Let’s start with the basics. Warhammer is a product of Games Workshop, a British miniatures game company. They’ve come out with an array of different Warhammer related computer games, mostly in the Warhammer 40,000 universe (a sci-fi one). Warhammer Fantasy takes place in a dark time, when the forces of chaos threaten to overwhelm good. There is no happy ending in Warhammer – there is only war.

Last year at E3 Mythic announced that they had acquired the license for Warhammer. Paul Barnett is part of the deal – he’s basically GW’s liaison to the project, or as his business card says, “Consulting License Producer”.

The Warhammer universe is very dark fantasy, and one of the immediate impressions of the orc area we were shown – and one of the things mentioned by other previews of the game – is the lightness shown. It’s more the light color palette being used than the actual game play or background. For instance, the first quest I had to do involved killing the vultures eating the bodies of our dead enemies and taking a trophy off of them.

That aside, Barnett pointed that the Warhammer license is kind of like Batman. There are many different types of Batman out there – from the original, to the various movie and TV Batmans, to the various incarnations in comics. There’s a right and a wrong way to do Batman, and there’s a right and a wrong way to do Warhammer – but there are a number of variations possible, and Mythic’s version is just another interpretation.

Besides, every piece of art, everything about the game, really, is vetted through Games Workshop before going in, and the GW people have been very active in coming to the States to work on it. Rick Priestly – one of the “main men” in terms of Warhammer – and Mark Jacobs, the lead producer of WAR and the man-in-charge of Mythic – have worked together extensively on game mechanics and how the game should look.

There are a couple good examples of where this shows up: the quest log and the battle standards.

Battle standards are the flags that the various factions have. Sure, it’s a flag, you might think. But if you’re heavily into Warhammer, you’ll recognize that the standards are rendered perfectly from the game, and you can learn about your opponent from it.

The fact that standards are perfectly copied over doesn’t hold to all the models. Attempting to make an exact replica of a miniature would simply not look right on the computer thanks to the fact that a computer model can scale – plus has animations, effects, and color.

The quest log that you have while you’re, well, questing isn’t just a pop-up screen that shows you what to do, like in most games. Instead, it’s a full-fledged book that you page through, showing what you’re working, yes, but also giving additional information and sketches. It includes an encyclopedia of lore and knowledge, gained while fighting creatures and questing in the world, and it helps bring the intricate and rich historical knowledge built into the Warhammer universe over the past 25 years into the game. The more you fight giants, for instance, the better the picture is, and the more you know about them.

They’ve also already brought in a number of the iconic locations of the Warhammer universe. If you’re familiar with the world, you’ll finally get to see up close and personal many of the locations you’ve only read about or seen modeled. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s your chance to delve deep into the world, knowing that what you’re looking at has a history and a shadow much past what you see simply visually.

For a game that’s only 8 months into development, the game play was surprisingly good. Following Priestly’s “rule of three” (three is a magic number, and many things have three parts, or aspects, or the such) there are three parts to combat – tactics, hot bar/skills, and morale.

Your tactics are how you approach the battle. It’s much like a permanent buff. Your skills on your hot bar should be familiar to just about any MMORPG player – they’re special abilities like an armor debuff or a strong hit that you can use on a timer. Finally, as you fight, your morale goes up – and as it goes you can do stronger and stronger special attacks that will deplete your morale. Barnett compared it to the spell casting in one of his favorite games of all time, Golden Axe.

Keeping with the Warhammer theme of constant and eternal WAR there’ll be quite a bit of PvP in the game. There’s no death penalty – Priestly believes dying is penalty enough – but there is a time delay in getting back to the game, in order to keep people from trying to zerg each other. Mythic is using what it’s learned in its years of running Dark Age of Camelot coupled with the “rule of 3” and the Warhammer tradition of point values for units to help balance PvP.

First off, you have three different types of PvP, basically – skirmish, battlefields, and scenarios. Skirmishes are incidental world PvP. Battlefields are larger fights in the persistent world. Scenarios are instanced fights that work for control of set points. This all leads up to the end-game of PvP – sacking your opponent’s capital city.

In the Warhammer games, each unit has a value. A rank and file orc may only be worth a couple of points, but an orcish hero would be worth ten times as many. The game keeps track of your performance in PvP and your equipment and gives you a point value. Thus, you could end up with 5 very powerful guys fighting 50 much less powerful people – but the point system will hopefully ensure that the fight is even.

In addition, in terms of population imbalances, the Dogs of War will balance out scenarios. Basically, the Dogs of War are mercenaries that join the smaller side to make the teams more even. That helps ensure that one side will not be permanently outnumbered, or that the larger population side can always have opponents.

Of course, you don’t have to PvP – but you’ll be missing out a lot from the game if you don’t. There are plenty of quests out there, as well as stories to be told – each race will have their own arc, as well as each zone, and even each server!

WAR looks like it has a lot of potential, and Mythic has a lot of experience with their previous MMORPG. So far, it looks like the game is off on the right foot.