Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning – The Long Road to Resurrect It

Mythic Entertainment’s Warhammer-themed MMORPG Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning launched in 2008 and was subsequently shut down in 2013. But in case you’re feeling nostalgic for this massively multiplayer Warhammer title, or simply would like to learn what it was all about, you might want to direct your attention to Return to Reckoning – a fan-made private server that strives to recreate an authentic Age of Reckoning experience.

This detailed PC Gamer article offers an overview of the game and its untimely demise while also focusing on Return to Reckoning team’s efforts to revive it, and as such, it’s quite an engaging read. Here are a few sample paragraphs:

ORvR, or Open Realm versus Realm combat, was brought across from Mythic’s previous MMO, Dark Age of Camelot. Rather than wall off player-versus-player conflict in instances or on dedicated servers, there were roughly oval-shaped areas of the map—called “lakes” because of the shape, though they could be anything from beaches to forest—and as soon as you passed the artillery and barriers that marked their limits you’d be flagged for Realm vs. Realm, level-boosted to have appropriate stats, and let loose.

To prevent high-level players from dominating, each tier of lakes had a cutoff point. If you were too high-rank for one you’d be warned not to enter and then, if you persisted, transformed into a chicken.

Warhammer Online had PvE and plenty of it, the public quests being a particular highlight, but the players most motivated to return are those who haven’t found anything to replace the feeling of its PvP. Like Zarbix, who played Warhammer Online from its beta to its final day. “I think that once you experience the thrill of taking on another real person, in a game designed from the ground up with that as its focus, you can never really go back to collecting troll tusks again,” he says.

“My best memory of the old Warhammer was possibly the first time we lay siege to the home city of the enemy realm. It hadn’t been done before, and the amount of teamwork it required, the hours of not only fighting, but winning those fights, and the final epic moment of the ram breaking through the enemy front gates is hard to put into words.”