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There aren’t too many clean sites devoted to news on Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (WAR), which is why I don’t keep up on WAR news on even a quasi-daily basis. Today I came across an article from January that gives a good insight into WAR’s development, which I started to question when there was no real word on anything other than two races. Apparently, however, four of the races are playable, which gives me hope that the game really will ship by year’s end (Q3 ‘07 is a current estimate).

The aforementioned article also addresses some of the concerns players like Maxator have, in that they are not big PvP fans and instead prefer solo or group questing. Coincidentally, the author of the aforementioned article is himself a PvE gamer, though was quite impressed by how fun WAR’s PvP areas were. This is in part due to Mythic’s stance on developing WAR, and their opinion that what PvE gamers dislike about PvP is when questing is interrupted by random, unnecessary player-killing (PK). To resolve this concern, Mythic decided to make many PvE areas locations in which players could not be killed by the opposing faction, whereas other areas had a PK flag turned on, because opposing faction players were part of a quest objective.

While word of WAR’s objective-based PvP areas is not particularly new, other changes to typical MMORPG faire is, such as the limited use of stealth, and the lack of crowd control and buffer classes. Mythic is pretty dedicated to making every class fight-ready, instead of forcing some classes to stay out of the action and serve pure support roles, as many classes in World of Warcraft (WoW) do. For example, in WAR, even the healing classes are fighters, and they are forced to continue doing damage in order to power their healing abilites. So, while support classes in WAR may not be front-line fighters, they are designed to deal damage and contribute to group damage, making them far more versatile than WoW’s support classes.

Other interesting notes about WAR include condition-specific abilities, such as those that can only be triggered when a character is knocked down. Quests offered in certain zones will change based on what faction controls the zone, and apparently, public quest rewards will be among the best loot in the game. Between that and the Bright Wizard who is a fire-based damage dealer, even Maxator should be able to find solace in WAR after his WoW fixation dies down.

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