If you're a gamer, then the month of September 2008 will be an early Christmas for you.  With the highly anticipated game "Spore" set to release at the end of the month, Warhammer online moving into its final stages of beta, with the go live date of less than two weeks,  Fable II, and Force Unleashed for the console lovers, September is drawing to a close one of the worst dry spells for games we've all seen in a long time.

And wanted to take a few minutes to share with the community some of the customizations in the interface of Warhammer online.  Before I launch into my long technical diatribe, let me just say that the people at Mythic have done an excellent job at making the interface and keyboard mapping as flexible as you wanted to be.

Let's start with a simple picture of what the interface looks like out-of-the-box. Here is Westeria, a level 5 right mage in the quaint village adjacent to the Gray Lady Coaching Inn.  In the distance you can see that the mill is on fire, I am not sure what they were storing in that mill, but it has been burning for days.  There are no major surprises; in the lower left is the chat interface.  In the upper left, you will find your stats; Health, Mana, Power and current spells or abilities that are cast on you. Along the bottom are your hot bars, you can have up to four.  The upper right is where you'll find the mini map and current location information. All and all it is what you would expect in an MMO.

  But unlike most MMO's on the market, your ability to customize the interface to your liking has been taken to the extreme.  First let's go into the interface editor to show you what I mean. 

  See all those green squares?  Those are every single window that is currently available on the interface.  When you are not an editor mode, you may not see some of them, because there is no information to display, but they are fully exposed an editor mode so that you can move them around, resize them, or direct them altogether.

This is not simply the ability to move windows around on the screen; this editor also gives the ability to resize parts of the interface.  This can be a great help to people with visual impairments.  Let me show you what I mean... 

In this picture I have taken the chat window and expanded it to epic proportions.  You can clearly see that I'm able to make the text in that chat window very large and easy to read.  But the resizing doesn't stop there in the next screenshot, you'll see that I've been able to expand the mini map, and while the size of the mini map may be very large for many players, for someone with a visual impairment, this feature may make the game, much easier to play. 

  Other features of the game that may be of interest to disabled gamers is the ability to map just about any move or action in the game to one or many keys.  This is good for people who are using adaptive technology peripherals. Further, with the exception of chatting, and jumping this came can almost be played entirely with the mouse.  Holding on the left button allows you to use the mouse to look around, holding down both buttons moves you forward. 

  While the game is not considered closed-captioned, hearing-impaired gamers may be happy to know that most of the major events that happen in the game are displayed in text on a heads-up display.  As you advance a quest is shown in the heads up display, as you change from one area of the map to the other, and a realm versus realm combat, cast spells, and many more things are presented to the user right in the middle of the screen.  So while the game is not officially closed captioned and do not see any real this advantage hearing-impaired gamer would have in Warhammer online.

If you want answers to other questions, post a comment and I will do my best to get you the info. See you in game,