Paul Barnett Hates You: The Warhammer Online Conference Call

They got into this issue again in a question later in the call, and I think the answers go well together:

Question: Earlier interviews talked about the complete departure from Camelot, but it seems that the most recent iteration from the classes, and also the warfare appear to be very similar to Camelot.

Why the change?

Jeff Hickman: I’m not sure about classes…

Paul Barnett: The Squig Herder was never in Camelot! The Witch Hunter has never been in Camelot!

Jeff Hickman: Very early iterations of our game—let me take classes, first—we experimented with a lot of insanity about classes and careers. Things that we really would love to do. Every developer goes into this, especially in preproduction and early development where it’s like, “We’re going to do this, and it’s going to be the best thing ever! I’m going to make classes out of clouds and gold!”

We decided that really wasn’t the right way to go. So, we departed from that design, and experimented with, Adam, four or five different designs for careers?

Adam Gershowitz: Yeah, we’re on at least four or five at this point.

Jeff Hickman: One of the things to remember is, there’s a lot of things that we innovate on in our game. There’s things that we chose to focus a lot of our attention on: RvR, the Tome of Knowledge, our living city system…

Paul Barnett: Witch Hunter hats.

Jeff Hickman: Witch Hunter hats, pig hats, that kind of stuff. Careers, while we chose to be as iconic as we could be, and we chose to be as interesting as we could be, careers are about fun. They’re not about doing something crazy and unique, out of the ordinary and complicated, they’re about ease of accessibility, they’re about understanding quickly even though they may be difficult to master, and that’s what we’ve got.

We’ve got careers that make sense within the Warhammer world, we’ve got careers that are awesome to play and are very iconic. So, it was just a natural evolution of the design process as far as careers go.

As far as the warfare system, as far as RvR in general appearing to be taken from Camelot: We had a very sound design on RvR when we started making Warhammer. We drove for probably two years with that design. As we put it into beta, the players really really liked it, but they wanted more. They basically were looking back at DAoC, and they were saying, “Hey, where are our keeps, and where is our siege?”

At this stage, this is middle of last year, we had great open-world warfare, we had battlefield objectives in the open world, we had scenarios, we had this great campaign game with the capital cities, but we didn’t have keeps and keep siege. When the players went in, they just demanded it. And we listened to them. If the players think that it’s going to be great, we’re going to try to put it great and we’re going to make it great. That’s what we’ve done. The departure that’s probably being questioned now is, “Why are you doing siege now all of a sudden? Why are you doing keeps?” Because it’s awesome, and it fits with what we’re doing.

They’re basically massive battlefield objectives, so we already had this concept, and then we took all of the knowledge and great stuff that we did in DAoC, rolled it into our game, and applied it to the campaign system and RvR. It has made our game such a well-rounded full PvP game, it’s so deep and crazy when the players get out there and play it, they’re gushing about it. So, that’s why, and that’s what we did.

While on the one hand this displays a welcome receptiveness to player feedback, along with the will to implement it on a large scale, could this be one of the reasons for the game’s delays?

Pages: 1 2 3 4