Warhammer Online Producer Carrie Gouskos: We’re a Game for People who Like Killing People. In the Face.
Steve opens up the Great Book of Grudges, and reads a few chapters to Carrie Gouskos.
In an extensive interview, the two discuss WAR’s history from launch up to the present day, the changes which have taken place over that time, as well as what’s yet to come.
If you played Warhammer Online at launch and have been wondering if your issues have been addressed and now is the time to come back, this interview was done with you in mind.
If you would prefer to listen rather than read, this interview can be heard in its entirety during Episode 27 of our Working as Intended podcast.
The MMO Gamer: To get us started, for those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what it is you do at Mythic.
Carrie Gouskos: I’m Carrie Gouskos, the Producer on Warhammer Online. What that means effectively is that I’m responsible in some way for everything that happens with respect to what goes into the game, what the big picture plans are, and how we work with the community.
There’s obviously a large team of people who deal with the specifics, but for me it’s about the big picture, and steering it into the direction I think it needs to go, and working with the community and the team to hopefully get everyone’s goals aligned together.
The MMO Gamer: Now, you and I have only met once before, way back at Games Day LA in 2007.
WAR had just entered beta then, and I recall that basically everything was coming up roses: The game was looking great, it had a very rabid fanbase… I can attest to just how rabid, when I said something slightly negative about it in an article later on.
The game had a huge buildup, a huge following, then it launched, and…
What happened?
Carrie Gouskos: There are a couple ways to answer that.
Pre-launch, I think we did a very good job about getting people excited about the game. We had a huge license, and we had a lot of unique personalities on the development team that were really infectiously excited about the game.
We thought we were doing a lot of really neat stuff, and wanted to share that with everyone. I don’t think internally—actually, I know internally, nobody here was going “Oh, we’re going to beat WoW!” or any of that. There was none of that kind of gauging.
But it was like, “We’re going to have a successful MMO. We’re going to be awesome, and have so many players!” all of that stuff. We had a lot of expectations, and we launched to that kind of hype.
I think the problem was, to some degree, you’re setting yourself up to be disappointed.
I actually think that we have a large game, with a lot of people playing who are excited about it. But you can see how many servers we opened with, all of that, and people try to do the numbers game, guessing how many players we have now…
The fact of the matter is that we came out huge, and there were problems. So I think that was a little bit of a buzz kill for the development team, and to some degree our players, as well.
We’ve been spending all this time since trying to refine the game, and get it to a state that we think, “This is what people are looking for, this is what they want.”
If you asked me personally how I feel about it, I loved the features in our game at launch, but I do think obviously there are things that I look at and say, “God, I wish I had fixed that! Or I wish I’d done that!” You can do that all day long.
So the goal since then has been to do all those things that we wanted to do, and to grow with our players, and instead of trying to make the game we think players are going to like, make the game that players are going to enjoy, because they’re the ones sitting here telling us, and we’re listening to them.
We’ve been maybe more quiet in the past six months, because we’ve been hunkering down and going, “Okay, what is it that’s going to satisfy the players’ needs, make them come back, and make them happy?”
I think we’ve accomplished that. I don’t want to say that in the tone of like “rah-rah,” I do feel like we’re down to business at this point, and we’ve done a lot of things to the game that has pacified some of the dissatisfaction at launch, and I’m very happy with the players, and their interactions with us.
The MMO Gamer: Those improvements were actually the reason I wanted to talk to you, today.
I played WAR at launch… hell, I played a long time before launch, I was in beta from January of 2008. I got into the pre-order head start, talked all my friends into buying the game… We had a guild going, big alliance, a hundred guys on every night.
And then all of a sudden it just kind of… stopped. Coincidentally, right around the time that Wrath of the Lich King came out.
Carrie Gouskos: Uh huh. [laughing]
The MMO Gamer: That was basically the reason that I quit. I don’t play MMOs to solo, and I don’t like making new friends. So once all my friends quit, I was gone.
And, I’ve pretty much been trying ever since to talk them into giving the game a second shot.
I decided to just jump in and swim last month, and see if I could needle them down by constant reminders that, “Hey, I’m playing WAR again, you want to come back and try it?”
But their responses always tend to be, “No. We played it. We didn’t like it. That’s it.”
And that’s of course the prevailing notion of just about every MMO on the market: People get an idea in their head at launch, and no matter what happens to a game six months, a year afterward, the day they bought the box is the image they have in their mind forever.
Anarchy Online, for instance, was never able to live down that launch…
Carrie Gouskos: Actually, Anarchy Online was one that I went back to like three times. Every time I went back, I just wanted to love that game so much, I tried so hard.
But I understand completely what you’re saying. It’s funny, isn’t it? The only turnaround I can think of is you need to have a complete makeover. And even then, it’s hard to change your intuition.
Which is interesting, because I do think a lot of games are actually broken at launch, but I don’t think that Warhammer was. There were problems, certainly. But compared to some of the experiences I’ve had in other MMOs…
I’m not saying that’s forgivable, at all. As an industry we need to move away from that, “We’ll fix it later” mentality, which I’ve never had. But they’re so massive, and there’s so much going on, it’s almost hard to contain it all.
And I guess you were setting us up for a question, which you can ask now if you’d like. [laughing]
Continued on next page…
[...] we have some actual honest to God news and features for you this week. Not the least of which is Carrie Gouskos sitting down with Steve to have a little chat about Warhammer Online. And by little, we mean 40 minutes [...]
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by The MMO Gamer. The MMO Gamer said: Warhammer Online Producer Carrie Gouskos: We’re a Game for People who Like Killing People. In the Face. http://bit.ly/9JxyEW #mmo #mmorpg [...]
Excellent interview, Steve!
The highlight here is the possibility of extending weekend warfront to the open RVR zones and that should be emphasized in the title or something. It absolutely makes sense. It's not like better city battles will change the way t4 is almost passively traded between enormous zergs. The zeitgeist of everyone who's been in t4 is that you scen when you want to kill people and ORVR is just for trading keeps without killing anyone. RvE or Waithammer. I hope they turn around after the city changes FAST to pull people out of the scens and into ORVR in tier4.
I forgot to mention that Carrie seems like a fresh and interesting person who must be a pleasure to work with. Something of a systematic positivist she seems to actively think through a problem to frame it in a way that the problem can be solved. I liked that and while I previously wouldn't have wanted to work for Mythic for less than the crown jewels, I don't think I'd mind taking part of the as-positive-as-realism-allows environment a higher-up like Carrie likely generates.
Games done, stick a fork in it. Meanwhile, Rise of the godslayer comes out TODAY.
Having met her, you're interpretation is pretty accurate. Speaking with her, you can see she really is considerate of the reality of the game-environment she has sway over. Every answer I got back from her during my own interviews you could see her churning over the answers and rolling it around in her mind to get a sense of how to best tackle the given situation. With all of that, she is extremely postive and happy about the reality of the game. She exudes a pleasentness and energetic enthusiasim for gaming and Warhammer.
[...] situation anyway. Or maybe it’s just because I just read an interview MMOGamer have done with Carrie Gouskos. Her optimism is really contagious but at the same time she shows a great amount of [...]
[...] some WAR interviews with Carrie. She’s talking to everyone. Everyone. Massively and MMOGamer are two of the most [...]
[...] an enraged Choppa to keep with the lore of the game – that Black Orc's is da biggest orcs!)SOURCE: HEREps."The MMO Gamer: Incidentally, I enjoy killing people in the face, too. Which is why I play a [...]
Loved the new city seiges in the last patch, and the removal of zone lock renown farming in lower tiers. Looking forward to whats to come
Did somebody really say that WAR was dead AND mention rise of the godslayer in the same sentence? Was that irony? Pot calling the kettle black?
Last I checked, there was a healthy (and growing) population on WAR, and an anemic (and shrinking) Age of Conan population. But I could be wrong…
But you see.
AoC's budget wasnt cut.
WAR'S was.
You're literally a sinking ship, stranded in the middle of the ocean.
Whens the last time you got legitimate new content?
A year ago.
LoL
Carrie's far too nice. I hope her job stress does not dim her obviously shiny spirit. Shiny in the "Firefly" sense. /dons brown coat
That type of shiny can never go away.
/dons brown coat
if there going to make a game downloadable, at least make it current. no downloads work!!!!
((((
I am currently playing on Karak-Azghal on my rr 59 BG
Both sides are equally balanced, there is rvr action from 12:00-02:00 =14 hours of RVR each day. new city sieges are interesting and fun. Scenarios are as always fun and now they actually give you something.
When I play on Azghal destro whines on imbalances in classes and I have to defend order.
When I play Norn order whines on imbalances in classes and I have to defend destro.
Game is balanced, classes are balanced. the only problem is that players love to feel that their side is the weakest and that they get steamrolled because of imbalances instead of realising that they suck and theyr opponents knows how to play!
War is improving slow but steady and as long as there are suscribers the game will just continue to get better!
Only problem I see is content for rr80 players. When you are rr80 the game is over, you have perfect gear, you can solo a FG lowbies, perfect build. There just isnt any reason to continue to play except for duels.
What I want to happen in war is to give rr80 players something to play for. Like rr70+ premade scenarios, battlegrounds with top100players. maybe some new pve or even improve city sieges and orvr to let the high players have a more important role.
bullshit to be honest. I am playing war from prebeta. The main problems war had was a very heavy client and to many bugs. Bugs and many more bugs and again bugs. You get a king dead by bug him and so on.
Also warhammer is a runhammer? You always run and run and endless run around.
They fixed what exactly? They failed epic for not fixing the hacks that exist from day 1 till today. I still see people fly, run without been able to slow down, walk under the earth, teleport behind a target, potbot and heal bot, teleport anywhere on the world.
So i am paying you for almost 2 years now? And all you say is that i trust you? I trust what? A company that cannot even protect me from hacks like hacks? A company that does not even ban people that have been reported hacking? a company that was banning people from forums just because they did say hacks exist? Meh.
As always you want people to see things the way you would like to see it. But as you can realize people that still play war just play it because there is nothing better to play. Does that make you a good game or a good dev team? I think not
What I didn't see addressed here was the pop spread at release. One of the things I think really hurt the RVR experience was there were 230948230948 servers out, but only a half dozen or so with really high populations. And as populations began to creep outward b/c of the server queues and such, Mythic's "Oh, you can move yourself, Little Timmy!" ended up fragmenting a LOT of people. You had some members of guilds tired of the lag and server queues wanting to move, while their guild mates on the other side of the fence wanted to wait for the queues to dissipate as people left. This happened to me *three times*. It's what made me leave the game. I was tired of splitting my time between 2-3 different servers, and having to pick and choose which friends and guild mates I played with. It was a complete disaster!
Mythic released with too many servers, allowed the population to fragment itself, and didn't consolidate all the nigh-empty servers until it was MUCH too late. In a game that depends on lots of people hurling themselves at each other on the field of battle, you cannot have populations thinly spread out over 100 different servers. That, to me, was the biggest mistake. All the client bugs and lag and server queues and imbalances along the way are par for the course for a new MMO and were easily tolerable. Having to pick and choose between friends and guild mates that scattered to the four winds because there were sever transfers every other week… that ruined it completely.
Just my $.02
@ mtown_nerd:
I think they fixed the server consolidation, and I agree it took way too long. One of the consolidations basically ended my guild as most didn't transfer to a new server and just quit.
Logging into T4 almost every night though has been a blast. Great group of people and some great warband leadership makes it fun. If we're not doing a city siege, we're locking a zone and getting some great RvR going. I quit the game a few times during the transitions, but I'm glad I'm back.
Shadow Warriors are not balanced. We need love. And we need it now. Physical damage is useless when mitigated by armor and toughness. When they introduced the resistance softcap (40%), they stopped tanks from being completely indestructible. Unfortunately this also made the only useful kind of DPS magic-based. Granted, shadow warriors should not be able to take down a tank easily but with everyone sporting armor potions of at least +800 or more it significantly reduces the damage that a (supposedly) dps class is dealing. Give us reasonable armour caps for different class types and some core abilities and i'm happy. Give some love to the marauder too, we know they're hurting but at least they have a pull and better survivability.
I am going to make a long comment here.. I didn't start playing Warhammer till later on after it came out after they got all the client issues and lag fixed, I played it for a few months and got to around level 30.. I found PVP to be repetitive and boring after so long and that was all I mainly did was PVP.. I found it easy to get into similar to Guild Wars but I really did not find it challenging.. I have done Player vs Player in just about every online game I have played and most of those games were heavily revolved around PVP.. (Darkfall Online, Global Agenda, Ultima Online, EVE Online, etc..) As a avid Player vs Player, one of the things I did not like about Warhammer was that it had the whole traditional MMO Combat that is made for PVE/QUESTING MMORPG's, if you really want to attract all the PVPers, the combat must have immersion, you have to actually feel the heat of battle, it has to be realistic and the way to do this is to opt out of the traditional MMORPG combat which is a sticky auto targeting system and replace it with real-time third person shooter combat, as PVPers, we want to use tactics, skill and intelligence to beat our enemies, manually blocking, being able to dodge and having to aim our sword blows, spells and arrows.. Also one of the things I did not like was that you could see the floating-name-tag of your enemy, this alone takes away another whole dimension for PVP.. Why should the enemy faction be able to see my name? It doesn't benefit for me, all it does is make me a target from miles and miles away, why should we not be able to hide around a corner, or try to use sneak attacks, where is the immersion here, it does not exist within Warhammer AOR when in fact it should.. Combat in a PVP MMO should be comparable to games like (Mass Effect, Oblivion, Fallout 3, etc..) This is one of the corrections I see happening with Dark Millennium… If Mythic wants Warhammer AOR to have any future, they will do the same with combat..
I am not saying though that it should be FPS style combat, that usually does not work in a MMORPG cause it clashes with the UI and in order to use the UI you have to lose control of your character and then go back into combat since in a FPS game you have no cursor.. The combat in Dungeons & Dragons Online does it right…
Just to throw my two cents in here after all this time. Zerotherm is correct. I've been playing since prebeta myself and quick several months ago after the same realization.
This is why a large part of the player base has left including myself and the 20 some people I took with me. I decided to leave a few months back after I began to realize this game was never going anywhere. I'm sorry, but paying monthly nearly tip-top dollar for an MMO that has zero respect for its clientele and a lack of content is what I see. Just as others have said before, this game should still be in a beta status.
Since pre-beta, the WAR team has had nothing but high hopes for itself. Once release came around, they realized themselves that they weren't getting the necessary feedback. From there, nothing but frenzy trying to save a failed project. Hence, all the staff changes and quick content fixes. Not to mention the cutback on over half of the servers since release.
If Carrie want's to save this game, because that's exactly what it is, my suggestion is to improve customer support while reducing play cost first. You will improve quality assurance at the same time introducing the game to newly interested players. Forget trying to make a profit this year and next, that's not how it works. Once the MMO has been established correctly it will open a whole new game of opportunities with a stronger potential for financial backing. Take care of your die hard fans first and move to expanding the realms of WAR.
At this point, as the company has tried just about everything expect. No matter how much positiveness you through at this situation, the MMO is unfortunately going to fail without a new influx of interested players. And without quality assurance, they aren't going to stick around.
As you read this post with several misspellings and grammar errors. Just think, that is what playing WAR is like. Lack of attention to detail, lack of quality assurance.
Nice to see how realistic and honest they are.
At the same time, it's very ironic how people get an idea the first time they play and stick to it. Same goes for WoW. They liked it so they keep playing no matter how much the game has been butchered and how people are whining since then.
I honestly think WAR did make some huge mistakes however. Copying WoW's Wintergrasp (PvP in order to farm an rea after) kind of killed WAR endgame PVP back then as you'd fight once every few hour to gain the farming rights.. and then farm.
Copying the successful isn't always the right idea as the only people who will migrate to a new game are those who are offered something new and better.This is why I probably won't even give Dark Millenium Online a chance as the first thing we heard from them after seeing the trailer is "we'll do like WoW".
Nice interview, intresting thinking indeed.
I left the game abit after Choppa and Slayer entered the game, after that i was just so bored of playing it.
I mainly left because of the class imbalance. Sure BW outdid the Sorc when i left but with imbalance i mean all classes.
The thing i mean that i hate 4classes really is all you need to WIN. Which are Dok/Wp Sorc/BW Choppa/slayer Chosen/Kotbs. All other classes aren't useless ofc but still they are inferior to the listed classes.
And i don't know but i always wonder, when they nerfed a class so it went to a OK level compared to it's counterpart, than they also buffed the counterpart making it stronger, so the roles were changed!
Anyone else felt this when playing? Just wondering. ^^