Well, today is the day.
As was announced back in September, Warhammer Online is slated to go off-line today. I gave some thought to returning to the game for one last look, especially when Mythic said they were letting people back in for free. However, various changes to the account system at EA over the years since I last played rendered my account unusable. There would be no return to game for me, no joining in the last countdown, no final farewell as a mass of pixels and database entries faded into memory.
So, instead, I thought I would collect together a list of posts from the time frame when I was actually playing the game.
The instance group in Warhammer
No speculation. No beta posts. Just what I wrote from the time the head start came online to when I let my account lapse. That totals up to 18 posts in just over two months .
- WAR Goes Live! Sept. 14, 2008
- WAR Unleashed Sept. 19, 2008
- Not Enough Tanks in Nordenwatch Sept. 22, 2008
- WAR on Gold Sellers Sept. 23, 2008
- Tips About Tips Sept. 29, 2008
- Some Tips are Lies Sept. 30, 2008
- The Failure of The Surge? Sept. 30, 2008
- Dwarf Collector’s Edition Head Oct. 1, 2008
- The Instance Group Goes To WAR Oct. 2, 2008
- Chicken as Chicken Oct. 4, 2008
- Five WAR Quest Log Gripes Oct. 7, 2008
- Ride of the Twilight Dandies Oct. 9, 2008
- Wanted: Order Players – Bounties Paid Oct. 10, 2008
- The Siege of Mandred’s Hold Oct. 16, 2008
- New Classes, Alts, and Grinds Oct. 20, 2008
- Screw Job in the Altdorf Sewers Oct. 23, 2008
- The Storming of Stonetroll Keep Oct. 30, 2008
- WAR’s Trumpet Fades Nov. 19, 2008
There are, of course, a lot of other posts here on the blog that mention Warhammer Online. If you go to the categories list on the side bar, you will see I have 93 posts tagged for the game. They range from predictions to discussion pre-release to the age of recriminations after most fled the game to EA Louse to occasional notes as to what was going on with the game, including an unsuccessful attempt to turn the assets into a MOBA.
There were various attempts to lure people back into the game, from free offers to Mac client support to opening up tier 1 as free to play. But the magic was gone. The game lingered only as long as it was contractually required to. That requirement runs out today and there will be no such game available tomorrow.
And so the game is reduced to memory. We talked about, argued over, defended, blamed, and went around and around on this game, not because it was what it was, but because it wasn’t what we hoped it would be.
Somewhere along the line in the last five years I managed to lose the directory with screen shots from the game. After the cut, you will find pretty much all I have left… uploaded to the blog… condensed into a single gallery.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
Funny alignment of experience with the two of us. Your inclination to try it again while it was free and shutdown was exactly my reaction. Your experience of being totally blocked with your account was also mirrored by me.
They did a lot of things right, especially with PvP, but widely missed the mark on so much else. Still, I got a freebie collector’s edition from Marc Jacobs personally so I still have that.
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One of my bigger day one buys that completely disappointed me. Still, I don’t quite regret it. There was a lot to learn from it, and Engineer was a ton of fun.
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I remember hyping this game, as I was at a point with EQ2 that I was done. This was going to be the game that brought me back, that made me fall in love all over again. All the dev videos and information coming before release got me more and more excited. I bought the game on day 1, which is to this day the only MMO in which I have done so, and I played my free month and that was it. I was disappointed that none of my MMO friends came along with me, and I never played again. That MOBA was complete garbage, by the way.
Still sad to see the game go, even if I didn’t play it all that much.
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I almost think this was the game that invented the concept of “I had such high hopes…” for a generation of gamers. Those of us from UO with open world PvP and DAoC with wide ranging warfare had been left behind by the revolution in games that were really interactive movies. And so we went from game to game looking for something and we were all convinced that this was going to be it. And now I’m afraid to even hope…but maybe…maybe….ESO, Wildstar and CU all say they want my kind. Could it be…
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