Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, or WAR is a Mythic designed MMORPG using the setting of Games Workshop's Warhammer table top game, and focusing on a core of large scale Player vs. Player content. Featuring three pairings of traditional enemies from the Warhammer Fantasy universe, the game builds a interconnected storyline focused around initially the individual conflicts of each pairing and eventually ramps up the scope of the story by interweaving the pairings near the end of game play alleging sides of the three pairings into two general realms.
The core of the game play focuses on large scale PvP play, or as Mythic refers to it, Realm vs Realm (RvR). In RvR players from all pairings compete to complete objectives either in instanced scenarios which resemble traditional multi player games such as King of the Hill or Murder-ball, as well as non instanced seiges to gain control of strategic in-game locations. RvR is heavily ingrained into the playing of the game, with crafting largely designed as a system to create consumables to gain advantage in RvR, and even a large number of PVE quests interacting with locations secured and created by RvR achievements.
WAR's designers were very conscious of the elephant in the MMO market, many of their design decisions can be seen as a response to perceived shortcomings of it's major competitor, World of Warcraft. Notable changes include the focus on PvP, and a new take on 'raids' called public quests, which features a non instanced questing area with a sequence of objectives players complete co-operatively simply by being in the same area.
