A Game's Quest for Online Success

At a basic level, much of Warhammer Online's action is the same sort of thing typical of fantasy-oriented games: Players take on the game's assigned missions to win loot and buy better weapons, armor or spells, so that they can, say, take on a more powerful class of monster in their next adventure.

But Mythic's new game has a few innovations, as well. In many online titles, the worlds' virtual cities remain perpetually controlled by one side or another. In Warhammer, by contrast, players banding together in online battles can grab control of parts of the game's virtual world and claim them for one side or the other -- for the Empire or for Chaos.

As it was gearing up to launch the game, the company hired about 200 employees to work on the game's support team. With its shorts-and-T-shirt dress code, it's not hard to tell Mythic's employees from the other workers in its nondescript office building, which is also home to a few accounting firms. Most of those new hires will be the virtual world's equivalent of cops, prowling the realms of Warhammer and responding to players' complaints about software glitches or offensive conduct.

EA says it shipped an initial 1.5 million copies of Mythic's new game to retail stores. Last week, Warhammer Online spent days at the top of Amazon.com's sales chart, beating out stiff competition such as Rock Band 2, a much-hyped new "Star Wars" game and Spore, the latest title from the creator of the Sims. Alas, Amazon started taking advance orders for a coming addition to World of Warcraft, scheduled for release in November, and that new version of the game quickly grabbed the top slot at the online retail site.

Among fans of this genre, the buzz about Warhammer is good, said Michael Zenke, lead blogger at the Web site Massively.com, a site dedicated to news about online world games. "Hopes are riding very, very high with prospective players of this game," he said.

Zenke has spent many hours exploring the test version of the game this year; it's kinda like Warcraft, he said, but there are enough enhancements to make it compelling.

"They've taken the framework that Warcraft has perfected and copied it over as best as they can, and then they've taken a lot of those game elements one step further," he said.

Warhammer will be the No. 2 title in the genre within six months, he predicted. Considering the success of Warcraft, that's high praise.

"There's no such thing as a World of Warcraft killer," he said. "You can't just turn off 10 million people's interest in the game."