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The Podcast of Reckoning recently had the chance to sit down with Josh Drescher, the Associate Producer for Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. Their lengthy discussion covered a lot of aspects of the upcoming Guild Beta, information we imagine you'd be keenly interested to see in print. Thankfully the GreenSkin is all over it, offering up another '50 bits of information list' culled from the podcast. Some of them are just wacky fun, but others are really interesting and give us a good sense of EA Mythic's dedication to the art of WAR. Some examples:

• The developers have joined some of the major pre-release guilds in secret, to get a better 'feel' for player interests.
• Exploring the world and engaging in multiple parts of the game will offer players a more 'well rounded' character than one who simply power-levels through the game.
• There are extensive guild tools in the game built from the ground up by and for guild leaders and members.
• The developers see the testers as a part of the team, and treats their feedback with a great deal of gravitas.
• Drescher's wedding was actually scheduled to avoid Warhammer's development period. That's dedication.

Make sure to check out the 'cast as well.

Last week Massively.com had the chance to sit with developers Adam Gershowitz and Josh Drescher during our visit to EA Mythic. There for a tour of Warhammer Online in its entirety, we'd already covered the innovative Engineer and Shaman classes. The morning was quickly running out, and to compensate for the sheer amount of information we needed to pile through our demonstrators went into overdrive. For roughly an hour we moved quickly from class to class, visiting the highpoints of several different types of gameplay. Much of our discussion explored the karmic doppelgangers across classes; different races entirely that share similar roles or playstyles.

As our weeklong series - Massively goes to WAR - rolls on, read below for crunchy game details on every single class in Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. At the end of the piece, check out the designers' take on why the Skaven (among other races) aren't in the game. And, if you're a fan of the recently announced White Lion class, make doubly sure to look below, because we have a few great details that should make you very, very well pleased ...

In the balance of our time viewing the ins and outs of Warhammer Online, Josh Drescher and Adam Gershowitz gave us a big portion of their day. After giving us a high level overview of all the classes (which you'll see here on the site later today), there was a few moments left over for personal favorites. At Josh's urging, Adam logged into a Chaos Marauder to show off the mutational fury of that faction's front line. This melee warrior's capabilities are predicated on the internal darkness that boils into his skin, malforms his limbs, and gives him the capability to cause massive amounts of damage.

His karmic doppelganger, the High Elf Shadow Warrior, is likely to get played more just by virtue of elven popularity. Still, the Marauder's place in the Warhammer world has its own horrific charm. Read on for details on their meat clubs, axe hands, and the aptly-named 'Wave of Horror.'

Our time last Thursday talking Warhammer classes with Josh Drescher and Adam Gershowitz was illuminating on many levels. For example, did you know that the user interface for every class in the game has been given a complete makeover? Not only will every class receive a neat widgety component (ala the Goblin Shaman's Mork n' Gork heads), but the bar itself is themed to the class's role.

The action bar for the Dwarven Engineer, as you might imagine, is a sight to see. This defensive ranged specialist is a unique addition to the MMO landscape. And yet, we couldn't help but feel the stunty's gameplay was incredibly familiar somehow. In fact, the experience of playing an Engineer in Warhammer Online bears a lot of resemblance to that of the Team Fortress 2 Engineer. If the little dwarf had complained "Spies sappin' ma sentry!" it would hardly have been surprising. Read on below for more on this highly skilled specialist ... and a few words about the Chaos Magus all the way at the end.

Sitting down with Josh Drescher and Adam Gershowitz to discuss the classes in Warhammer Online is somewhat like getting to sit next to the director during a feature film. They're so intimately tied to the game that every race, class, and locale in the game has an associated story. We had the chance to get the director's commentary straight from the source, and the result is a wealth of knowledge about the 24 different in-game classes.

The first class we took for a tour was the Goblin Shaman, the healer/DoT specialist for the greenskin race. Though nothing was said beforehand, the tiny gobbos with the big sticks are this blogger's favorite class. It was therefore especially enjoyable to check out the numerous tweaks to the concept, look, and UI of the little healer. Read on for the full Waagh!

Warhammer Online's ongoing series of production videos are almost too informative sometimes. For the bloggers at Massively, they pretty much do our job for us. Not that we don't mind taking it easy, but as you've probably gathered right now we really enjoy talking about MMOs. Thankfully, some topics are complicated enough that they warrant a second look. Warhammer's Living Guilds system, for example, was the subject of a great video just a few weeks back. And yet, there are still a number of questions you can walk away with.

Where can you use the guild banner (now called a standard)? What kind of tools will guilds have for coordinating events? What about the big picture? How to alliances work? And, perhaps most importantly, where can guildies get drunk together? All of these questions and much, much more are explored in the latest of our ongoing series of articles about Warhammer Online.

If you're so inclined, you can jump straight to to part 2 or part 3, or join us below as we chat with Mr. Drescher and Ms. Christian Bales.

<-- Jump back to part 1

We note there is a website and an email address down there at the bottom of the tab? What are those?

Christian Bales: That's just my web, that's test for now, but that's when the guild leader wants to set the actual guild's email address and the guild website.)

Josh Drescher: You can set that to be whatever you want, so ... Obviously, one of the cool things that you really want from a guild is a sense of belonging, the team jersey, you go and dress up in your Redskins jerseys or wherever you're from. It'll have the guild heraldry. The heraldry is a customized, unique sort of heraldry for your specific guild. So a symbol on it, specific color scheme, shape, patterns and so forth that's applicable only to your guild, that your guild will have the ability to place on various things.

Christian: On your standards and on your guild cloaks.

<-- Jump back to part 2

Is there a formal in-game mechanic for alliances?

Christian: There certainly is. We do allow formal alliances in the game, you can form an alliance with up to ten guilds, and you can assign officers within that alliance structure, though that is very limited. We actually have a roster for the alliances, you form it just from this window, and then it populates with your alliance roster. Note that every member from your alliance is not displayed in this roster, only your guild, the alliance leaders and the officers, because that would be - if you had ten guilds in your alliance, that would be a lot of people.

Thursday afternoon Christian Bales and Josh Drescher sat down with us to discuss the Living Guild system in Warhammer Online. We did, at length, and you'll see the results of that discussion on the site later today. In the midst of all that information, though, we got to talking about their early days at Mythic Entertainment. Unlike many of the AAA MMO developers today, Mythic originally started out as a 'garage-style' development house.

It's hard to imagine today, walking the halls of EA Mythic's corporate office space, but the duo's tales of antenna-based internet service, hallway offices, and legacy code make for a great reality check on the modern MMO marketplace. Read on below the cut for stories that will make you very glad to be working in a cubicle ...

Drop bears. Death kangaroos. Surly emus. Australian gamers have a unique sense of humor, something they share (obviously) with the sensibilities of Warhammer Online. EA Mythic has taken their threatening marsupials very seriously, and announced in an interview with Gamespot that they'll be offering local servers to Aussie players when the game launches later this year. In fact, they're working right now to add an AU server to the Beta.

The ever-informative Josh Drescher told the game news site that their support of the gamers down under is entirely about personality and recognition. In Drescher's eyes the Australian Warhammer fans have been incredibly supportive, whether in the form of Beta signups, forum postings, or angry stuffed animals mailed via parcel post. The associate producer credits their relationship with EA here - this is another element to the game they may not have been able to offer if they hadn't partnered with the software giant.

At the end of the day, Drescher says it's about recognizing an under-supported marketplace: "It's clear to us that it's a completely viable new market that hasn't got the attention it deserves ... I don't know the exact location, but we'll be hosting the server somewhere in East Asia, so it will be in the correct time zone. At the moment we are targeting it squarely at Australia and New Zealand." The full transcript of Gamespot's interview is also available, where Drescher offers up some familiar (but always entertaining) insights into the world of Warhammer.

In a recent interview Warhammer Online senior designer Josh Drescher remarked that World of Warcraft has actually made it considerably easier for other MMOs to succeed in the market, contrary to popular belief. While nobody has come close to dethroning the Blizzard juggernaut and its 10 million subscribers, WoW has done a lot to expand the the potential user-base, and for that Mythic is grateful. Drescher notes in the interview the rate of success in a post-WoW world is considerably higher than it was before, making for a more friendly marketplace to release a game.

It's this kind of mind for market dynamics and future-planning that's really coming to define the modern MMO game designer. For them, retail release is only the beginning of a long process that can extend as far as ten years into the future. So when it appeared during the interview that Drescher suggested that the Warhammer Online team had content planned out five years in advance, some people were understandably confused about the scope of Mythic's development efforts. Was the game delayed to implement content intended for half a decade from now?

This month we get a look into one of the many cool aspects of Warhammer Online: living guilds. This important Warhammer Online feature is explained by the dreamy Josh Drescher (that's right we said dreamy, just look at those honest eyes) who yet again explains the system in such a way that we cannot help but woo over him -- we mean it, the system.

Anyhow, living guilds are EA Mythic's response to the many different problems with running a guild in MMOs. Everything from the complexity of running a website -- which you don't need with the bevy of features WAR's living guild system offers -- to giving players a powerful reason to join guilds and participate with other guild members in the first place. Did we need yet another reason to be extremely excited for Warhammer Online? No, but it really doesn't hurt to have more of them.

The men and women behind Warhammer Online love their job. It's not hard to see, or hear, and yesterday we had the opportunity to listen in as Warhammer's leading lights chatted about their favorite subject. EA Mythic participated in a conference call aiming to update fans and press alike with the latest news of their much-anticipated title. The team went through a slew of general questions, fleshing out our understanding of the features coming with the game's fall release. Sitting in on the call were Adam Gershowitz (Combat and Careers lead), Josh Drescher (Associate Producer), Paul Barnett (mouth-full-of-pizza), Jeff Hickman (Senior Producer), and Destin Bales (Content Director).

Join us as we walk through the often-humorous commentary from the WAR boys. We'll learn about RvR, keeps and siege, cooperative gameplay, the makeup of the endgame, the viability of PvE, and what you have to do to end up on Paul Barnett's whiteboard. Read on to find out, and to see some exclusive screenshots of the game in action.

So, Warhammer Online was just delayed for another few months. Fans are preordering the game like crazy, and why not with such a fantastic collectors edition? But what the heck have they been working on up there? Are they just larking around, making us wait? The answer to that is a categoric no, and to prove it EA Mythic has collaborated with Ten Ton Hammer to offer up a string of videos showing fans the current state of the game. This series is informative, extensive, and extremely exciting for anyone looking forward to the PvP-geared fantasy game. So what do they have on offer?

How about a walkthrough of the bastion of Order, the city of Altdorf? This tour examines everything from taverns to towers, and everything in between. They have up a tour of the Inevitable City, the Chaos-warped counterpart to Karl Franzs' beautiful metropolis. Fans of 'not-combat' will enjoy a discussion of the character customization system called dyes, as well as even more details on the trophies system. Those same folks might enjoy this little video about ... crafting! Yes, crafting in Warhammer Online is covered by this video demonstration. If you're like me, you're really looking forward to the Tome of Knowledge, one of the game's most unique features. A great walkthrough from Carrie Gouskos gives us the ins and outs of this multi-layered achievement/unlock/lore/map/quest-tracking system. Finally (and perhaps most fantastically) Josh Drescher and Paul Barnett sat down with the TTH folks to talk about the big picture, the thousand-foot view, and why they have no problem taking their time getting the game out.

We previously reported on the erroneous emails from Warhammer Online's Beta Center, asking people who hadn't yet been invited to the beta to update their DxDiag file and consequently getting their hopes up. EA Mythic had already confirmed for these poor sods that they would need to wait for a real beta invite, but associate producer Josh Drescher has offered up a few more details about the situation on his personal site.

Drescher states that the receipt of the emails by those not already invited does not mean you have a greater or lesser chance from anyone else of getting in, does not mean that something is good or bad about your computer that will lead to you getting picked or avoided, and it doesn't mean that you've already been picked (although you could be, unrelated to the email).