.

I haven't had a chance to play it myself yet but a few people at work have and wont shut up about how good it is. I suppose I'll find out for myself when the open beta hits :)

The game sounds good and all, but how much does it cost us Aussies? Will we expected to pay more because we live in an awesome country?

What are the realms? Ie server vs server or High Elves vs Dark Elves?
Can you choose your race and start in that race's capital, or is it like a description i read, in that you choose a race and have the same starting place as some form of mercenary.

The game sounds good and all, but how much does it cost us Aussies? Will we expected to pay more because we live in an awesome country?

As always, yes, its $99 at EB but with any luck JBHiFi will undercut them like a mofo (as they did with Age of Conan).

As for the subscription fee, it looks to be the same as wow. http://www.destructoid.com/warhammer-online-release-date-and-subscription-costs-announced-98471.phtml

As for Fireblood, its Order (Dwarfs, Human & High Elf) VS Destruction (Orc, Chaos & Dark Elf). And from what I've read it's Orc vs dwarf citys etc but I'm not too sure about that part (having not been in the closed beta, just going from what I read at http://www.war-rvr.net/).

I wonder how all the alb and hib players are gonna go in this now they can't join up and double-team mid

jim cries like a little bitch without end song

To give you an idea about what the higher tier RvR will offer :-
(This is from a guy from my old WoW guild, he's a bit of a smacktard but it's an ok write up)

So this week I got my first real taste of RvR battlefronts, notably the Siege warfare play.

At first I didn’t expect the game play to change much from the scenario RVR (think WoW battleground style stuff), but I couldn’t have been more wrong. It was by complete chance that I came to discover the wonders of siege warfare! I was attempting to take a short cut to one of the many quest way points, during which I haphazardly ran into 50 odd destruction players laying siege to one of our keeps (Ostlands). What I observed is the following:

At the front was a large pack of Chosen warriors with battering rams, hacking and slashing at the Guarding NPCS while the battering ram pounded loudly on the door, just behind them lay a row of support healers and ranged dps casters, and further behind them still was a battery of player built and controlled catapults and bolt throwers (which are to scale), which were raining a steady flow of ordnance on to the ramparts above.

On the walls and in the ramparts of the fortress lay less then 20 players with a handful of NPC champions, they were armed with their own bolt throwers, cannons and cauldrons of burning oil. I broke on through to join the defenders in the keep, from this point the battle ranged on for close to 20 mins before the attackers broke through the gate and stormed the keep - Dire times where ahead!

After the initial slaughter of the defending players, the NPC keep lord was engaged (again, for the WoW players thing the Generals in AV), however unfortunately for the Destruction players they had little to no healers to assist and were soon repelled by a reinforcement wave of fresh Order players (The respawn point is actually a fair distance away for both sides).

With the numbers now beginning to balance out, the battle came to a loose stalemate, in which we (the Order players) could not break out with out being massacred by the Chosen Heavy Forces below, but at the same time the attackers could not advance due to a constant hail of fire balls arrows and cannon balls.

After 20 mins (when the gate was repaired) the Destruction players attempted another assault on the gate, but this time it was quashed and a counter attack ensued which overran the enemy battery and emplacements. We surged forth from the safety of our keep to engage the remaining force of 30+ on the road and in the open. A “stalemate” type situation occurred again when the destruction players closed ranks, basically forming a tight block in the middle of the road between two sloping mounds. We were in a loose line forming a semi circle around them, then without warning they broke and began to flee! And we followed them in earnest! Like a proper rout they spread and ran in all directions, most of them being singled out and cut down as they did!

This carried on until we reached their fort and the whole thing then played out again, but in reverse.

Just to clarify stuff - Scenario RvR = Essentually capture & hold strategic points until you win (for the WoW players, think Arathi Basin/Eye of the Storm style stuff).

Order = good guys. Empire, dwarfs, high elves
Destruction = bad guys. Dark elves, chaos, Greenskins.

Right, so PvP then. Got it.

Right, so PvP then. Got it.

I don't think you do.

No, neither do I.



(happy jim?)


last edited by darkjedi at 15:23:44 27/Aug/08

neither

gonna wait for some reviews first, age of conan had alot of teething problems, don't think blizzard is worried

hey can you fix mine up too darkjedi (needs capital n)

(and a full stop, or is that an exclamation mark?)

So I've looked at a few screenshots. My girly asked me why I was looking at WoW..

I agree with her, from what I've seen it looks graphically very similar to WoW.

WoW at this point in the beta stage was more polished, and after 3 years it's now gleaming compared to a new contender. That aside the difference in play style is the main distinction between the two. That's not to say that the world is the same, there's heaps of plot, storyline and personal tomes of knowledge to please ardent warhammer fans, but ignoring all that you will still see enough difference by jumping in to public quests and contested areas.

A simple and effective change is that groups are open by default. Anyone can join in on an open group that is in their area. This allows very dynamic group creation, allegiance, and destruction. It adds to the sense that everyone is on your side and working together is easy (and necessary later on).

i don't think people are expecting it to be a wow killer, but i for one would like it to push blizzard into picking up their game... i.e. PHYSICALLY BASED australian servers... not american servers flagged "oceaniac". f*** off the rng, let premades back into bgs because grinding tokens in pugs is probably worse then sticking your dick in a cheese grater.

I honestly think that Mythic have no excuse for some of the 'polish' related stuff - If they're aiming to be a WoW-killer (and they're kidding if they say otherwise), then the little things like targeting, the UI & other things you'd file away under the "polish" category should have been dealt with by now.

War's got just enough new stuff to warrant a look in, however I'm still towing the "give it 6 months and have another look" line unless something really changes between now & release date.

last edited by darkjedi at 20:13:16 27/Aug/08

You know I just typed out a post then realized I pretty much said the same thing in a previous post about AOC. So I figure I'll delete it as I don't want to jinx anything, given how quickly Aoc fell over.

Bottom line is I guess I just hope War is good enough to hold a decent player base and give people a bit of fun.

last edited by Taipan at 23:11:23 27/Aug/08

Based on my experiences in beta WAR will be appealing to a lot of MMO players out there. The gameplay is very tight, just a few little graphical glitches and stuff that I noticed. A no bugs that make me think it won't be good on release. Unlike AoC, which I completely regret purchasing.

WoW at this point in the beta stage was more polished,

The first 20 levels of WoW was very polished, but then it polished rapidly vanished into rough grindtastic experiences. After SM it all went down hill.

then the little things like targeting, the UI & other things you'd file away under the "polish" category should have been dealt with by now.

I don't know. I think I'd rather file "is the game f***ing fun at all levels?" before you'd worry about superficial things. I really only found the polish an issue for the first few minutes of any of the classes I played, after that the gameplay was fast, fun and engaging.

If they're aiming to be a WoW-killer (and they're kidding if they say otherwise)

Isn't that kind of like saying "Internode is aiming to be a big-pond killer (and they're kidding if they say otherwise".

WAR is really aiming for a (large) niche within WoW and all other of the PvP centric games that want to play competitively against each other, not mutually masturbating each other in a cave somewhere raiding mobs.

Open Beta also starts on September 7th for anyone who preodered it or if you have a fileplanet subscription

Wouldn't it be smarter from a marketing point of view to allow anyone to jump into the beta instead of people already committed to buying the game (excluding fileplanet)?

Anyone playing the open beta yet? A friend of mine is picking up his preorder (and thus ob code) today, but I hear the client is pretty huge, so I'd imagine it'll be a day or two worth of solid downloading before he can check it out.

yeah I can't download it because it's my entire month worth of downloads on one game. thanks bigpond, australias leading provider

its about 9.5gb

Wouldn't it be smarter from a marketing point of view to allow anyone to jump into the beta instead of people already committed to buying the game

Although betas are undeniably used as a marketing tool these days they are still useful as a pre-release testing apparatus and the people already committed to buying the game are the most likely to provide better bug reports and feedback to the developers.

Wouldn't it be smarter from a marketing point of view to allow anyone to jump into the beta instead of people already committed to buying the game

Yeah, that was my thought too, I thought they'd be trying to get the fence-sitters hooked on it, rather than the people who've already committed to buying it.

can anyone supply a ip or hostname for the australia based war server? i want to run a latency test... if its lower then 80ms i'll change from wow to war on this one point alone.

nope

Wouldn't it be smarter from a marketing point of view to allow anyone to jump into the beta instead of people already committed to buying the game (excluding fileplanet)?

Yeah I'm not going to bother buying this game without trying it first, I made that mistake with AoC already. One of the reasons I bought WoW was because I enjoyed the beta.

Is there any kind of balancing put in place? One thing I've noticed with WoW is that most servers tend to favour a faction and if it is by a decent margin then the trend is for it to get worse since it's more beneficial as a player to be on a server with a high population in the faction you choose. It seems that for an RvR type game faction imbalance would be a big factor in whether it works or not. I reckon a lot of people will just pick a server that has a dominant faction unless there are systems in place to ensure proper balancing.

Haha, 25 hour queues for non subscribers on fileplanet looking for ob client.

can anyone supply a ip or hostname for the australia based war server? i want to run a latency test... if its lower then 80ms i'll change from wow to war on this one point alone.

i dont have the ip anymore, but when i ran a test i got an average of 30ms.

This game looks pretty sweet! :)
Argh!

I've been thoroughly underwhelmed so far. The game is OK, but just OK. My first impression was that it was just WOW with more PVP orientation. But it's fun. I don't think I'll bother buying the game on release though.

^^ same i've been playing the beta for a little while, had a few lvl 8.. got a lvl 9 chosen atm... and i just can't seem to get into it.

lvl 2-3 bright wizards can do crits 4-5x larger them me... some healers are fkn impossible to kill without help from another person, atm the game isn't close to balanced and i just feel some classes aren't at the same standard as others

also there's some pretty major bugs atm.

+ on the pve side, chosen have 2 aggro moves so far at lvl 9... zz taunt and a "heroic strike"

last edited by Raider at 11:27:24 09/Sep/08

Yeah, I'm finding a few bugs that are really irritating (worst being I cannot exit the game ever via the Exit option or log off). /quit doesn't work either. I have to minimize and close from task manager :(

because no doubt level 8 is a true representation of the end game and class balance and I would form my final opinion of the game based upon that =p

lvl 2-3 bright wizards can do crits 4-5x larger them me... some healers are fkn impossible to kill without help from another person, atm the game isn't close to balanced and i just feel some classes aren't at the same standard as others

The game shouldn't really be designed around every class being able to beat every other class. Classes should be designed so that each side has a counter to each other to balance things.

some healers are fkn impossible to kill without help from another person

news just in: healers can heal themselves

anyone looking for a guild lemme know :D

Classes should be designed so that each side has a counter to each other to balance things.

which is what mythic has attempted to do


imo tank plus a melee healer = win

Which is what I'm saying :)