E3 Interview: Mythic’s Adam Gershowitz Talks Warhammer Online

By Steven Crews | August 6, 2008 | | Filed under: Events, Features, Impressions, Interviews

The MMO Gamer: You mentioned the importance of beta feedback a little while ago. Was there ever anything you worked on that you thought players were going to really, really love, and then it actually got into beta and they said, “What the hell is this?!”

Adam Gershowitz: Actually, that happens all the time, to be honest with you. We’re designers, and we’re players as well, but every player has a different opinion. A really good example on the career end of that is the Chosen.

The Chosen is one of our kind of aura tanks, we spent a lot of time designing him, very meticulous in forcing players through this progression of hitting buttons, auras that do this, and auras that unlock special abilities, and using those specialty abilities you could do different things in different situations.

When it came down to it, it looked great on paper, right? All these situational decisions that unlock this, and unlock that. We got it out to beta, and basically players said, “I like this. It’s really fun, but I want to be more in control of the situation. I don’t want to have to go through these crazy unlock chains. I want more freedom of movement.”

So, working with the beta community over the past couple of phases, basically simplifying the system a little bit, keeping the ability to either play as a tank that goes out and fights and people, or defensive support where I stay back and corrupt everything around me.

Basically the Chosen has evolved from a more linear progressive gameplay to a more open-ended choice system. It’s just a natural progression, it was really, “Hey, we thought this was great, beta players thought it was great, but it wasn’t quite what it felt it was.”

They’ve helped us tremendously working through the gameplay on that career.

The MMO Gamer: Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?

Adam Gershowitz: It depends on what it is, and whether or not you’re going to print it, but go ahead. [Laughing]

The MMO Gamer: I try to get at least one philosophical question into my interviews these days, as opposed to, “When is your game coming out, what’s the loot going to be, and how many exclusives are you going to give me?”

Adam Gershowitz: Yep.

The MMO Gamer: So, one of my favorites is: Why do you make games? Why do you get up every morning, go to work at Mythic, and do what you do?

Adam Gershowitz: Well, first of all, it’s because I used to work as a programmer. I got up, went to work, wore a suit every single day and worked on network code. It wasn’t very interesting, and it wasn’t very fun.

I work at Mythic, and I work on games specifically, because I’m a creative person. I have a lot of technical background, but art is one of my passions. Games is just one of those ways that I can reach out and enjoy what I’m doing, express myself as a person, as an artist, and get involved with the community.

For me, it’s all about seeing people enjoy what I’m doing. I enjoy what I do a great deal. Some times, as an artist, artists are very critical of themselves, so you always look harshly on your own work. But it’s one of the best feelings in the world to go to a show, and what you might think is a lackluster piece, because you’ve looked at it a thousand hours, somebody, a small child, or a fan comes up and just really digs it.

“Ahh, look how cool the Black Ork is! I love that armor, and the skulls on this!” Or, “Look how fun it is to play!” And it’s just one of those really satisfying things, that makes all of the hard work—the game industry is not necessarily the most 9-5 job out there, it is a bit rigorous, it really is what turns it all around.

It’s a way for me to kind of be more than just a 9-5 job, more than just another guy behind a desk, and to know and see that my work and my own passions are shared by other people.

The MMO Gamer: We’re sitting here at the Into the Pixel display, and you’re an artist, so I think this would be a suitable location to ask this question: There is a lot of debate out there over whether games are art.

Do you think they have achieved that status yet? If not, how far do you think they have to go to prove themselves to the other mediums?

Adam Gershowitz: That’s really subjective, but I really do think games are art. It’s just like a movie, there’s art in storytelling, there’s art in cinematography, there’s art in user-created content.

I mean hell, look at Spore. That is all art, right? It’s an unlimited set of tools to do whatever you want with, and share it with everybody else. Just like art, some people are going to love it, some people are going to hate it, it’s just a creative outlet.

To be honest, I think my own personal opinion is art is a way to express your own feelings and creativity and share it with others. When it comes down to it, I think games are a great way of doing that. With the way games are going now, where we’re giving players more and more choice to take what we’re doing and they’re not just experiencing our art, and our own creativity, but making their own out of it.

That’s what to me makes it seem more like an art form than, you know, a ride at Universal Studios. You’re not along for the ride any more, you’re part of it, you’re enjoying it, and you’re making something for yourself.

The MMO Gamer: You mentioned storytelling in that answer, and that’s a very red meat subject for me.

Do you think that MMOs are currently a good storytelling vehicle, if you want to call it that?

It’s difficult, to say the least, to tell a story in a little box the size of a postage stamp telling you to go kill ten rats. How do you go about addressing that?

Adam Gershowitz: MMOs, as a genre, are a little less storytelling than say, Metal Gear Solid. We don’t have huge cut-scenes, we’re not forcing a player through an experience. In the case of Warhammer Online, we do quite a bit of small storytelling. Our quests do some of it if you read the quest dialogue, lots of players don’t.

Where we kind of do our little stories is the Public Quest system. Where it’s all about these little events that happen in the world, they’re very small stories, but if you pay attention they grow up into even larger stories.

But, storytelling in MMOs, honestly, I think really comes from the players, and the experience, and the things they build out of it. You look at games like Dark Age of Camelot, you look at World of Warcraft, you look at EverQuest, you just search that stuff on YouTube and there are people out there that are making stories. They’re putting stuff to music videos, they’re making comics out of it.

There’s just all of these things that are inspired by the games we make which might not be telling our story, but it’s telling the individual’s stories, and if they want to share it with the world, that’s a way for them to do it.

The MMO Gamer: Thank you very much for joining us, we enjoyed it, and we look forward to speaking with you again in the future.

Adam Gershowitz: Any time. I hope to see everybody in beta pretty soon.