If you’ve been keeping an eye on Warhammer Online rogue server Return of Reckoning, you probably already know that the game is knee-deep in its take on the Stronghold Saga, which currently pits Dwarves against Greenskins in the Marshes of Madness. But this month, the player dev team has been hinting that there’s more than just RvR on deck for this leg of the saga: It sure looks as if they’re bringing in cities as well, cities that were once planned for the game when it was alive and well under Mythic but never made it in.
“When the world of Warhammer Online – Age of Reckoning was introduced to us back in around 2007, we were told we were going to be able to visit all of the races’ capital cities,” the player devs explained. “Not long after, we were told how ‘Campaigns’ were going to work in Warhammer. Players would fight in open-world group PvP called Realm vs Realm or RvR. The top-level players would fight in Tier 4, which was a massive battlefield spanning five full-size zones where players would push the tide of battle toward the enemies’ capital cities, invade, slaughter the king, and pillage what was left. This would happen simultaneously in Empire vs. Chaos, Dwarfs vs. Greenskin and High Elves vs. Dark Elves. Mythic even showed us how it would work for the Dwarfs vs. Greenskins.”
If you were around back then, you might even remember some of those videos because the Dwarfs vs Greenskins zones were featured early, along with a relatively complete Dwarf city, parts of which were included in the closed beta. Of course, it was not meant to be; all but two cities were ultimately cut from the game before launch: Altdorf and The Inevitable City. At the time, Mythic planned to implement the other cities later, but that was ultimately scrapped too, as the game’s anemic performance eventually led to high-profile departures, layoffs, content droughts, and then the sunset itself. In fact, when the sunset was announced, Mythic even told players that it had tackled “two of the four remaining fully built cities” – Karaz-A-Karak and Karak Eight Peaks – but the optimization work was too much to overcome.
That was six years ago, however, and players have been left to restore the game on rogue servers, which brings us to Return of Reckoning and its content plans. The group recently dropped a teaser video that appears to show a train traveling through Dwarven mountain terrain, telling players to look forward to… something… on September 18th.
The Reckoning team is playing coy with the details, meaning folks on the game’s forums have been left to speculate on what the “more to come” actually means. But the developers did reiterate that players will want to tune in to the stream Saturday as they chat with “former Mythic employees to talk about the Dwarf and Greenskin cities and what was meant to be the end of The Stronghold Saga.” Let’s just say that it’d be an awful lot of teasing not to give you at least one of those cities now.
