Warhammer Online Preview: The Armies of Chaos

I'll make this clear up front: Chaos does not mean Hell, fire and the Devil. Barnett yelled this a half dozen times during the presentation and I figured we should get that out of the way up front. So if not Hell, what is it? Chaos is ... Chaotic. It's about mutations, random corrupting evil and any eventuality someone can think of. Chaos has no plan, no reason, just the corruption of everything it touches.

At their root, the characters of Chaos are all humans. Since Chaos is an all-pervasive and corrupting influence, I wondered why there couldn't be Chaos Dwarfs and Elves?

"The most poetic fall from grace is a human who falls from grace," Barnett explained. I probably would have quit with him telling me that it is because they don't have infinite art resources, but he continued. He gave the examples of Christian angels, who are always depicted as human, even as they fall from grace. There is something less emotionally appealing about an Orc who lusts for power.

"Chaos is romanticized corruption," he added. "Chaos is all about when someone is consumed by something they do."

This brings us right back to their physical evolution. In Chaos, players start as vaguely sickly looking humans, but as they advance, are more consumed by the powers of corruption that fuel them and begin to mutate. They call it warping. As they mutate, some grow tentacles, claws and other randomness, while others strap more and more armor to themselves to prevent themselves - quite literally - from coming apart. In short, the more screwed up a character is, the stronger he is likely to be.

"Chaos's job is to convince individual people that they can in fact rule the world," Destin Bales echoed during the presentation.

They're so bent on destruction and domination, that this group can hardly be expected to sit around and till the fields. As such, their starting zone is actually a corrupted Empire town. Players emerge from a portal and must go forth into the town and destroy. The town was like a Bizzaro-world version of the Empire town I had just played. It was the same stuff, but something was not quite right. The buildings lurched to the side, the sky swirled an evil pattern and sometimes giant eyes would blink at you as they emerged from the trees. When the Chaos portal opened on the hill, bad things happened. Rocks began to glow, others began to float, while the entire landscape was corrupted.

My character strode down into the town, killing defenders, burning houses and pillaging loot from the town. Again, the progression was smooth, and not altogether unlike the Empire start, except much more evil. From the first moments, I got a clear idea of what it meant to be corrupted by Chaos.

Like each race, the Chaos realm is divided into four classes. They are:

• Chosen: A melee tank, in the traditional sense of the word. For a clearer picture, think of the evil thing from the cinematic trailer. He's huge, he's bolted every part of his body and carries a very evil looking sword. He reminds me of Super Shredder from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II.
• Zealot: This class combines magic and healing. These are the priests of Chaos who not only believe it, but spread it.
• Unknown Class: They didn't release the details on their third class, save to say it was melee / melee DPS.
• Magus: These are the pure spellcasters and the example class from the demonstration. What's the hook here, since every class so far has had one? Why Magus ride disks of course! Not only do they get more screwed up as they advance, the disk they stand on does too. The disk is a floating thing they stand on at all times, without exception. Unfortunately, in the demo we saw, they had not yet been added.

The Chaos classes have perhaps the best potential for insanity of each of the realms, but also felt the least polished. The real enjoyment of them was to put a visual face to something that people who do not know the original IP so well may not otherwise understand.

As we will get to later, a key part of the end-game involves capital cities. This creates a problem when you consider that Chaos doesn't build cities. Barnett addressed this with a fitting, if funny, solution. Chaos did build a city. They're chaotic and as such, every eventuality comes to pass. As such, the Inevitable City was born. We didn't get to see it, but their esteemed Creative Director did tell us a tale of how it may or may not include (he may have been kidding, I couldn't tell) a stairwell that never ends, which a poor artist has been texturing for three months. I certainly hope he's kidding, if only for the health of that artist, but one never knows.

Never-ending stairwell or not, when Warhammer Online ultimately reaches market, the realm of Chaos is the place to go for the single most deranged experience ever put into an MMORPG.