I thought this was worth a cynical chuckle.  Amazon.com’s deal of the day is for Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning!  $25.98 scores you a copy of the game, quite a savings.  Someone at Amazon must get my brand of humor, because today is the release of WoW: Wrath of the Lich King.  Perfect day to start a sale you don’t expect anyone to snap up! I’d be very surprised if they get many bites at all.

In the beta. Just got it downloaded. I wont break the NDA. But lets talk about the female selection/models. I’m pretty sure the race/sex/class breakout is common knowledge, so lets just congeal it here to make a point.

Both sides have 10 classes to choose from.

For Order, all the classes can be female or male.

For Chaos, 5 of the 10 classes can be female.

The three choices on the greenskin side are male-only, because, apparently all the orcs in the warhammer universe are bloody mushrooms, and have no sex. But lets face it, they look like males, no boobies in sight. You can run around as an orc with a lisp… I might just do that!

*coughs* Continuing on…

The three Dark Elf choices are all able to be female. You get a melee dps, a caster, and a healer out of that as options.

The “Chaos” the evil humans have 2 of their four options as female. Another caster, and another healer.

When all is said and done, you have no tank option. You have 2 healer, 2 caster, and 1 melee dps option. At least one of the Chaos chosen females looks like the goddamn wicked witch of the west, and I bet few people will play it due to ickyness.

Many polls for warhammer show a huge favoritism for the Chaos side in Warhammer. Makes sense, they have a lot of cool looking/feeling classes! Paul has shown off Witch Hunters as the best thing since slice bread. But once people come to the realization that, this isn’t the damn miniature game and women play mmos too, everyone is going to be joining the Order/Empire side. See, gender restriction wasn’t a big deal in the miniature game. I bet the ratio of women playing the miniatures was 20 to 1, but MMOs have a growing female audience, and what they’re presenting us with simply will not work. People play mmos to be with their friends, they have social network of friends, and this is how mmos grow their userbase, from friends joining friends. So even if you don’t have a wife or a girlfriend that mmos with you, you’ll probably know a girl somewhere between you, and Kevin Bacon, which will either 1) Stop you from playing warhammer because the trickle effect of them not willing to play, stopping other friends from playing, eventually making you quit due to lack of friends, or 2) Everyone will play Empire/Order.

What this boils down to, is a huge lowering of my hopes for Warhammer. Mythic is pandering to the IP, and I’m sure the small but loyal basement dwelling community of Warhammer miniature fanatics will love that their world is being preserved, certain concessions need to be made to make the game more desirable to the mmo community as a whole. I simply do not see this game beating out WoW now, because of this move, if nothing else (and lets be honest, they were trying to, everyone is trying to. I’m honestly surprised there isnt yellow exclamation points above npc heads…they went with some other funky icon). Not implying anything, because we can’t really be sure, but if you’re a part of the crowd that thinks Lucas Arts effected the outcome of SWG, you can only imagine what an overbearing IP holder can do to a mmo. Screw the story, screw the lore. If WoW can have freaking space pirate Blood elves pewpewing the Dranaei mother-ship, then Warhammer should be able to add female models. http://lorelol.ytmnd.com/

Comics deviate big in movie form. Warcraft 1, 2, 3. Do you remember many female trolls, tauren, orcs or undead? No, but they added them in.

Warhammer goes on and on about how their years of backstory and history make for a rich environment to play in. I argue that it’ll be one of the things that propels their game into mediocrity.