The State of Warhammer Online
By Michael Lafferty

EA Mythic dev team discuss where the game is and where it is going

It was a touch unpredictable, but then, when you have a teleconference with EA Mythic’s Warhammer Design Manager Paul Barnett involved, just about anything can happen, up to and including the conversation touching on “hats, pig hats!”

Barnett, Content Director Destin Bales, Lead Character Artist Adam Gershowitz, Associate Producer Josh Drescher, and Senior Producer Jeff Hickman were some of the development team members on hand to field questions about the state of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (or WAR) from media. Eddiemae Jukes, of Triple Point PR, tossed out the questions, and the answers resounded fast and furious from the assembled panel, sometimes overlapping, as others submerged beneath the good-natured fun and snickering.

The game is currently testing the high-level campaign game in closed beta, but while segments of the game is being tested it was the overall game that was the topic of the teleconference.

The game has been receiving some pretty intensive stress testing in beta, particularly in the area of realm versus realm. Since the model for the RvR was DAoC, what has the testing shown and how will that portion of the game differ from DAoC?

We learned a lot of great stuff from Dark Age of Camelot as far as how to balance out realms, how to balance out population, how balance classes, what’s fun-what’s not, what do players enjoy doing in short bursts, what do players enjoy doing in long bursts … so a lot of the stuff we are doing with Warhammer was derived from the stuff we were doing with Camelot.

Some of stuff was things like we said ‘if only we could do this’ when we were making Camelot, but we couldn’t. So Warhammer really built upon that great foundation that Camelot put in place for us. But it differs greatly also. Where Camelot was one frontier with a set number of keeps and zones you could fight over, Warhammer is three different battlefronts, battles raging across the world .. not only in open-world RvR, but also in scenarios, which are evenly matched instanced combat. There are over 30 of these in the game.

So you have all of these different ways of playing the RvR game and it culminates in these great city sieges where you can literally attack your enemy’s capital city, ransacking the city, looting, pillaging and burning.

How will players be able to coordinate the invasion of a city?

Through alliances is the easiest way you are going to be able to do that. The game is really focused on two things from the very beginning: it’s cooperative – you’re playing with other people, and it’s competitive – you’re playing against other people. So from a very early stage in the game we are trying to introduce you to cooperative, social gameplay. Even as you are running through things like the public quests, that is a subtle way to teach you to play well with others.

A lot of it is the little things like the messaging in the game. Just by keeping players informed inside and outside of the game allows players to participate in everything that is going on in the game.

There is going to be an epidemic of people seeing the War Herald as their home page at work and then frantically refreshing it all day long – and then saying ‘screw it, I have to go home right now.’

A question was asked about balance in the RvR and winning zones, as in how winning sides (which will reap rewards) won’t continue to get stronger and just keep winning as the losing side gets weaker from repeated beatings  …

Obviously you get rewards for winning, but the longer a zone is under control of a winning side we start to do little things that might bring the losers up to par and things like slowly taking the winning side’s advantage away as time progresses … trying to get back to that sense of parity. We are not punishing you for being successful but we are trying to give you a sense that the competition is lively and interesting. And there are a number of organic things that will try to encourage population balance, trying to encourage class balance.

The purer answer is there are a number of organic things you do to try to attract players on a population level and then mechanical things you do to make sure the numbers make sense.    

Regarding end-game content accessibility, are you targeting the top 10 percent of the average gamer?

We are targeting everybody. It’s not about what you can get, it’s about how long it takes you to get it. It’s about commitment, it’s about being skillful at playing the game but everybody has access to the end-game content. City sieges are about a lot of people but they are not about big giant raids. You can literally walk into a city alone, because there will be other people there for you to fight alongside. Because it is a realm-versus-realm game, you always have friends, you will always have people on your side, in your realm, who are there already. So it really is accessible to everybody.

We build our end-game so it is firm, compelling, attractive and a great hobby.

What is the current release date?

Fall of 2008.

What can players expect in terms of playtime needed to reach the highest renown rank?

If you go to Dark Age of Camelot and look how long it takes to move up realm ranks, we based this system similarly to that. While our leveling is fairly quick, actually, our renown leveling is much slower. That is where we want people to spend their time.  

The game is starting to resemble many of the elements of Camelot, when earlier in the development you said it would be a complete departure from Camelot. Why the change?

Very early iterations in our game we experimented with a lot of insanity about classes and careers, things that we would really love to do. We decided that really wasn’t the right way to go, so we parted with that design and experimented with several different systems until we came to the system we are at now. And one of the things to remember is there are a lot of things we chose to innovate in our game, a lot of things we chose to focus our attention on - RvR, Public Quests, the Tome of Knowledge, the Living City system, and careers, while we chose to be as iconic as we could be, careers are about fun, they are about ease of accessibility, they are about understanding quickly even though they may be difficult to master and that’s what we got – we have careers that make sense in the Warhammer world.

As far as RvR in general, appear to being taken directly from Camelot, we had a very, very sound design on RvR when we started making Warhammer and we drove for probably two years (in development) with that design and as we drove into beta, the players really, really liked it, but they wanted more. They were basically looking back at Dark Age of Camelot and saying, ‘hey, where are our keeps? And where are our siege?’

When the players went in (to beta), they demanded it (keeps and keep sieges) and we listened to them.

Why are we doing keeps and keep siege now? Because they are awesome.

Everyone knows that RvR will immerse players in the world, what about PvE?

Public quests are dynamic, they change with the environment. PvE will be in close proximity to RvR. We have RvR quests.

Every system in the game are intertwined. … everything you do in the game contributes to the war effort, it contributes to the zone control. Everything you will do helps that RvR at the highest level. The RvR players get a benefit from the PvE players.

The way you immerse people in the PvE is making it a dynamic world. Everything in the world is focused on that war effort. You talked about sieges in RvR, but it is available in PvE as well.

What can you tell us about guilds?

Guilds are critical to the overall success that a player is going to achieve in the game. A couple of the goals is that the guilds can’t be a static thing; they have to be an organic, living part of the world. Everything you do in the world helps your guild to advance. There is always something for you to work toward, not only as a solo player, but as a guild.

How viable is solo play?

Very viable. As a solo player you are not going to be able to walk to an enemy city, knock down the wall, walk around the city and kill the king. You are going to get a different experience playing solo than you would with a group. You can play the solo game and experience almost all the content.

We want you to run out and have fun instantly.

As for the way the beta is being handled, the dev team admitted that the focus is on certain elements of the game, and is thus very directed.

We are doing a very focused beta test, so it is very rare that people see everything that we are doing. There are so many layers to our game. Our game is not about leveling from 1-40. It’s a total hobby experience.

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