Get Some WAR Skills
DateTime:7/8/2009 5:21:12 PM

Something else which should set Warhammer Online aside from the massively multiplayer crowd is its flexible career system, more in keeping with the old Warhammer pen and paper role-playing games of the 1980's. "The idea of character classes goes all the way back to the Dungeons and Dragons games of the early 1970's. 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. In real life, people develop their personalities by acquiring three different types of 'things' - friends, possessions and skills. It seemed to us that this basic truth was instantly transferable to an online game where the 'friends' 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 'possessions' become the in-game assets that you've acquired through your efforts and adventures and will range from armour and equipment, to horses, men-at-arms or a building! Your 'skills', as in real life, become the things you've learned to do through hard work, practice and training."

As a result the original plans for a persistent online strategy game have sadly been ditched in favour of something more like a traditional massively multiplayer role-playing game. Instead of online Warhammer Fantasy Battle, we're effectively getting online Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play. "From the outset, Warhammer Online was conceived as a game that would plunge its players into a life of battle and adventure within a grim and gritty realisation of the Warhammer World", according to Robin, although obviously the details of how this will be done have now changed radically. "Set in the Reikland against the turbulent backdrop of Warhammer, players will enter the world as lowly adventurers. In company with hundreds of other players they'll 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." That's not to say that Warhammer Online will be just another paint by numbers MMRPG though. For starters it has the benefit of two decades worth of back-story and development, during which time the Warhammer franchise has expanded from table-top wargaming and lead figures into role-playing, magazines and a series of highly successful novels, turning a hobby into a ￡100m industry. What Robin and the team at Warhammer Online are aiming to do is to bring that world to the internet, "to create a game that brings together the excitement and gameplay of the early pen and paper RPGs, with fantastic graphics and a great social environment - a game that makes the Warthammer World more real than real!"