Sometimes I hate time zones. I just woke up this morning at 7:30am PST to find a wave of new information regarding Warhammer Online’s release and open beta dates.
From the WAR Herald: Release date is September 18th
* Monthly Subscription: $14.99 USD
* 3-Month Subscription: $41.97 ($13.99 per month)
* 6-Month Subscription: $77.94 ($12.99 per month)
From WarhammerOnline.com: Open Beta can be downloaded beginning August 15th
The Open Beta will be level capped and content restricted. You will be allowed to choose any of the game’s 20 unique careers and advance through rank 20. You will also be free to explore and battle across Tiers 1 and 2 of each army’s homeland. Please note that any characters created during the Open Beta will NOT carry over into the live game as they will be wiped from the servers.
To register for Open Beta:
- After August 15, 2008 visit the Mythic Entertainment Account Management website.
- Create a new Warhammer Online game account.
- When prompted, enter your Open Beta code.
Woot! We have our dates now. The Age of Reckoning is at hand.
Update #1: 10:00am PST – Mark Jacobs just made a post on the WAR Vault that he will be posting more details concerning today’s announcements + Press release later today.
Update #2: 1:22pm PST – Mark Jacobs made a huge post here with more details including some nifty bonuses for pre-orders.
Now that subscription prices have been confirmed, it raises the question: When will MMOs move above $15?
The cost of delivering quality content is only going up, and so at some point clearly the cost of subscription must go up as well. However, there’s a huge risk for the first company that moves beyond the $15 barrier.
The first game to breach the $15 mark will get a lot of heat. I’m thinking it will be Blizzard who makes the move though with their next gen MMO. They have the clout in this market to do it. Anyone else might risk being shunned on pure principle.
I just realized that open beta is potentially only 9 days away… wow! Time is flying right now.
I really think the Open beta will start the 22nd. The 15-22nd will be used for downloading time.
I wonder when NDA will be lifted, should be pretty soon based on the previous comments about lifting it atleast 1 month before release
Well, it’s gonna cost $22/mo to play from the UK, it’s hovered around $18-20 for a long time for us, count yourselves lucky! 😛
Wait…Open Beta “DOWNLOAD” is 9 days away. I see no “confirmed” OB date yet.
Thoughts anyone?
There’s no confirmation either way right now Openedge1. Download and play could begin the 15th or there could be a ‘wait and download’ period before it starts. They’re not giving an exact “Servers open now” date/time because they’re probably still working out server logistics. It is potentially 9 days away though.
The wording on the Open Beta thing is a little confusing. They don’t actually say we can start playing on the 15th, but they also don’t say when we can start playing at all. The 15th is the only date they’ve given. It seems like it would be strange to open up the servers for open beta the same day everyone is downloading it, but that could be what they’re doing.
I agree that blizzard is likely to be the first to break the $14.99/month barrier. The only other contender would be bioware with their Kotor MMO, since bioware is another company the fanbase feels can do no wrong.
The accidental EA Store date (August 23rd) would probably be most likely the day OB goes live.
The chances of them allowing you download and play on the same day are very unlikely, because everybody on earth will whine when the download servers get overloaded and they can’t play.
I’ll go ahead and guarantee a minimum 9 gig download, which will take many people that entire weekend to download. Let’s hope its not done through bitorrent for those of us that get ours throttled through our ISP.
I imagine the open beta will begin on the following Monday, giving people the weekend to download the game.
Hopefully no game goes beyond the $14.99 pricing, I think that is more than enough and a fair price. I can’t see myself shelling out more than that to play a game, even if people believe $15 is chump change. I already paid the $50 to buy the CD’s, and I’m willing to pay the $15 monthly… anything more is an insult. Especially as I think Blizzard’s next MMO, the software will probably be raised to $60 as it looks like SC2 will cost that much.
I’m excited but having real problems trying to register my beta key when I make a Master Account.
It keeps saying my Open Beta Key is invalid, although it doesn’t help the code isn’t pristine when they sent it and thus every facking 8 looks like a B and visa versa.
I’m hoping it’s simply I can’t register it yet because the open servers aren’t up or something but it’s both frustrating and worrying.
September is going to be an epic month for gaming. I mean we have Spore, WAR, and Force Unleashed.
How am I going to play everything?
@Shamutanti: It says you can’t register until after the 15th. Trying to register before then won’t work. Right now the only keys we can enter are the ones at the WAR Beta Center that flag our accounts as “collector’s edition”.
@Railith: It’s going to be rough having so much good stuff to play. In a way it feels like the past two years of anticipation are coming to fruition all at once.
What’s the link to the WAR Beta Center Keen? Cause I’ve got an account over at EU-WAR but it seems only Closed Beta related (upon which i’m not involved) and there’s Road to War that’s… well down xD
Never mind just checked – seems I’ve gotta wait till the 15th. Cheers Keen.
Mark Jacobs just made a post on the WAR Vault that he will be posting more details concerning today’s announcements + Press release later today. I’ll keep you guys updated on the news as it happens. Until then I’ll send it back to you in the studio.
Why is it content restricted? Why cant we try out the end game?
Another AoC?
Do you really think you could get to the end-game in a matter of a couple weeks? And would you REALLY want to in an open beta? It’s placed in there for a reason so that people can’t experience the entire game for free in a short period of time.
As per the AoC comment I can see where you’ve based that assumption, however there is a difference here. Tier 4 (end-game in WAR) has been tested extensively by the beta testers whereas in Conan the city sieges were never publicly tested beyond a few internal/private tests. The PvE in Conan wasn’t done at release let alone during open beta. So whereas Funcom had something to hide, I don’t feel that’s the case for Mythic and WAR.
A valid question though.
And, they have already gotten far beyond 15 dollars a month. Us in EU are going to have to pay about 20 dollars..
Unbelievable that they can do that and not get us 1st priority (as opposed to the crap ass treatment we are getting in other MMOs)
Not me exactly, but im sure someone could do that and inform us if it sucks 😛
No, not an AoC. They probably don’t want to test how fast we can level up and spread outselves out across the entire game. They probably want to focus stress-test with us all lumped into the same areas.
Have faith <3
@Jukasa: People have definitely tested beyond level 20. I’ll happily fill you in on all the information I have once the NDA is down.
@Jukasa:
Because it is OB meant to just stress test things. WoW stress tests were limited to level 30 too. Also WAR is different and you will be able to do a lot of things up to level 20, including taking small keeps and world pvp overall.
I agree with the OB restrictions, because it seems like the OB will be close to a month long. You can still experience about half the game or so, which is fine.
If the beta was extremely short as first speculated via the EBgames stuff, then I would be very much against content restrictions as… it’s too short to make sense.
Who knows, as the last day of OB comes, they will do something ‘special’ like everyone else has done, and that could be your ticket to experiencing endgame for a short while.
I remember when people yelled when LOTRO capped levels, or when AoC did or PoTBS got people in an uproar.
Everyone always wondering what they were hiding
Good thing WAR is not going to be awful after level 20.
hmmm, no news on the European side of things, if this turns out to be a repeat of LOTRO Euro piss poor experience I won’t be wasting my money this time.
@13 – You can’t put in your open beta code yet to my knowledge, just your CLOSED beta code. They will make updates shortly to accomodate the various other codes.
@Renko: what do mean on ‘no news’ on the European side? They’ve announced its releasing the same day in Europe and will cost $12.99 EU a month. That’s as much news as the U.S. has gotten :p
Oh man, I broke down and preordered from play.com. Was a bit reluctant after AOC and the 1st videos i saw, but the new ones look a lot better. I know it’s all about gameplay, but I dont want to play a game that looks like it’s from 2002 ;).
Furthermore, the more I read about the dungeons, public quests etc, it sounds like it’s gonna be a fun game. And now it’s only 5 weeks away !
Even the haters place the graphics at 2004 so you should be good! 😉
Mark Jacobs made a huge post here with more details.
As a CE pre-order customer I’m giddy with delight at Mark’s latest announcement.
Yes, that is kind of sad.
Bah! After my AoC CE, I swore off all CE’s forever.
/cry
Very strange, unless there is something wrong with the page loading, on the EU site the announcement isn’t on the frontpage or the News page, it’s hidden away on the Press Release page and the last release was Dec 07 so it’s not a page I visit very often :S
I foresee the open beta starting on the 22nd or 23rd as somewhere on the website they said there would be a “Preview Weekend” and I doubt that they would have that after open beta. That weekend seems like when the preview will start, the 15th until then will be for downloading time, and I’m going to guess at NDA being dropped a bit before the preview starts.
Hey, anyone out there preorder the CE from the EAStore.com AND received their Beta codes? I keep getting the same line from Customer Support that I should rest assured that I will receive them before Beta begins, but IF I do not to contact customer support. The order was place July 22nd, and it seems so many people who ordered through other vendors have their codes. I thought by ordering through the company distributing it, I’d be safe.
I ordered on 07/5 and got the codes via email on 07/09 from EA Store.
woot! Last night I went to Gamestop to pickup my pre-order box that I was supposed to get when I preordered the CE some months back. Definitely looking forward to next month, such a great month for gaming.
PS: Thanks for all the great blog posts lately about WAR. Helps me keep up on whats going on 🙂
hey keen, what you mean register after the 15th? we cant do it now?
You can’t register and enter your info until after the 15th. That’s what the announcement said.
I wish they’d give some info on how the CE pre-order thing is going to work. The “CE pre-orders get into closed beta next week!” thing was great, but how is it going to work? Should I be scanning my spam folder constantly for fear of an e-mail, or will we be signing up somehow. The suspense is driving me crazy! I’m not subscribed to any MMOs at the moment, so I need my MMO fix :p
i got preorder box but only 2 codes in it , one ofr open beta and one for the items i went to the beta site it accepted my openbeta code downloaded the client
hope i didnt screw up usieng the openbeta code on the closed beta website thing … i just followed instructions on the card :/