It might be hard to remember at this point, but back in 2008 there was a fever-pitch excitement for Mythic’s Warhammer Online. The RvR MMO was poised to be not only a successor of sorts to Dark Age of Camelot but a rival to World of Warcraft. It drew from the dark Warhammer fantasy universe and had a lot of neat little ideas, including trinkets, wild classes, and public quests.
Unfortunately, WAR never managed to live up to these lofty expectations and eventually closed three years ago in December 2013. In a new video, a fan examines the history of the game and why and how it failed to live up to its potential.
Settle in for this 39-minute video below and let us know your favorite Warhammer Online memories in the comments!
Source: YouTube
Oh and I forgot to mention, they originally intended to have multiple factions.
From what I understood, they wanted all factions to verse eachother, with encouraged fighting between certain factions like Dwarves vs Orcs, Humans Vs. Chaos, Dark Elves vs Elves, etc.
Before the game was developed to a point where Humans could reach Dwarves or even before Chaos was added, Mythic was bought out by EA, where they forced them to have a Good Vs Evil faction war set up, instead of the Warhammer nature of anyone vs. everyone.
It was unfortunate the game never saw it’s true potential.
As someone who was among the very first group of 1000 Alpha Testers and grew up playing Warhammer (Table Top) as a little kid, I was very disappointed with Warhammer Online.
Several times we tried to say the game wasn’t ready for release, they needed more PvE content, as well as PvP driven by story. (The PvP was good, but it wasn’t great like it should have been.)
I never bothered to play at launch due to my disappointment with the developers and their ‘We know better than you players because we’ve made an MMO and we’re gonna kill WoW!” attitude.
However, I do still have an unopened Collector’s Edition of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning still sitting on my shelf, as a memory of the time.
I kept the box in the packaging knowing it’d be worth more as a relic of history, than played as a game.
Although I was disappointed with Star Wars: Old Republic, I wasn’t as disappointed because of my history with Warhammer Online, and knowing EA can’t make a good MMO.
I’m sure Mythic Entertainment would have made a perfect Warhammer Online that could have killed WoW, however after EA purchased Mythic, they were forced to remake the game, starting from scratch on everything but the textures.
Before that moment, Warhammer Online was fun. The PvP was spectacular, it could and would happen anywhere.
There would even be large sections of the map with a mixture of PvE and PvP.
You’d have a quest to kill 5 random creatures, and someone on the other faction would have a quest to kill you.
When EA purchased Mythic they forced them to completely rework the PvP, making it more similar to WoW, rather than their original PvP style that was far more organic and exciting.
After the EA purchase and rework, Warhammer was no longer fun.
There were areas for PvP after, and sure you could play on fully open PvP servers, but it just wasn’t nearly as fun as before.
The original design had a seamless experience in mind. EA wanted to separate players so the players wouldn’t be griefed to the point they’d unsubscribe.
Shortly after large groups of people started to receive Alpha then Beta invites.
Most players were never able to play the version of Warhammer Online that could have killed World of Warcraft.
Long story short, never trust a game to succeed if it’s got an EA label attached to it.
War is very much alive and very playable https://www.returnofreckoning.com
As for the game it never really clicked with me mainly down to the poor character models with the greens only being the good ones but I could never get immersed in the world.
I did pre-order and hang around for the first few months and return on occasion