[PC] Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning - You can't play as Nagash so WHAT'S THE POINT?

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I reckon it's time for a thread, myself!

Okay, so here's the deal. I've had a fair bit of experience with MMOs - EverQuest being the first - and I've always been a pretty casual player. None of them have really been able to hold my interest for really long, I usually make it to about halfway up the level ladder before falling asleep and plummeting back down, rolling out the door I came in. "Make mine single player" and all that.

But here's what my friends tell me. EA Mythic, the guys making this game, have also developed Dark Age of Camelot, an MMO I've never played but otherwise heard very good things about. If the previous title is any indication, they say, then this game will be the apex of PvP. It's Warhammer, so I expected it to be pretty carnal, but it turns it that it will focus almost entirely on player vs. player combat to the point where much of the experience and progress a player earns will be gained by beating up as many other people as possible. If WoW was responsible for the rebirth of player/environment interaction in the genre, then this game would be the next step in player/player involvement.

Big words, I know, but they're majorly excited and now I am too. Most of them swore off MMOs entirely after they quit WoW about a year ago (I lasted about half as long as they did - nothing against the game itself, it was great, just not in my nature to play a game like that to death), but they say this is the one to come back for. Beta sign-ups are still open, but the game itself isn't set for release until the second quarter of '08, and that's if they don't push it back again.

So is anyone else thinking about playing, or heard anything cool from the devs about what's going to be in it? Is it Hammer Time for anyone else, or are you too legit to commit?

Jam it back in, in the dark.

So in researching the game, I found some cool features the devs are trying to implement as we speak:

- Healers won't be bots. Mythic is attempting to quell the MMO standard of standing back and throwing out heals and nothing else. The primary Dark Elf support class, Disciple, can dual-wield swords for example. Not just as a PvP option, either, that's their normal weapon setup. They're primary function, aside from heals, will be damage and dots.

- Unlike WoW, Good and Evil race zones will be parallel to each other from the moment you start, such as the Dwarven starting zone being directly across from the Greenskin one. This is to give players a sense of war or ongoing battle at all times. You have to be in PvP-mode constantly. Each zone will be divided into one of three tiers based on level where combat can take place.

- Shared quests. I don't mean like in WoW or EverQuest, where a player can share any open quests with someone in their group, I mean the entire zone automatically shares any quest anyone in it happens to have. If you wander into a new zone and take up a quest to kill 20 rats, for example, you automatically get credit for every rat anyone else with that quest kills in the entire zone. Rewards such as gold or items are then split and shared between everyone involved. This option can be turned on or off as the player permits.

- Skull harvesting. Just like Diablo, you get a small war trophy for each person you defeat in PvP. At a certain point, you can adorn your character model with skulls of people you've slain.

- Dynamic character models. As your character levels, they become larger, more muscular, and generally much more imposing.

- Guild Alliances. Several guilds can join into a much larger alliance, giving everyone within those guilds a new, shared chat and raid window. This can lead to raids of potentially hundreds of players for realm vs. realm combat.

So yeah, pretty exciting. Even if MMOs aren't you're thing, It's still an interesting direction for the genre to go towards. May this'll be the one I can finally stick to.

There's nowhere I can't reach.