By Jason Van Horn

Recently, Mythic Entertainment revealed two of the latest armies of the upcoming Warhammer Online - the Empire and Chaos. Empire and Chaos are simply put humanity at its best and worst. On the Empire side of things you have the puritan state of mind with Witch Hunters who pummel on minions of evil to repent for their sins; holy knights looking to thwart evil at any time; and in general the Empire is simply looking to survive as evil pushes in on them at every corner. As for the evil, Chaos is its name, and with their twisted way of life and deadly magical arts, it seems as if they won't stop until all that is good and pure in humanity is wiped clean from the world. During a recent conference call, Mythic Entertainment representatives Paul Barnett (Senior Designer), Josh Drescher (Senior Designer) and Jeff Hickman (Producer) talked about what to expect from the Empire and Chaos in Warhammer Online.

Humanity all times exists in a duality, where at any time you can walk the line between bad or good, but at any moment you can either rise to the occasion and prosper on the good side of the law or either slip and plunge into darkness, nevermore so evident as when it comes to the Empire and Chaos, as Paul Barnett summed it up so eloquently, "It's basically humanity in its two forms. The humanity which is struggling to survive and doing its best to make end's meet in a world of grim darkness, represented by the Empire. And Chaos, humanity totally converted and corrupted by tentacles, and tendrils, and puss, and the Bird God, and magic, and all sorts of armor, and axes, and stuff."

The philosophical nature of humanity represented by good and evil is great and all, but people really want to know what types of characters and careers they're going to be able to role-play as fight with, not who would give Sigmund Freud a run for his money if he was still alive today. So with that in mind, Paul quickly went into the careers you can expect should you choose the Empire or Chaos. "The Empire has got things like knights, Witch Hunters (very Anglo-Saxon - they hunt witches), Bright Wizards who throw fire everywhere (and that's all they do), Warrior Priests are the holy priests who go in to battle with big hammers and the more they smash up the more faith they get (they radiate healing), so kind of the stock standard medieval done a bit mad. And then you've got the Chosen, great, big, armored knights, basically WWF wrestlers covered in armor with horns and axes. We've also got the Zealot, who is kind of this crazed guy with daggers and skulls and who throws enchantments around and is utterly mad. And we've got the Chaos sorcerer, a guy on this enormous disk - is always on this disk - and he flies around hurling lightning at everyone with his great big staff, and his disk has got tentacles, and spikes, and teeth, and worms, and it gets bigger, and it's terribly fantastic."

If the Magus of the Chaos sound like the favored minion of evil by the people involved in the game, then you'd probably be correct in that assumption, as they both loved to talk about it, debunk unknown facts, and relish in everything that is the Magus and the Disc of Tzeentch that they ride on. "The disc is a living entity summoned from Chaos that is just about kept under control by the Chaos sorcerer," said Paul. "At any moment he might lose his ability, and it turn on him and eat him; such is the consuming nature of Chaos itself. It is basically a floating, demonic shark with great big spikes and teeth. And the idea is that as your sorcerer gets more powerful, he is able to control more and more energy, and he is able to control more of Chaos, so his disc will show a difference and be able to do different things." The participants involved in the call were also quick to point out that since the disc is such an integral part of the Magus class, some things needed to be cleared up point blank. For starters, since the disc acts as a mount, the Magus won't get a mount like all the other characters since they already have one essentially. The Magus will also always be on their disc, so even when going up stairs expect to see it still be under your character's feet.

To showoff the power of your created characters in Warhammer Online, characters will physically change as they get more and more powerful, such as Green Skins getting larger and larger and Dwarves growing longer beards. But those are humans. So what changes would be around for the human Empire and Chaos characters. "The reason Orcs get bigger is because they don't do much else. The reason dwarves get bigger beards is because they are short and they have to overcompensate. Humans is all going to be done through loot and wearing things that clearly show you are unique and special like humans really do in real life. They are going to get bigger hats, better shoulder pads, more impressive weapons - you know, like real humans do," said Paul.

Beyond learning about the Empire and Chaos armies, a good deal of information was also shared about the game as well, such as how loot will be handled. "We probably have five or six different methods, from very random rewards to "you kill a monster and loot drops" all the way up to very planned mechanisms such as through the PQ influence system, where as I'm going through PQs and earning influence, I then get to pick my rewards at the end of that. And there is a lot in between as far as drops from monsters, drop from players, specific encounters that are going to give you specific types of drops, drops in RvR capital cities where you can go into capital cities and pick something up from the loot pile if you will, there are specific encounters in capital cities that will give you specific types of rewards, there are rewards from capturing your enemy's king and the influence you build from capturing enemy capital cities, so we have a variety of random to very planned out loot systems in place," said Jeff Hickman.

Josh Drescher also revealed some information about the consequences of death, stating that, "Regarding things like PvE death will cost you experience or coin - no to both. Whether or not you're going to lose constitution when you die in PvP - you will not lose constitution. There will probably, potentially, maybe, maybe not be Red Sickness." The biggest thing, however, as Jeff put it, is that the time it takes away would be the biggest penalty for dying in combat.

The handling of travel was also an interesting topic of discussion, as though the plans for footing it across the country, receiving personal mounts, or taking mass transits from one place to another isn't exactly a new territory for MMORPGs, what was especially nice to hear from Paul was that unlike some other games, you won't have to have previously traveled there on foot before you can visit there another way. "The only thing we do have about transport - and this one is important - is that we don't believe in those ideas that you have to visit somewhere before you can travel to it. That is just rubbish. You shouldn't have to walk to New York to be able to go and buy an airline ticket to New York."

All in all, by the time the call was done, we were still eager for more, not because nothing was revealed, but because so many great tidbits of information we wanted to learn even more about what to expect from the final game and the rest of the armies. World of Warcraft might be the default MMORPG game of choice right now, but if Mythic Entertainment and their Warhammer Online have any say about it, they certainly look to be putting forth all their effort to bring down the mythical giant, and if everything works out like it sounds, David just might be slaying another giant in the near future.

For more information on Warhammer Online please visit http://www.warhammeronline.com.