Warhammer Online Preview
Chris Leyton
00/12/0000
Warhammer Online hopes to faithfully replicate the table-top battles that made Games Workshop a common name amongst men across the country...
If youâre a male, chances are youâve heard of Games Workshop, in all likelihood itâs probable that youâve even played one of the games or collected the miniatures, even pictured yourself as an elf in the fantasy worlds that they create.
For those not in the know (because it is all rather clique), Games Workshop specializes in tabletop fantasy wargames, such as Warhammer and Warhammer 40k; you know the ones with the little die-cast miniatures that you can paint. In fact itâs fair to say these guys kickstarted the whole RPG genre, creating rich worlds and diverse characters for people to play as, in the many games that peaked during the 80âs yet still remain popular to this day.
We grabbed a first look at a new Games Workshop game today; entitled Warhammer Online. Sure itâs not the first Games Workshop videogame, but it is the first one to be developed by Games Workshop themselves, so we decided to take an early look at what theyâve got in store.
The game is set to be a massively multi-player online game (MMOG) that looks to replicate the same experience as the Wargames clubs up and down the country. The game is a joint venture between Games Workshop and Climax â“ the UKâs largest independent computer games developer. Former White Dwarf editor and Design Studio boss â“ Robin Dews, heads up the company â“ and Rick Priestley â“ Warhammerâs original creator and now Games Workshopâs Design Director â“ is leading the game design team. On the Climax side, Matt Sansam is producing the game under the guidance of Paul Caruthers, Gary Liddon and Karl Jeffery. Itâs a pretty heavyweight team with a great deal of experience of cutting edge games design and delivery.
Originally Warhammer Online was set to place players as militant commanders, controlling a garrison of troops who establish a territory around their base in a kind of 3D âAge of Empiresâ resource management and military conquest game. This was changed however to be a game that plunges players into a world of adventure and battle, more akin to an RPG. Entering the world of Reikland as a lowly adventurer in the company of hundreds of other players, youâll begin to explore the world and through skill, luck and a trusty blade, rise to become a famous hero and the leader of a powerful band of men.
As youâd expect the world of Warhammer offers a lot of distinct and wonderful creature races for players to be, and thatâs where the game starts off. In keeping with Warhammer tradition the âevilâ races will be kept for the game system and the Game Masters (GM) to maintain that thereâs always a challenge for the players. Players will be able to pick their characters from a number of races, including â“ Humans, Dwarfs, Elfâs, Halflings and Ogres, whether you play them as good or evil however is entirely up to you. As with other online games there will be the powers of law and order, so players that stray down the path of evil may find themselves hunted into the wilderness, or strung up on a gibbet at a bleak crossroads or crowded market square.
As with most RPGâs, character classes will play an important role in the game, rather then offer a number of pre-determined classes the team have designed a system which will allow you to shape your own characters destiny. In the words of the General Manager of Warhammer Online, Robin Dews:
âThe idea of character classes goes all the way back to the pen and paper Dungeons and Dragons games of the early 1970âs. This places a number of fantasy races â“ Elf, Dwarf, Gnome, and Human etc. â“ along one axis of a grid with the types of career along the other â“ Thief, Druid, Warrior, Cleric etc. By cross-referencing the two, you came up with a character â“ Human-Cleric, or a Dwarf -Thief, or Gnome-Druid etc that had the attributes of both the race and the class. Although the staple of fantasy games ever since, this seemed to us to have little counterpart in the real world and we wanted to take a rather different approach.â
âIn the real life, people develop their personalities by acquiring three different types of âthingsâ - friends, possessions and skills. It seemed to us that this basic truth was instantly transferable to an online game where the âfriendsâ become the other players in the game and more specifically the group of people who log on at a similar time and have similar game objectives to you. Your âpossessionsâ become the in-game assets that youâve acquired through your efforts and adventures and will range from armour and equipment, to horses, men-at-arms or a building! Your âskillsâ, as in real life, become the things youâve learned to do through hard work, practice and training.â
In keeping with the Warhammer background certain races will indeed have special kinds of aptitudes â“ Dwarf engineers and Halfling cooks, etc. - but on the whole this skill-based approach provides us with a means to enable our players to shape their own destinies rather than forcing them down certain pre-determined paths. Whether or not you can paint your characters in the create mode is currently uncertain!
Currently causing the team a few headaches is the subject of death within the game; the Warhammer vets would prefer death to mean exactly that â“ Game Over! In Rickâs words â“ ââ¦in terms of its feel, the Warhammer world is brutal, grubby, frequently cruel, often absurd and inevitably uncaring.â However there are issues that the team need to work on, the idea that after playing the game for a year or so your favourite character diesâ¦deadâ¦finito. This might be just about ok if you are fully aware of what you are getting into when you go up alone against that Dragon, but it also throws up technical problems such as what happens if you accidentally go linkdead as you are about to cast your killer spell and the server is left to decide your fate.
