WAR - as it should be

After reading a few articles at Massively about Warhammer Online, I am more excited than ever about it. World of Warcraft have had enough cash from me, I doubt very much that I will ever go back to it. After having experienced Age of Conan (what I thought about that) and read all there is to know about WAR, I can't possibly go back to the boring WoW. However WAR will launch first and the end of the year, so what the h3ll am I going to play until then?

But back to topic. For starters I will mention some of the basics in WAR. There are two realms: Order and Destruction, and each realm has three armies. For Order there is Empire (humans), High Elves and Dwarves. For Destruction there is Greenskins (orcs and goblins), Chaos (humans gone bad) and Dark Elves.
Each of these armies have it's opposite army, their arch enemy. This is pretty much the same in most fantasy worlds, descending from Tolkien's Middle Earth. Dwarves hate Greenskins, Humans hate Chaos, and High Elves hate Dark Elves. So if you roll a dark elf you will face and kill high elves most of the time, unless you chose to go and help some of your allies.

The entire world is in war. A ever changing, moving war. Not the static kind of war you experience in, for example, World of Warcraft, where nothing every changes unless it's patched. In WAR the world is dynamic and realms can take keeps from the opposite realm, moving the war forward. Each zone has a number of keeps, depending where in the war the zone is, and once all enemy keeps have fallen into your hands you can launch the attack on the main capital. By conquering the capital and finally killing the faction leader/king you get to enjoy a time of plundering the fallen city. Doesn't that beat honor points?

The final siege of the capital will be instanced and capped at 48 players on each side, so I guess there will be kicking and screaming to get a spot. Breaching the Fortress is not a simple matter, with its massive walls and imposing gate. To your help you will have catapults that can be mounted a distance away and rams driven by your local bunch of cannon fo- er, valiant troops. And of course there is boiling oil, archers on the walls and everything you need for a mass slaughter. Defenders can sally forth out to destroy your sweet siege engines, so I bet there will be quite some action.

When the walls has been breached the fight continue inside the city, where completing Public Quests will help you defeat the last of the puny resistance. Once that is done you will face the faction leader in a epic fight.

Having played World of Warcraft all this might sound a bit like your local Alterac Valley except with real sieges. Your normal "aaw crap we lost again, let's try harder next game", followed by a 1-20 minute queue depending battlegroup/server/faction/race/hair colour, have a bit higher stakes in WAR. It will take weeks or months of battling back and forth to get to this point, and losing will bring all back to square one, and all keeps will be reset. I doubt you will find people /afk in the middle of a capital struggle. If nothing else, your team mates would probably be furious and find out where you live and... write a letter saying how furious they are. (That's a Team America reference by the way, go see it if you haven't already)



Since Keen and Graev's Age of Conan podcast ended when the cancelled their subscription to AoC, they (or Keen to be exact) join forces with Warhammer Online bloggers Snafzg from The Greenskin and Syp from WAAAGH! to start a new series of podcasts about WAR, called ChaosCast. The first episode is out, and I look forward to hear more from it.