E3 Interview: Mythic’s Adam Gershowitz Talks Warhammer Online

The MMO Gamer: If they’re not gone forever, do you have any tentative timetable for when they might make an appearance in the game? Would they be patch content, or something that might be held off until the first expansion?

Adam Gershowitz: That’s kind of a question that’s better suited for Jeff or Mark.

I do know that right now, us as a team, we’re focused on getting this game out the door. Our first and primary focus right now is making the careers that remain, and the cities that remain, top-notch. After we launch, obviously we’ll come back and take a look at what we’ve cut out of the game, and whether or not we want to bring it back.

I really can’t say one way or another, because it’s really not something we’re looking heavily into right now, it’s not something that we’re planning out. We really just want to get the game done, finished, and to a really high level of polish.

The MMO Gamer: Let’s talk about your specialty a bit: Could you tell us about some of the new classes that have been added into the game in the stead of the ones that have been cut?

Adam Gershowitz: Basically, right now we have just introduced the last two careers for the final launch candidate, the White Lion, and the Magus.

One you’re actually a little more familiar with, because the Magus was in beta previously. This is a great example of when we went back and took a really hard look at each of the careers and wanted to see what was wrong with it.

In the case of the Magus, everybody thought it was pretty fun, but they basically said he wasn’t Chaos-y enough. He wasn’t Chaos Sorcerer… What the hell, he never summoned demons? He didn’t call down storms of multicolored fireballs? He just didn’t feel the way he needed to feel.

When we brought him back to the drawing board in June, we took all of that beta feedback, and all of that player feedback and rolled it back into the class to say, “How do we add in demon summoning? How do we add in a lot of that very Tzeentch flavor and bring them back out?

So now, what you have is the new and improved Magus. Basically, before he went under the hood he was just another spellcaster.

Now, he is still a very potent spellcaster, but he also has an entire demonology tree which revolves around summoning horrors, flamers, these basically insubstantial stationary pets, because what happens with them is he summons them into the world, you can’t control chaos very long, they only last a very short period of time, they have to stay within the region they were summoned.

Otherwise, they’ll go berserk, out of control, and honestly no player will ever want a class that just summons pets you can’t actually control.

So, that was our way of working with the IP and the lore to build this emplacement turret-type class that felt very Chaos-y, but also filled a similar role to the Engineer and his stationary emplacements.

However, once again, we didn’t want them to be “Just like the Engineer,” right? The Engineer does other things, he has mortar blasts, and land mines, and everything else. But the Magus really needed to have more with the disc, more with demonology.

So, we delved even farther. We took the disc and we gave him a number of PBAoE abilities, and short-range abilities where the disc lashes out at your opponent. We also did a bunch of things—we went back into the lore, we got a hold of the new Demon Codex and everything else, and we went back in and we said, “Ok, what are other things?”

The Sorcerers in Fantasy spawn demons, blue horrors from the corpse of their enemies. So, higher down the demonology line you have a Magus ability, The Violet Fire of Change, that basically you can channel on a target, and if it’s under the warping power of Chaos when it’s killed, an uncontrolled blue horror will spawn in its place, and for the next minute or two will run around rampant, just attacking people.

Another great example of that is how we made his tier 4 morale abilities a little bit better.

Basically, when you’ve reached a full tier 4 morale, you’ve got so much power stored into you you rip open the fabric of reality and a Firewyrm of Tzeentch comes rolling through, which is more of a major demon, and that demon, because it’s so powerful, only stays in the world for a very short period of time, like 30 seconds to a minute, but it rampages around and does tremendous amounts of damage.

While other people, like the Shaman, does Fists of Gore that hit a lot of people for a lot of damage in an area, we did it with a monster, instead. So basically this rampaging monster’s going to roll around the entire area, and do tremendous amounts of damage just like an AoE spell, but with a complete different flavor. It’s also very interesting, because Magi can use it as a tactic, to simultaneously spawn a bunch to really break through a line.

The other nice thing is players can react a little bit to it by trying to kill the demon before its summon time is up.

…Sorry, this might take awhile, because they’re two very interesting careers.

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