Warhammer Online Developer Diary
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n a massively multiplayer game like WAR, there isn't going to be just one player, and there isn't really going to be an end, either. The backstory in WAR, then, has a few additional purposes to serve.
To begin with, there's the game's scope, which is nothing less than epic. In a single-player RPG, there's usually only one real hero, and that's the player. In WAR, there will be thousands of players, and thus thousands of heroes (and villains!), all of whom will contribute to a story that sees six of the Warhammer world's mightiest armies clash in hundreds of battles all across the Old World and Ulthuan.
The backstory, then, has to be layered. It has to encompass the epic, but also the personal, and it has to join those layers clearly. As a player, when you complete a quest to help a small camp of Dwarfs, you're also helping win the battle in that zone, which in turns helps with the war effort in that racial pairing, which in turn helps your entire Realm in the greater conflict. We need to make sure you can always see those connections.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the story of the Age of Reckoning has to allow for a perpetual conflict. We'll tell you how the war got started, but you have to fight it, and it has to keep going.
With those goals in mind, we hit the books, and let me tell you, there are a lot of them. Games Workshop has spent two and half decades writing about the Warhammer world and we couldn't be happier about it. We have a wealth of vivid, imaginative fiction to study for ideas and inspiration. In addition, many of our writers and Content Designers were huge fans of the setting before we even got the license, and they've brought a tremendous amount of enthusiasm and passion to the project, along with great knowledge of the Warhammer Fantasy setting.
