After giving us a tease earlier in the year Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is finally set to open it's doors.

Recently, I began having flashbacks to my impatient childhood all because of Mythic Entertainment’s choice to push back WAR.  It has been a long time since I’ve been extremely excited and terrorized while anticipating a new game.  In fact, not much seems to thrill me as it did when I was young and was constantly anticipating the new games seen in Nintendo Power magazine.  I was a subscriber from the start and I’ll never be able to forget the thrill of cracking open a fresh mailer to see what the future would hold.  I’m thankful that the Internet has killed all of that anticipation since this info flows freely on a daily basis.

Despite all this anticipation, I hope the hype hasn’t tarnished the game for me.  I’ll always have to keep in mind that this is a beta and there may be issues that will hopefully be resolved come launch time in the middle of September. Of course you always have to ask yourself, is the anticipation going to be worth the payoff?  In this paticular case, I think so. Not much information has been released since the NDA is still in effect, but should be lifted shortly, at which time I will be posting a plethora of information here, at Generation: Gamerz.  Personally, I’m looking forward to what this game has to offer in the PvP department.  If your looking for huge end game raids, I don’t believe this is the game you should be looking for.

Here’s a quick rundown on where WAR stands currently. Originally slated for a release quite some time ago (I won’t even begin to mention dates since there was so many speculated, and not actually confirmed) and then pushed to March of 2008, WAR was then put on indefinite hold this spring for more beta testing.  Most of the gamers (I know) moved on, opting for games like Age of Conan.  Everyone had been anticipating WAR but settled for Age of Conan. No one from my gaming group had been invited to the Warhammer Online closed beta testing.

AoC turned out to be a huge disappointment for many people and many of them swore off buying another MMO at release for the rest of their lives (or so they claimed at the time). Here are some interesting bullet points about the two games:

• AoC’s publisher has never had a successful MMO
• The publisher of WAR has one of the best PvP based MMOs on the market, Dark Age of Camelot, which they used to form the structure and support for Warhammer Online which I believe translates into success.
• AoC's biggest shortcoming was its PvP, an are in which most of my colleagues and I specialize.

Last month I gave in and purchased the collector’s edition of WAR since I had heard they were running short. Indeed, they were.  A week after I purchased my copy, it was sold out almost everywhere online and can currently be found on EBay for $200+.  I got my codes that were not active yet for Open Beta and the Head Start and began the great wait for open beta.

But as can be expected, the wait for a highly anticipated game is starting to wear on me. What seemed like an hourly activity now for the last few weeks, I’ve waited and watched my email for the notice that I am invited to play in the beta.  That good news came a few days ago when we learned that people who ordered the collector's edition would get access to a preview weekend that began today around 1pm EDT.  Oh, but I’m still not in, as they have thrown another curve ball at me: a 9.33GB client download was in order to play the game via Torrent.  And unfortunately, many of the users have reported extremely slow feeds for a variety of reasons.  After a lot of forum reading and computer tweaking, I think the end may be in sight.

I won’t give away anything I’ve learned from guild members up to this point, but my anticipation has reached an all time high.  My download can’t seem to go any slower, and my nerves won’t be able to take this for much longer.  I’m sure this isn’t the last game that will do this to me in my life, but it’s going to be awhile before I let this happen again.  I’m hoping to stay on the Warhammer Online bandwagon for years to come and it may be possible if I can survive the waiting and get back to the grind!

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