It’s an amazing day outside, the sun is shining, I’ve been cranking out some Jack Johnson, Pete Murray, and Matt Costa (on my awesome Logitech Z-10 speakers), and I’m feeling good. So what do I do? Well I try to solve a mystery, that’s what I do.

Ever since the new design went live for the Warhammer Online and WAR Herald website there’s been that mysterious "Coming Soon" button. Once this button popped up people assumed "Oh, it must be the special login area for the open beta", but alas, it’s not! I’ve not completely cracked the code but I’m about 95% sure of what this button will lead to, but I’ll walk you through the process of finding my findings.

Firstly, I right clicked on the main page of the website and clicked "View Source". I found the HTML code for the "Coming Soon" button which is:

<li id="rlm"><a href="#" title="Coming Soon">Coming Soon</a></li>

As you can see, thebutton has been given a style ID . I feel pretty ignorant now for not knowing what rlm (the style applied to this mysterious button) could mean until I looked into the global style sheet which controls the main elements of the global site design (it can be accessed at this link). If you go to the properties of rlm it’s just positioning the background images for the buttons, the breakthrough came from a bit higher up in the file. Providing the actual background image of the "Coming Soon" button is the code "body#realm ul#nav", and therefore I’ve deduced, my good sir, that rlm stands for Realm.

What can we get from this?

It certainly, in this detectives opinion, defunks the idea that this button has anything to do with the Open beta. It’s far more likely to eventually direct visitors to a list of all the different servers (or "realms") and then navigate through them to find the guild statistics, character statistics and all that other statistical stuff which has been confirmed by multiple developers at EA Mythic to be coming to the site.

Maybe you already knew this…

I was fairly sure it’d be something like this (I just didn’t think a link to the open beta details would be in such a prominent and permanent position within the design) but I feel this practically guarantees what the button will leading too. Hopefully I don’t look too stupid if everyone already knew this and I just missed the boat on it, but I feel smart so feel free to praise me unconditionally.

If you have your own theory about what this "Realm" button is then feel free to email the site, leave a comment, or post it on your own blog. I love speculation.

In other news, the official Warhammer Gamers Detective Agency will be launching early next week…

Warhammer Online still has a good 5-6 months before it’s meant to be released (that sounds worse every time I say it). What can we do until that time comes? Sure, do all that socialising, real-world stuff, but during the times when you just want to sit back and relax, the thought of waiting so long for a game we know seemingly little about can be quite irritating to say the least. We’re all waiting on Warhammer, so lets figure out how to pass the time.

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A few days ago I posted a link to Ten Ton Hammer’s Release & Beta FAQ. At the bottom of the article there was a note saying there had been rumors that WAR could come to the 360.

Just a few moments ago an article popped up in Google Reader via Google News that was from GameSpot. It speaks of Stray Bullet Games developing an MMO for consoles, but that’s irrelevant for this article. What interested me was the line “Warhammer Online’s Gamebryo Engine is compatible with the [Nintendo Wii] console”. This particular compatibility is still fairly new, but it has been compatible with the likes of the 360 for quite some years, having powered the infamous Oblivion.

I may be just shooting in the dark here, but putting MMO’s within the evergrowing console market is becoming a trend amongst developers to reach a much wider audience, namely with the multi-platform nature of Age of Conan. I don’t want to stir up rumors of WAR on consoles (but seriously, I do, as that’s a great marketing tactic), but if WAR is a success I don’t see why EA wouldn’t try to milk all the cash they can out of it, especially with their past history of taking all they can out of a game. Then again, rumors for WoW on consoles continually fall flat.