WoW For Now...

Warhammer Online's Inner Competiton

Another Common Content article ahoy! This week I’m supposed to talk about what games the players of Warhammer Online are also involved with. Kind of an easy topic when you realize the entire following that Warhammer has gained over the past several years of its existence. So what do Warhammer Online fans play right now? Well time to take a look!

The obvious game that can be associated with Warhammer Online fans is, believe it or not, Warhammer Fantasy Battles. As a game that is the real forefather of Warhammer Online, Fantasy Battles is a perfect game for any player who is interested in getting into the Warhammer World. As I am trying to show in my Road to 7th Edition series of articles, there is a perfect connection between the two games that allows for players to get involved in both at an interesting level. With Warhammer Online there is the typical MMO sense of instant gratification where a player can login for a few minutes to a few hours and accomplish whatever tasks they want to in that time. With Fantasy Battles there is a much more personal interaction between players and more of a long term gratification with watching an army grow from boxes filled with pewter and plastic into something that is yours. Fantasy Battles would have to be the primary associated game with Warhammer Online at this time just based on the fact it’s the basis of the Warhammer line right now, and the number of players who seem to play it and are awaiting Warhammer Online.

For the next game that is played by Warhammer Fans I would have to fall back on the Warhammer Fantasy Pen & Paper Role-playing Game. As a fantasy world that is pushed by a heavily involved fan base there are a lot of Pen & Paper RPG players who are involved in the Warhammer Community. The fact that the Warhammer World has been fleshed out to such a state where players can now successfully run their own campaigns based on printed information by the Black Library is amazing. Since there are a lot of online gamers who are slowly moving into the realm of Pen & Paper gaming, it stands to reason that Warhammer Online will be no different in directing players in this direction as well. As another game that really extends into the Warhammer World, the RPG makes a lot of sense for players to get involved in and I can only see it growing as we get closer and closer to a release date.

The next big winner in terms of games that Warhammer Online fans will support is likely the Collectible Warhammer Card game. Personally I don’t play the Warhammer Card game and I have no intention of doing so; I have far too many things on my plate to handle then a CCG being added to the mix. There are however a lot of gamers out there who crave the ease that a CCG can offer. As a game that doesn’t require large amounts of time spent on one single game (most of the time), a CCG is good for the gamer who likes to show up to “the store” and play a few games with people before running off to do whatever else they need to. Much like an MMO, a CCG presents players the opportunity to partake in gaming with little time investment required and a pretty good amount of enjoyment from it. Having worked in a gaming store myself I can tell you that a lot of players who played CCG’s like Magic: The Gathering were also highly into MMOs, so the connection has been a strong one for quite some time.

Finally we reach the bottom of the proverbial barrel of Warhammer Online Fans and what other games they are interested in… World of Warcraft. As a former TenTonHammer Community Manager for World of Warcraft I can’t say too much about the game, but when it comes to MMO’s it is the ‘King of the Hill’ so to speak. There are few MMO’s that can compete with the steamroller that is WoW, and the only possibility at this point would seem to be the following that Warhammer Online is accruing. As an MMO that is already established with a back-story set forth in three previous Real-Time Strategy games, World of Warcraft is a perfect example of the success that Warhammer Online can get with its existing fan base. Of course WoW’s popularity attracts so many players that Warhammer Fans have been playing Blizzard games for years now and even amongst the community discussion for WAR there is already talk of comparisons to how WoW handles certain aspects of gameplay as opposed to WAR. World of Warcraft is the current crack that’s keeping the Warhammer masses happy until the good dealer that is EA Mythic comes along with some new… candy.

Overall Warhammer Online fans have already picked up several other games without WAR even being released at this time. It will be interesting to see as development continues and the game comes out what affect it will have on the Games-Workshop side of things as well as other companies such as Blizzard and smaller MMO companies. If what I think will happen happens, Warhammer Online will become a big player in the next few months and we’ll be seeing a lot more converts to all of the above mentioned games based on it.