"Damn it man... put some clothes on! What do you think you are playing at - Lord Godiva! - for goodness sake!"

Despite my many contrary promises, once again we return to the subject of hairless men dressed only in their underpants. The only mitigating factor this week ("you honour...") is that he is also mounted on a horse ("...as if that makes it any better!") and it provides me with the perfect opportunity to discuss transport and travel in this week's column! That being said, it is another superb animation from the team and gives a real sense of what the PC's will look like when they are mounted and moving across the landscape.

As most of you are aware for our first release, we've focussed our attention on the area of the Reikland between Marienburg and Nuln. This is an area of around 400sq Km that the team are currently mapping and building as an environment within the game engine. One of our design decisions has been to avoid the use of trivial magic - teleports and the like - to help players move across the landscape. You have to remember that within the Warhammer world, all magic is derived from Chaos and if someone suddenly popped through a portal, it's more than likely that they'd be lynched or burnt at the stake as a witch!

This leaves us with a bit of a problem - the landscape is large and our players can't magically flit about, Despite Rick's comment of "Make the buggers walk!" we've created three different types of transport for the game. River barges and ships will run along the river Reik from Marienburg to Nuln in a sort of conveyer belt fashion. There will also be coaches that will cycle between town, cities and villages and will work in a similar way to the horses in DaoC - you buy a ticket and then get on and off. Then we will also have player owned persistent horses.

As you know at the heart of the game is the skills and careers system and so in order to be able to own and ride a horse, you'll have to go through the requisite careers - stable lad, trapper etc. You'll also need to have a reasonably good income as owning a horse in Warhammer will be a bit like owning a Ferrari in the real world. That being said, over time we expect many of our players to ride around on their own mounts and of course for those who can be bothered there are further careers that will unlock mounted combat...