E3 Interview: Mythic’s Adam Gershowitz Talks Warhammer Online

Coming on the heels of word that Warhammer Online has received its September 18th release date, today we bring you an interview with Adam Gershowitz, the game’s Associate Art Director.

The interview actually took place a few weeks back at E3, but I’ve been sitting on it until now to allow it to become a companion piece to my updated impressions article, which you can read right over here.

After getting the questions I had to ask lest I be fired out of the way, we got down to business discussing the details of recent class changes in the game, along with the team’s responses to tester feedback.

And, seeing as how I don’t interview people with “Art Director” in their title while sitting in the middle of a game-inspired art gallery very often, we even delved a bit into an old eternal question…

Read on for the transcript, or press play to listen to the interview.

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The MMO Gamer: Here we are at E3 ’08, sitting in the Into the Pixel Gallery, which was the only quiet space we could find.

I’m here with Adam Gershowitz from the Warhammer Online team, and just so I don’t get your title incorrect, in case you’ve changed jobs since the last time we interviewed, could you please introduce yourself, and tell us a little bit about what you do at Mythic.

Adam Gershowitz: My title hasn’t changed; I’m still an Associate Art Director. But, I’m actually working more with the Combat and Career Strike Team now as one of the design leads.

Day-to-day, a lot of the stuff I do is working with the designers and the artists to really put a high level of polish on the career system.

The MMO Gamer: There’s been a lot of Warhammer and Mythic news coming out lately. Let’s start with just the name: Mythic: Why you’ve gone from Mythic, to EA Mythic, and then back to Mythic again?

Adam Gershowitz: Basically, that actually has more to do with John Riccitiello and his vision for EA. When EA bought us, Riccitiello obviously wasn’t the president.

The company was still a lot more corporate. It was a big publisher, everybody was a part of EA. Join the Borg, right? Be assimilated.

But what happened when John Riccitiello came in, is he really put more of the focus on the studio. He wanted to give the power and the creativity to the developers, and more importantly, wanted the developers to be credited for it.

So yeah, everybody wants to know EA is a good publisher for good titles. But, more importantly, no one knew who was making those things. Very few people knew that Tiburon made Madden, while Black Box made Need for Speed, for example, they were all under the EA label.

Really what’s been going on right now is the studios are regaining their identities. We’ve been Mythic for—oh—ridiculous amounts of time.

We were EA Mythic because they were kind of starting to do this when we bought us, and now we’re just returning to our roots, Mythic, because that’s the name that has been associated with our games since we started working on games, and it’s the name we want to have associated with the studio from here on out.

The MMO Gamer: The other piece of big news, obviously, was the announcement that you’re cutting a number of end-game cities and classes from the game. I imagine that was a somewhat painful decision.

How long did you guys talk about this, and what did you weigh as the pros and cons of making the decision?

Adam Gershowitz: It was a very hard decision. Just like Mark said, honestly, it’s all about making the best game we can. When it comes down to it, we’ve been in beta for quite some time now.

We’ve really taken our beta tester feedback to heart. We wanted to make sure we didn’t just have a good game, we wanted to have a great game. When it came down to it, certain careers weren’t cutting the mustard.

In some cases it was just the artwork wasn’t where it needed to be, in other cases the gameplay wasn’t where it needed to be. So we took a good, hard look at where we were, what the players wanted, and where we had to go with everything.

When we did, we came back and we saw four of the careers really weren’t where they needed to go. The other careers were a lot more fun, and instead of investing ridiculous amounts of time making good careers a little bit better, we wanted to invest all that time making the current careers really great.

When it all comes down to it, it was focusing our effort more, getting time and effort in to really, really, really bear down on that polish level on the 20 careers we had left.

In the case of the cities, it was a very similar type of circumstance. But actually, that was as much driven by beta feedback, and the fact that players really, really love the cities, we had concerns about running multiple campaigns at the same time, and when it comes down to it, we wanted to make the cities fantastic.

So we basically said, a single campaign is actually a lot easier, having the campaign go across where you have to win two of the pairings in order to unlock the city, make sure that people are going to multiple pairings and there’s large populations and everything, and then really focusing down on Inevitable and Altdorf to be the key crown jewels at launch, where they are a playground. We’ve put that much more content into it.

We’ve even put some of the content that was found in some of the older cities into Altdorf and Inevitable City. So, it’s not like those cities are just gone, vanished forever, we’ve moved a lot of that stuff over into Altdorf and Inevitable City just to make it more broad, and more interesting.

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