WAR Server Closure Announced

Loyal Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning fans received a final blow yesterday with the announcement that the game servers are due to shut down on December 18^th, 2013. The news came in the form of a blog post, stating the end of the licensing agreement with Games Workshop as the reason for closure: Original post – Warhammer-Notice-Shutdown.

Carrie Gouskos, Producer, describes some of the many plans that never saw fruition. This only confirms, to those of us who loved to play the game, that WAR really was a missed opportunity and an MMORPG that never got the chance to see its full potential.

To get a further sense of the disappointment and anger felt by the community, over the way WAR has been handled, it is very telling to read the final forum post of Fozee, last community forum moderator…

I wanted to say some hurtful things about WAR’s management right here. The fact is, though, they’ve never so much as laid a finger on the forums and certainly have only lied to me. Hey, they lied to all of us. My only request is that they not be set in an undeserved positive light by the gaming media over the coming days. – “Fozee”

Original post: Fozee Quits

There is no denying that WAR has been on a steady decline since, well, a few months after its release. The game arrived to much praise in 2008 and sold over a million copies in just a few months. But early issues were not dealt with quickly enough and success was not to last. In the years that followed, WAR lost thousands of subscribers, leading to many server merges – today there are just two servers left.

I, and many thousands like me, kept returning to WAR in the hope of new content and fixes. In the end such investment was too slow to arrive and even the most loyal players started drifting away. It has been clear for some time that the end was nigh, but we held on in the hope that such an amazing game would not be cast aside and forgotten.

I will miss WAR very much – the game offered an immensely enjoyable PvP environment against a dark but humorous backdrop. For me, no other PvP game has been as easy to dip in and out of and, for an avid gamer who is also a parent and has a full-time job, WAR filled my free time perfectly.  The PvE side of the game, whilst largely neglected and pointless due to conflicting issues between “experience level” and “renown level” (from PvP combat), was also something I will miss. The environment was actually quite interesting to explore, with many engaging and funny PvE quests and “easter egg” type items to be found.

Sadly I now accept that I will never hit that illusive “RR 100” but I am looking forward to a few more weeks of fun–lobbing grenades at people on my Dwarven Engineer.

RIP WAR. You will not be forgotten.

Further reading – great write up here from mmorpg.com:

http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/game/239/feature/7787/Warhammer-Online-Age-of-Reckoning-Death-Comes-to-WAR.html