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Former Mythic Entertainment developer and City State Entertainment co-founder Andrew Meggs has called on EA to release a single-player, server-free version of Mythic 's massively multiplayer online game, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning.
According to a blog post by Meggs' — who is currently working on massively multiplayer online role-playing game Camelot Unchained — there was an option to run Warhammer Online without a server in each "unreleased, internal-only developer build" of the game's client.
"As the lead client engineer I spent a good amount of time doing that," he writes. "There were no login or character selection screens. There were no NPCs or other players. There was no gameplay of any kind. It was just you and the entire world spread out before you. You could fly around like Superman, or teleport anywhere at will."
While the game can run as a standalone, according to Meggs, it will no longer be a game but a piece of history and a "place for the die-hard fans to visit by themselves, to reminisce and remember the times they had there with others."
"It won't be WAR; that only exists with other players," he went on to say. "But it's a double-clickable museum exhibiting much of what WAR was, so it won't be forgotten completely. It's an effort by all of us, as developers, to preserve a living record as our transient medium is created and destroyed. I can't do this; I left behind the code when I left EA. But there are people inside EA who can easily make this happen."
Warhammer Online shut down Dec. 18, 2013, due to the end of the company's licensing deal. In the lead-up to the game's closure, the title went free-to-play in November to those who previously held "or had an account in good standing starting October 31st, 2013."
