Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning

Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning—Feature Story

by John Gaudiosi

Electronic Arts purchased Mythic Entertainment a few years back because the massively multiplayer online (MMO) game developer had a proven hit with Dark Age of Camelot, as well a potential mass market license in Warhammer Online. That game, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, is now unleashed to the public.

"The first thing to bear in mind is that we're not making a computer game, we're making a hobby experience," said Paul Barnett, creative director at EA Mythic during an interview at the EA Studio Showcase. "We do the three things that all hobbies provide -- skill, commitment and imagination. You can play it lightly and have a really great time or you can attempt to be the best player in the world. Our commitment is time, money and an understanding that our game is joyous and wonderful.All great hobbies trigger your imagination. We make you think about the experience when you're not playing the game."

That experience offers players six races distributed across two alliances and three frontiers. Although there's general animosity between all of the factions, out of necessity, the humans, dwarves and elves have alligned to fight the greenskins (orcs and goblins), chaos and dark elves.

"If you come and play Warhammer Online, we have the next generation of the pen-and-paper game," said Barnett. "It has more to it than any other MMO. There's more texture, it's easier to play and it has a great world. It's 25 years of gameplay packed into one experience."

Barnett said Warhammer Online offers 80 percent of what gamers are used to, sort of like an MMO Greatest Hits, but it also adds another 20 percent of new ideas and concepts like public quests and the ability to partake in player versus player experience from level 1 to level 80.

"The world of Warhammer has great depth," said Barnett. "Our game is easy to get into and devilishly hard to give up."

According to Barnett, with every new generation of MMO game, the experience becomes easier to play. That accounts for how Blizzard Interactive was able to attract such a large audience of gamers with World of Warcraft.

"More people are getting used to committing time to these types of games," said Barnett. "It's been years since WOW was out and I believe gamers are looking for something new. We want to welcome you to our wonderful world. We want every opportunity for you to get your hands on our game to see how good it is."

One of the reasons EA purchased Mythic is based on Mark Jacobs' track record with MMO games. Barnett said Jacobs, who was the lead designer of Warhammer Online, has been designing these games since the '80s.

"Dark Age of Camelot was a wonderful learning experience and wisdom generator," said Barnett. "We've taken all the best fits of what we know and incorporated them with all of the new technology now available, to make the best iteration of an MMO."

Barnett has watched as the evolution of connected social gaming has exploded from the text-based days of MUDDs to the graphical extravaganzas of Age of Conan and Warhammer Online.

One of the reasons Warhammer Online is so robust is because of the technology developed under the hood. EA Mythic created a proprietary engine for this experience, while adding several third party software packages to the mix like GameBryo. They also worked closely with Nvidia.

"Nvidia's tool support for their hardware is unsurpassed," said Colin Shannon, technical director, EA Mythic. "As a result, this has allowed us to implement several features and diagnose problems in our own graphic systems that would have been extremely difficult to do without. This has allowed us to pursue features in our product that we simply would not have had the time to do otherwise.

Shannon said gamers will especially dig the new sky and lighting systems in Warhammer Online.

"Our advanced lighting system, detailed terrain, and scalability for hundreds of figures were all made possible thanks to Nvidia's GPUs," said Shannon. "They're the gold standard for performance while developing Warhammer Online. Their tools and support are unsurpassed."

"Nvidia GPUs provide the best visual effects and performance for Warhammer Online," concurred Matt Shaw, CTO, EA Mythic. "Warhammer Online takes full advantage of the incredible performance that NVIDIA's GeForce 200 series delivers to maintain high framerate at high resolutions."

Now gamers can explore this rich world with the latest Nvidia GeForce cards.