'appy second WAAAAGHday to Warhammer!

Two years old and still going.

Not bad for a game that was going to get shut down by Xmas 2008 and is dead in the water being in "Maintenance Mode".

May everyone at Bioware Mythic keep on Waaaghing for a long long time, I look forward to another two years at least of Warhammer Online. Thanks to all the devs that work and have worked on the game and to all the bloggers and twitters that keep the community going. Kudos also to everyone who just plays the game and shows support quietly by going out and enjoy it, you truly are the stars of this MMO.

Happy Birthday Warhammer.

Warhammer Online: Island of Blood

I recently found out that Warhammer the board game has recently had a new version brought out (I stopped playing the board games a long time back), it's up to 8th edition and is just a rulebook. However Games Workshop have also announced that there will be a boxed set expansion type thing for the game in September featuring two armies.. High Elves and Skaven.

Now what possible tie in could happen with a certain online game that we play?

http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/content/blogPost.jsp?aId=11500028a

Nothing even mumbled from Mythic of course, but it'd make an almost perfect opportunity to announce an expansion whether live or paid. Fighting over resources or some such for the war against a Skaven horde. Now we just need to find out some background on this Island of Blood and what the story is behind it, could it be linkable?

World of... Fight? / Warhammer: Age of... Fight?

Over on the Asian continent a major event happened with Blizzard stopping partnership with The9, its Chinese operators of Warcraft and moving it to someone else. By the looks of it, The9 aren't going down without a fight and could be trying to launch their own version of WoW with this recently launched website apparently promoting "World of Fight", which has a very familiar looking font *cough* Warcraft *cough*...

http://www.wofchina.com/


Now this is where it gets really interesting. Take a step back, re look at the picture in the background. Does it look familiar to anyone? Might do for say.. Chosen, Marauders, Zealots and Magi... Still unsure?

Co-incidence? Well WAR already has it's Chinese operators in GigaMedia, so we know it's nothing to do with a change of operators, but the second interesting part of this story comes now. Electronic Arts (Owner of Mythic Entertainment) actually own substantial shares in The9 apparently (couldn't find the exact details but you can see on the website they also operate Fifa Online (an EA license) ).

So what does this all mean? Possibly a bait and switch coming as the place holder website leads onto Warhammer Online China.. Possibly just art theft.. Maybe The9 will be ripping the WoW code, mixing it with Warhammer and making one hell of a mess?

Could be interesting to see what happens...