E3 Interview: Mythic’s Adam Gershowitz Talks Warhammer Online

The MMO Gamer: Don’t worry about it.

Adam Gershowitz: The White Lion, on the other hand, is the last career we’re putting out. Obviously, when we talk about parity, we want to make sure people have equal choices on both sides. Order was lacking in a pet choice for quite a long time.

The White Lion is one of those cases where we really dug through the GW lore, and we saw where something was interesting we could work with them. After a lot of meetings with the GW guys, we kind of came into agreement that the White Lion was the perfect career for that.

Obviously, the elves have Dragon Mages, but dragon pets, as cool as they sound on paper, it’s really hard to have something that big follow you around all the time. It’ll block your screen 99% of the time, you can’t see through it, screen shakes making everybody—it’s really annoying.

So what we did was we focused in on the White Lions, which are equally interesting, because there’s these huge, savage war lions…

The MMO Gamer: If I can interject something here… Did you actually ever add dragon pets in the game to test that theory? Or was that all just on paper?

Adam Gershowitz: It was on paper, but you have to remember, even if you play in the first PQ, you see what a small dragon is in our game. He’s rather large, he’s not going to fit through hallways, he’s not going to fit through small corridors, he’s not going to patiently wait for you while you go into that little hut to work on a quest.

I’m surprised to say we never made a Dragon Mage, but back when we were sitting down and looking at the paper product of it, we said, “Well, this is the size of a dragon, this is the size of a player, what’s going to happen if you get 40 of these players running around?” All of a sudden, you’re not going to see anything except a whole bunch of dragon feet.

So, dragon feet are interesting, but at the same time, we wanted the game to be fun, and the framerate not to drop into the crapper the minute everybody summoned their pet.

The MMO Gamer: [Laughing] Sorry, morbid curiosity.

Adam Gershowitz: Back on the White Lion, we then wanted to make it a little different, so we went with the idea of the melee pet class. What this is, it’s almost like it’s his own little roving group.

He’s all about doing lots, and lots of damage, but what we really wanted to do there, was have a synergy between player and pet. In a lot of places, we have what are called “trainings” that basically change a pet’s special abilities, attacks, and basically AI and logic to do different things.

There’s a neutral training, where I’m on even keel with my master, I’m not going to do anything crazy, I do normal damage, it’s a lot of AoE swipes, basically the type of stuff where you and your pet are going to wade into a fight and strike out indiscriminately.

There’s another training that’s all about offense, which basically tells the pet to be more low-key, let the player get a little more aggro, be more aggressive, and then at the right time the player’s going to trigger abilities that have the pet come in from the shadows and do positional damage.

Also, a nice thing is it’s very group friendly. Those same abilities that the White Lion uses to distract from his pet, he can also use to distract from his group members. So, while he’s not a direct tank, he can do things to fade aggro across monsters, or reduce the amount of hatred or damage coming in to friendly people.

The final part of it would be where the pet has kind of a defensive training, where the pet actually takes a bit of a tank role. He’s not nearly as effective as a normal tank in a player, because it’s a monster, monsters even in our game, where we’ve worked on the AI, are not terribly smart.

They’re not going to look after you the way a tank would. But, the pet does get beefed-up defenses and some decent hate-management skills, so at least in a PvE situation, he can start pulling a little bit of aggro and allow the White Lion really to unleash Hell on his opponent.

In a PvP situation, all of his abilities are geared towards intimidating roars, reducing people’s offenses by putting debuffs and things on them, so it’s basically lowering your opponent’s damage output, while bolstering your friendly players around.

It really makes a very interesting class. The final part about it is, we wanted to do something we hadn’t done before, which is a fully-customizable pet. You won’t see it in beta right now, because we’re just testing the class out, we want to do things in phases.

But, later on, players are going to be able to choose a small selection of customizations for their pet. They’re going to be able to choose different patterning, different colors, tint color on the final armor, it’s very important to note that the white lion, the lion itself, will level up with the player, that’s something you’ll see in beta right now.

Every five or ten levels or so the lion will start getting bigger, his mane will grow out, he’ll get more ornate stuff. Finally, the final version of the lion is shoulder-high to an elf, which is really, really tall, fully-adorned, huge mane, battle armor, quite impressive.

Pages: 1 2 3 4