Warhammer: Odyssey has been going through a little more than a rough patch over the past week. The Discord has been updated with news that the game, as well as Virtual Realms’ game Celtic Heroes have been offline due to a security breach. In addition to the massive security breach that has forced both games offline, worries that Virtual Realms has moved on from development of both of their titles, in favor of a new one, has forced a developer response to clarify their involvement on other titles.
For those that may not me familiar with Warhammer: Odyssey, here’s a quick refresher. Warhammer: Odyssey is a mobile MMORPG, that has attempted to bring a familiar feel of PC MMO’s to mobile gaming, with no auto play, and group-oriented open world encounters. It has hundreds of thousands of downloads on both the Apple Appstore and Google Play. It is still in it's Soft Launch status, and is not yet feature complete. A feature that Virtual Realms probably should have taken more seriously, is security. According to the latest posts, the extent of the breach of security has yet to fully be understood.
“At this time we have not confirmed that your account details for Apple, Facebook, or Google Play are compromised. We authenticate your game account with these services but game account passwords are randomized upon creation and are encrypted.
We will provide additional information once we have come up with a plan of action to restore affected accounts.”
-Definitus, Warhammer Odyssey Discord
The team does have a plan to move forward. They’ve hired a third-party security contractor to assist in fixing their security issues, and they intend to perform a full rollback from before the breach when they are finally able to bring the game servers back up. According to the development team, they have removed Warhammer Odyssey from both app stores until security issues can be resolved, but as of 3/20/2022, the game is still available.
“Right now the team is working on restoring services to Celtic Heroes and Warhammer: Odyssey. We are nearing completion of restoring Celtic Heroes today, but Warhammer: Odyssey will remain offline over the weekend while we work with an independent security consultant to protect the game from future attacks and identify those responsible. We have temporarily removed the Warhammer: Odyssey app from both the App Store and Google Play Store until we can bring the game back online.
We will roll back the server to a time before the incident and reimburse any Sovereign purchases made during that time. We are also working on a compensation plan for the extended downtime and lost progress, but will follow up with more details next week.”
-Definitus, Warhammer Odyssey Discord
Finally, fans of the game on Discord have been antsy over the possibility that Virtual Realms has started developing a third game, before Warhammer: Odyssey has properly launched. The game Legends of Elumia is apparently a third-party title that Virtual Realms was contracted to provide some development for, but they want players to know, it is not a Virtual Realms title, and they are not going to stop development on their current games.
If you’ve played any Virtual Realms games, however, it would probably be wise to change the passwords on your accounts associated with them. Due to the nature of the breach and possibility that apple or google accounts with associated logins could have password information as part of the breach, it’s better safe than sorry in these circumstances.
