Paul Barnett Hates You: The Warhammer Online Conference Call

By Steven Crews | May 5, 2008 | | Filed under: Features, Interviews

Question: What systems are in place, if any, to prevent a winning side, should such a thing happen regularly on only one side, from getting progressively stronger than the side that loses?

Would that not make the side more capable of winning the next round as well, possibly leading to a vicious cycle?

Adam Gershowitz: One of the things that we’re doing is, obviously you get rewards for winning. But, the longer a zone is under control of a winning side, we start doing little things to start bringing the losers up to par. Things like pulling their number of guards out, taking the winning side’s advantage away, slowly as time progresses.

Josh Drescher: If it doesn’t work, it’s all Adam’s fault.

Paul Barnett: People always say things like, “But what if everyone decides to play one side?” And so far, in every trial we’ve done, every open beta we’ve done, it’s balanced out. It’s absolutely frightening. It’s almost as though we’ve made both sides compelling, and both sides interesting, and we’ve made the combat and RvR so good, and so balanced that people have gone, “Doesn’t really matter, have a great time whichever way. Burn a city here, kill a king there, slaughter people, get a pig hat, ride around on my wolf…

Everyone: [Howls]

Josh Drescher: The shorter answer is, there are organic things that you do to try and attract players on a population level, and then mechanical things you do to make sure that the numbers make sense.

This could be a real killer for the game if they don’t get it right. No one enjoys being repeatedly run over by the opposing faction. In some games I’ve played people rerolled to the winning side to try and get a piece of the action, which just made the problem even worse, until the server ended up a ghost town.

Question: Regarding end-game content accessibility, are you targeting the top 10%, or the average gamer?

Jeff Hickman: We’re targeting everyone. It’s not what you can get, it’s about how long it takes you to get it. If you persevere as a player in our game, it’s about commitment, it’s about being skillful at playing the game, but everybody has access to the end-game content. Everybody has access to the items. City sieges are about a lot of people, but they’re 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.

Paul Barnett: There is an obsession with designers to build for the top 10%, because they’re very loud, and they’re very successful. That actually leads you to doom and destruction.

When you build something like a golf course, you can build a golf course so that only Tiger Woods can get par, but that would be madness. What you do is you build a good golf course, and if Tiger Woods wants to shoot on it you know what? He’s going to score huge. Everyone else is going to have a damn good game, and is going to understand it and have things to aim for. It’s the same sort of logic, we build our end-game so that it is fun and compelling and attractive and a great hobby.

The Furors of the world are impossible to please. The best you can do is hope to mollify them for a week or two after a major patch until they’ll have bulldozed their way through the latest round of content that just took six months to produce.

On the other hand, as they said, they are also a very vocal minority, whose opinions have the power to sway others into playing or not playing a game. How they actually end up dealing with the top 10% will be interesting come launch.

This next answer was actually from an unrelated question earlier in the interview,that I’ve decided to shoehorn in here because I feel it’s a good segue into the next one. The original question was about RvR (as most of them were), but, Paul at one point picked up the topic and ran with it…

Paul Barnett: My boy, Callum, he’s dead clever. He’s a finger ninja, which means that when he plays his little computer games, all he does is annihilate his dad, relentlessly, and laughs, and won’t ever let me live it down. As a result I have a complete aversion to doing player vs. player. I don’t want to do it. And I don’t want to do it because my ten year old boy will just kill me, a lot.

What I like doing is player vs. environment. I like going off and being heroic on my own, and not having ten year old kids pummel me into the dirt. So, what I like about our game, is that when I go off to do that I’m left alone, I have a complete game experience. I am one of the malcontents who just wants to do PvE on my own and wants to be left alone.

I can level all the way through the game, I can kill giants, I can take on dragons, I can help with the war effort, I can help with the siege equipment, and then when I start burning the city to the ground, I can wander over and I can go, “You know what? I’m going to go into the city and do all sorts of crazy quests, and be very happy killing, murdering, and pillaging, on my own without having to worry about anyone else. I’m really happy with the PvE experience because it means I don’t have to fight anyone else.

Whereas my boy hasn’t done any PvE at all, all he does is kill other people, all day, forever, and he’s deliriously happy, too, because he doesn’t have to read any quest text.