Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is an MMORPG that was officially shut down in 2013. Today, 6 years later, thousands of players are still playing, sometimes simultaneously. It is larger than some other MMORPGs that are still operational.
What is Warhammer Online? Warhammer Online was – or is – an MMORPG set in the popular Warhammer universe, specifically in the franchise’s fantasy setting. It is somewhat of Warhammer’s answer to World of Warcraft.
In Warhammer Online, the factions Order and Destruction fight against each other. The focus of the game is on the so-called “Realm vs Realm”, meaning large PvP battles and common objectives, known from still-played classics like Dark Age of Camelot.
Playable races for the factions are
- Order
- Dwarfs
- High Elves
- Empire (Humans)
- Destruction
- Dark Elves
- Greenskins
- Chaos (corrupted Humans)
The playable classes follow a “Career” system. These are specific roles such as Tank, Healer, Melee and Ranged DPS. The actual “Classes” are only open to the respective Race as an option and may be familiar to some players as classes from Vermintide 2.
Where do players play? Since the official servers of Warhammer Online were shut down in 2013, fans of the game had to resort to unofficial servers. In 2014, the pirate server “Return of Reckoning” was launched.
“Return of Reckoning” is currently operated by a team of 24 members who take care of both community management and ongoing development and patches. Even a German support helps in some areas.
How big is Warhammer Online: Although this project is a fan-operated private project that is unofficial, several thousand players are playing “Return of Reckoning.”
As the Polish site mmorpg.org.pl reports, at one time 1379 players were simultaneously playing “Return of Reckoning,” causing the server capacity to be increased to 1500.
“Return of Reckoning” is thus larger than some still running MMORPGs like Bless, which according to current status according to steamcharts can muster just 633 players at the same time. (As of April 30 at 12:45 PM)
Not only projects like Warhammer Online sometimes have to shut down, but also large MMORPGs:
