Warhammer Online: Will I Buy It?

By George Walker | July 10, 2008

I suspect that we’ll be getting some more info on this title, especially since hype seems to be ramping up a bit as we get to E3. Oddly, I haven’t heard much about it from some of the MMO blogs I frequent, but SUPPOSEDLY, Warhammer Online has about 700,000 beta applicants. I believe WoW had 500,000 back in the day.

What does this mean? Well, like any good blogger, allow me to speculate wildly.

Compared to just a few years ago (when World of Warcraft was first released) the MMO market was a completely different beast. In North America, EQ was king, and the only MMORPG with over one million subscribers was a Korean MMO called Lineage. The market was different back then… I had friends who played Ultima Online and EverQuest, but I stayed away from most of these.

Today’s MMO market is vastly different. World of Warcraft has put MMORPG’s firmly into the mainstream. Politicians, professional athletes, TV celebrities, have all admitted to having WoW accounts. At over 10.7 million subscribers, no one can deny that WoW has brought new blood to PC and MMORPG gaming.

So it stands to reason that Warhammer Online (which, when I played it at PAX, looked and played almost exactly like WoW) will draw a lot of the WoW crowd to their game. Will Warhammer Online be able to challenge WoW’s ascendancy as King of MMO’s? I don’t think 700,000 beta applicants is really any indication of how popular the game will be. That will depend on the quality of the final product.

I think we’ll be seeing a lot more of Warhammer Online at E3. Especially as buzz for the WoW expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, continues to build up and threaten to overshadow EA Mythic’s efforts.

Will I buy it? I don’t know. It honestly depends on how it compares to WoW and Wrath of the Lich King. If EA Mythic has nothing that’s truly innovative to bring to the table, I don’t see myself leaving my WoW characters to go start over in another game that lays almost exactly the same as WoW.