Warhammer Online is a fairly logical extension of the offline world
DateTime:7/8/2009 5:21:12 PM

Indeed, Warhammer Online is a fairly logical extension of the offline world that the Games Workshop has developed around Warhammer, with clubs, shops and magazines all helping to build up a huge community surrounding the world's most popular table-top battle system. "One of the features of massively multiplayer online games that interested us in the first place is that they are barely computer games at all. Sure they rely upon a computer and the Internet to deliver the game to the player, to interpret the player's intention and calculate the results of their actions, but in a very literal sense they are a completely new form of entertainment. The high levels of social interaction mean they owe far more to the role-playing and play-by-mail fantasy games of the 80s and early 90s than the recent spate of computer role-playing games. It was this community aspect to the gameplay and the fact that we could begin to build a virtual model of the Warhammer World that attracted us to this area in the first place." "Operating a successful [online] game has more than a little in common with running a wargames club or any kind of activity group.  In essence, it is the kind of environment we feel we should be offering our players - opportunities for co-operation and competition set against the real world background of Warhammer."

"By focusing on gameplay derived from the principle of Warhammer as a real world, we can quickly get to places where the answers to questions like 'will there be player vs player combat' are simply derived from the game system itself. If within our career structure one player goes down the path of a Witch Hunter and another takes a magical path with leanings towards Chaos, then you should absolutely expect these players to come into conflict. Handling PvP in this way means that we can offer a level of protection to new players, whilst at the same time enabling experienced adventurers to take responsibility for their own actions and any attendant consequences!"