Warhammer Online Offline

You may be aware that Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning has been undergoing a closed Beta. Your awareness is a day out of date. Mythic have confirmed that they're closing their Beta for a couple of months so they can - I paraphrase loosely - "Have A Little Think".

Closed betas closing aren't exactly commonplace, so this has lead to a mass of speculation. Mythic's Big Chief Mark Jacobs takes time from not running a closed beta anymore to elaborate over at f13.net. In the thread on the topic he posts extensively, basically saying everything's fine. If you're interested in Warhammer Online - hell, or just the difficulties of MMO makers generally, I suggest you read it all, but here's a fun quote to get a taste...

"The reactions have been kinda funny. When we said we could do the game in about 2 years (we didn't even have a contract for WAR till the summer of '05), people said we should take more time, spend more money and do it right. When other companies take extra time to do it right, lots of people jump up and down and say that shows that they really care about making a great game. When we announced our delay last year so we could make the game even better than we originally planned (thanks to the level of competition from Blizzard and elsewhere), people said the game was doomed."

The final point Jacobs makes in his full post is, I think, the strongest for those who are worried about Warhammer Online. It's not a general Back To The Drawing Board delay. It's specifically two months, which implies a plan. That said, by being so specific, they've set themselves an actual task. If in two months time nothing happens, eyebrows will be raised.