MTV News video editor Joe DeShano is a gamer and "Warhammer" fanatic. Read on for his thoughts on the upcoming MMO...
I was eight.
It was Christmas and my brother was opening a gift that said, "To The Family; From Santa."
That gift was an Intellivision Entertainment System, and I had no idea what that meant. I quickly learned and became obsessed. Somewhere around the fourth hour of domination of "Tron: Deadly Discs," something got written into my DNA. I was a gamer.
Fast forward six years and my friend handed me a book called "Warhammer" by a company called Games Workshop. I was familiar with the company from a game I had played previously with him called "Talisman." So despite the fact that I thought he was crazy for buying a "game" that only had a book with no models or board, I decided to read it. I soon understood why he was freaking out.
The story -- or "lore" as most people refer to it -- was massive, and I loved it. As we would play "Warhammer," I couldn't help but wish for my newfound love and the one I acquired so many years back to merge. Games would come out under the license in the future, but they weren't exactly I wanted. I wanted to be immersed in a world of "Warhammer." I wasn't interested in playing a video game version of the tabletop game.
I then found out about MMOs in the late '90s, and I knew that was the genre I wanted the game to be in. In 2004, I started playing "World of Warcraft." "WoW" was great, but it wasn't "Warhammer" -- I stopped playing "WoW' in July 2006. Then a year and-a-half ago, I learned about Mythic working on "Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning." The two worlds of my childhood and adolescence have finally merged.
This weekend will be what Mythic calls "Preview Weekend." From what I gather, players who were in the closed beta of the game and those that pre-ordered the collector's edition -- along with the first 50,000 who pre-ordered the standard edition game -- can gather for a weekend of "Waaagh!" proportions. I will be there and will be looking to see how much "lore" Mythic was able to include in the MMO and how much has changed.
Check out the Multiplayer blog on Monday to read about my experience during Preview Weekend, and feel free to share some of your own.
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