Editorials

Warhammer Online devs announced that the Oceanic server will take care of players from Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and other Southeast Asian countries. Additionally, the Oceanic server will launch Age of Reckoning on the same day that it debuts in North America and Europe.

WAR Oceanic FAQ

Where will the server be located?

The game server will be located on mainland Australia and service New Zealand, Singapore, and other surrounding South East Asian territories.

When will the server be available?

Australian, North American, and European servers will all launch simultaneously with the client available throughout the supported territories mentioned above.

What are the benefits to having a local, regional server?

A local server means reduced latency and packet loss. These advantages allow for better performance in Realm vs. Realm battles and an overall improved game experience with limited lag and a more responsive environment. In addition there will be a higher population during peak Oceanic play times allowing players to better coordinate their in-game efforts.

Will Oceanic players be able to play on North American servers?

Absolutely, players from both North America and the Oceanic region will play using the same client giving them access to both North American and Oceanic servers. In addition servers will be listed with regional tags and able to be sorted by ping rate allowing players to select the best server for them quickly and easily.

What server hardware will be used for the Australian Server?

The game will be hosted on the same server technology used for North American servers.

There are also links to two interviews about the new server and the game's progress so hop on over to the official site.

Games Industry got their hands on EA-Mythic's senior designer Josh Drescher for a talk about Warhammer Online. The discussion meanders among several topics including MMO development in a post-WoW environment:

Q: What challenges do you face in developing an MMO, especially in a post-WoW world?

Josh Drescher: As a studio Mythic has actually been developing massively multiplayer games for over a decade, so they're not challenges that are surprises to us, we've been working and innovating around for well over a decade or so.

In terms of operating in the post-WoW world, one of the core things to remember is that since WoW has launched the vast percentage of MMOs that launched after it have been successful.

Obviously no one has eclipsed the 10million subscriber number, but there have been numerous titles that have come out on different platforms and multiple genres all over the world that have been far more successful than MMOs had been previously.

The market is actually much larger now and as a result is much more tolerant of unique and interesting ideas, in the same way that a film industry that is dominated by blockbusters has a lot more room for independent films, documentaries, small foreign films and pictures of that sort.

If you have a major industry leader that gets out there and gets attention it's actually much easier as a developer to then capture the additional attention from that audience.

So the post-WoW world is a great world to be making MMOs in, you don't just have to target their subscriber base as your metric for success.

There is a lot more to read so check out the rest at Games Industry.

PC IGN is featuring a progress report on Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. Editors got their hooks into content manager Destin Bales and discussed the beta test and end-game content.

According to Bales, "In our beta test we just did our first tier four campaign testing. That's where we artificially level players to the highest level in the game, give them access to the highest content in the game, and said go fight through these zones. We also did a one-night test of an invasion of Altdorf, which is our Empire capital city. We let people go in, burn down the city, kill the king, capture rewards, sort of the culmination of the entire RvR game.

"Our next phase of beta is going to release the Greenskin and Dwarf tiers one through three content, and that will allow players to see stuff they haven't seen in almost a year. We've been focusing heavily on the Empire and Chaos and recently the Elves in beta, and so now we're going to give players a chance to see the Greenskin and Dwarves and see all the improvements and polish we've made to those areas."

Check out the rest of the article at IGN.

As game worlds become more and more advanced, they also grow larger and larger. The by-product of this improvement is the long distances that must be traveled between locations. For some reason, with this increase in world size, there is not a corresponding improvement in traveling systems. Indeed, there seems to be almost a perverse joy in sending players on quests that involve running back and forth between two distant points with no other objective but carrying a bickering message between a pair of NPCs.

Warhammer Online has published the latest Grab Bag, a plethora of questions from the community on a wide variety of topics. Most prominently this week is the topic of guilds:

Q: What are the requirements to form a guild?

A: You have to be in a party of six, travel to the capital city and have a little money to spare.

Q: Aside from a start-up cost, will guilds have any sort of maintenance costs?

A: While there is no fee associated with maintaining a guild, there may be other features that require a monetary investment from the Guild or members, such as dues/tithes, guild store purchases, and keep maintenance fees associated with a claimed keep.

Q: How many titles can exist in a guild?

A: There are ten titles are available within the guild structure - these are fully customizable by the guild's leadership so you can tailor your guild's titles to your own specific attitudes and purposes.

Q: Is there a maximum number of characters allowable in a guild?

A: Nope! You can invite any number from six on up. The sky is the limit!

Check out the rest after the jump.

Jim Moreno tackles the difficult task of roleplaying a merchant in this edition of RoleCraft: "Even roleplayers are known to struggle with this cookie cutter gameplay, and with keeping their characters from looking and acting just like every other character in game. What to do? One sure way to avoid the pitfalls of routine is to realize that there are many other classes in game besides adventurer. It's time to become a professional roleplayer!"

Crispy Gamer has kicked up a preview of Warhammer Online. The article came via a conference call between editors and developers. Here's a snippet:

Finally, Jeff Hickman ended the call. "Since we are focusing on certain areas, it is very rare that anyone sees the entirety of our game. People don't understand the real depth of what we're doing. There are so many layers of things to do, places to see, rewards, advancement... People often ask us, 'Well, you level from 1 to 40 and then what?' And I just laugh. Our game is not about leveling from 1 to 40. It's about leveling up your guild, going through the campaign, getting one of 20-plus armor sets ... it's a total hobby experience."

"It's very difficult to try to explain because we talk about things like guilds, and people say, 'Yeah we have guilds,' and I say no, no you don't understand, you can level up your guild, assign standard bearers, claim keeps, and we have many other special things we haven't even talked about, yet. There is just so much depth, I wish everybody could see all of the great stuff that we're doing."

Well, Mr. Hickman, we'll all get a chance to see it soon enough -- in fact, in the fall of 2008.

There are literally tons of nuggets of information in the rest of this article so be sure to head out and read the rest at Crispy Gamer.

Sean Bulger's periodic community column today looks at the concept of Open PvP (player vs. player) and what it does to games and their communities.

A while back we talked about conflict between players and what sort of a role that it can play in a game and for communities. During this, it was noted that player competition can be implemented in numerous different ways. This week, I would like to revisit this discussion and talk about one of those particular methods: the open PvP world.

Open PvP is one of the more controversial topics in MMO circles and plenty of people have fairly strong opinions one way or the other on the subject. That said, I would like to explore both the positive impacts and negative ones on the player community. Open PvP has the potential to help bond a community fairly tightly, but it also has the potential to truly tear it apart as well.

Read more after the leap.

Last week, Jonathan Steinhauer's column looked at the design of outdoor areas in The Dangerous Wilderness, Part 1. In Part 2, he continues his thoughts on the basic challenge most every MMO faces.

The easiest solution, though it avoids the root of the problem, is to disperse the ground spawns to a more realistic population level. There are areas where one would expect to encounter monsters, and that is where the heavy concentrations should be. Hard core hunting should occur in the fortresses and camps of the various villains, monsters, and animals that are the bane of the adventurer, not every time you step off the path. This opens up the wilderness for travel and casual hunting while giving players the kind of combat that exist in epic stories: battle in the lairs.

Read more after the leap.

EA Mythic announced several stops for Warhammer devs this summer. In addition to allowing visitors to play the game, folks will also be able to enter to win a beta slot:

Gamers Can Get Their Hands on WAR and Win a Spot in the Closed Beta

Fans looking forward to Warhammer® Online: Age of ReckoningTM (WAR), EA Mythic's highly anticipated MMORPG, can get hands-on time with the game at events throughout the US this summer. Gamers, including the over 600,000 fanatics eagerly awaiting a spot in WAR's closed beta test, will have the chance to experience WAR's Realm vs. RealmTM gameplay at several upcoming events. Attendees will also have the opportunity to win access to the closed beta, and meet the developers, including Creative Director Paul Barnett and Senior Producer Jeff Hickman.

Click through to see the dates and locations of the various conventions.