Rez Pls: They're Alive! Warhammer Online's Live Events

Good times in Warhammer Online


I've been playing a lot of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. In fact, it's supplanted World of Warcraft lately, though I know I will get back to Azeroth again. I've been trying out different classes, leveling characters, and enjoying my favorite pastime in these massively-multiplayer games -- killing other players. Now that Mythic has ramped up rewards for participating in open realm-vs.-realm combat, it's easier to roam the game world and find other players to battle. It's thrilling to actually kill a player and gain a level.

Warhammer Online racked up 700,000 active accounts in its first month. Playing scenarios was a favorite activity of players.

Another impressive thing about WAR is the way Mythic is rolling out special events. Sure, World of Warcraft has a lot of those, but it took some time for Blizzard to implement them, and the ones we see now are mostly retreads -- with some tweaks of the same event from the previous year. Mythic has already completed three events, and WAR hasn't even been live for six months. One event, Heavy Metal, introduced two new classes, and we now have a legion of Black Guard and Knights of the Blazing Sun running amok in WAR. That's impressive.


I had a chance to discuss the event with Mythic's Mark Davis, the game's associate producer and live events person. Davis was also behind Witching Nights -- the event that took place during Halloween for eight days -- and the most recent Keg End festival.

"The [Heavy Metal] event let players unlock the two new classes a week early," Davis said. "[WAR is] all about the bragging rights. Players like to show off how powerful they are or what accomplishments they've unlocked, and this is one way that they can show how cool they are."

Special events, which can be a mixture of player-vs.-environment and player-vs.-player, are designed around daily tasks that players find in a new tab in the Tome of Knowledge. Davis said there are three design goals: "The events need to be solo-able, they need to be [doable] by any level, and they need to be done in under an hour."

Warhammer Online features well-designed cities, but they aren't the social centers they seem to be in World of Warcraft.

The recent Keg End event didn't include a new scenario, but Heavy Metal did. Called the Reikland Factory, it was a scenario for 18-vs.-18 players. According to Davis, the team was excited about it. "Many of the daily tasks took place in the Reikland Factory. It's an industrial place where the Empire makes steam tanks, so both sides want to own it. One [task is] to detonate steam tank ammo inside the scenario."


The Reikland scenario is unique in that players in all four tiers of Warhammer Online can participate. "There were really four copies running, one for each tier," Davis said. You could not queue for one that was beyond your level. "The scenario itself was not a part of the campaign," he added. "The player's efforts in the Reikland scenario did not move the war forward." What he means is that it didn't affect the overall battle to capture the rival side's capital city, the game's ultimate goal. While players' efforts in all of the tiers, including scenarios, usually do contribute to the war effort, Reikland did not.

Players seemed to really enjoy it, too -- when they could get in. A number of players complained about the scenario taking too long to launch, perhaps because it needs 36 players to start.

Did this dude just step out of a Frank Frazetta painting? Warhammer Online features some cool artwork.

Davis did say that players had a "little bit of wiggle room" in completing the daily events. "Mythic is full of gamers, and as we get older we have more and more 'life things' we want to do as well. We understand that players may not be able to log in every single night. You're going to have a couple of nights you can miss."

After the Heavy Metal event was over, the Reikland scenario was removed from the game. There are plans for other new scenarios, but nothing concrete yet. "Anything is possible," Davis said, when asked if the Reikland Factory would return. He added that "Reikland Factory represents some of our finest work ? the action is fast and furious."

These kinds of events are a good thing in a persistent world game like WAR. So much of these worlds are frozen in place and never really see much change, so when a special event gussies things up a bit, it's a welcome sight to players. I did ask Davis about upcoming events: Will peace break out? Will Orcs and Dwarves be lifting flagons of ale together? Davis laughed: "Our motto is still true: War is everywhere. I don't think there will ever be a truce or peace between Order and Destruction."

Whew! That's good to know. I'm not interested in playing Peacehammer.

The legacy of WoW

Blizzard announced that it had 11.5 million active subscriptions, of which 10.9 million were Death Knights.

The aspect of the MMO scene that I found most interesting in 2008 was the popularity of both Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures and Warhammer Online during their respective launch months. In the pre-World of Warcraft days, Sony Online Entertainment's EverQuest was the big rooster in the chicken yard with 400,000-plus subscribers. EverQuest essentially lapped all other competitors, more than doubling anyone else's subscriber base in the North American fee-based MMO market.


World of Warcraft shattered any ceiling EverQuest may have set. We all knew Blizzard had a chance to be really successful with WoW, and predicting that it would eclipse EverQuest was about as risky as predicting more babies for Angelina Jolie. I remember thinking that WoW would probably get to 500,000 subscribers, and had a chance at a million. I was a little off. More than four years later, it continues to grow, and recently hit 11.5 million subscribers.


What WoW has done is expand the market greatly for big-name MMOs that capture the imagination of players, and that was evidenced by the launches we saw last year. Age of Conan and Warhammer Online both hit 700,000 registered accounts very quickly. What this tells me is that there is a large pool of MMO players ready to jump in and try a new game. Give them a game that grabs their interest, and make them believe it's a game of some substance, and you can pull in big numbers right away -- numbers that dwarf the old standard, EverQuest at its peak.

The promise of this kind of PvP action got Funcom more than half a million registered accounts right out of the starting gate.

The trick is to keep them. WoW does it; so far, it looks like both Age of Conan and Warhammer Online have bled a lot of players. Funcom has slashed staff for Age of Conan and recently announced that it was closing 31 of 48 servers this week. I expect Funcom to continue to improve Conan and keep it alive, but the game may never get close to those 700,000 accounts again. Warhammer Online may end up being a million-subscriber game, but it's going the wrong way now, as the developers are actively encouraging server transfers to ensure adequately populated servers. (And in a classic case of having to eat your own dog food, Mythic President Mark Jacobs is probably sorry he said this to MTV Multiplayer last fall about measuring success by the number of servers:

"?if you've seen a game consolidate servers, you know it's in deep, deep trouble -- that's not a healthy sign for an MMO ? It will be the same for 'Warhammer.' Look at us six months out. Look at us six weeks out. If we're not adding servers, we're not doing well."

They are not adding servers. They are encouraging players to leave low-population servers. The math isn't hard to do.