The website of Rock, Paper, Shotgun release the perview of the anticipated MMO Warhammer Online.

Two conflicting positions: I have very high hopes for Warhammer Online, and believe it will be a great MMO with fresh ideas, and a unique way of dealing with global conflict. Also: I really worry about Warhammer Online, concerned that by the time it comes out it will have devolved into a very generic WoW clone.

The very first time I saw WAR, back in February 2006, it was more conceptual than physical. They had built a bit of the beginning ground for the Dwarves and Greenskins, and that was just about it. But they had some really exciting ideas. The world of the Games Workshop monolith was going to take some really original approaches to the genre, and the most immediately exciting was the abandoning of levels. Instead they had this fantastic structure in mind that let you micro-manage your character's skills, picking three at a time and then letting the XP you accrue fill each until it's complete. This was then broken down into five distinct stages, and, well, it doesn't exist so it's not worth explaining. But they were excited about it, and so was I. It's very telling that the MMO genre seems to have the power to force developers to lose anything that strays too far from the familiar. You've got to get a player-base, and if you want them, you've got to make it familiar enough. Which means, of course, you've got to make it feel like World of Warcraft. Sigh.

Now of course WAR has entered that troubling time of vanishing betas, occasional silence, and hugely extended release dates. So it's now that I'm going to tell you why I'm so optimistic about WAR.

First, delays like this mean something: they're making the game better. Now, this might mean they're smoothing out more obscurities that separate it from WoW and thus confuse the stupid, but it also means they're likely improving all that remains.

But more than that, there's stuff that's staying in that's really distinct from WoW, no matter how the Warcraft fanatics will cry, "But blah-de-blah is the same as that if you squint and use your imagination..." And these are all structured around the global warfare in which your character is involved.

From the very start, you're involved in the main conflict, even though you're not immediately aware of it. While the game has the usual array of regular "kill 30 of these" quests (there's a feature they told me about and I don't know if it survives, but I really hope it does that if you'd killed 25 rabbits in a field, then get given a quest to kill 30, you'll only have 5 to go please keep this in Mythic), there's also those that invest in the overall progress of your race.

Continue to Read: Games For 2008: Warhammer Online

News Original From: Rock, Paper, Shotgun