Games Day LA: Interview with Warhammer Online Combat and Career Lead Adam Gershowitz

Steve covered Games Day LA for us, an event held by Games Workshop, where he got to speak with one of the team leads behind Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. The audio and transcript of the interview are available after the jump.

I’d like to think that I have a fairly straightforward interviewing style: I ask questions that I myself would like to have answered.

As a general rule of thumb, I also try to stick to topics that I have at least a modicum of knowledge about, so that in the event that someone starts feeding me a line of bull, I can call them on it.

Thankfully, I didn’t have any problems in the truthfulness department during this particular interview, but I did run into a few problems on the knowledge side.

For one thing, I was interviewing an artist. A reformed artist, granted (he is now the Combat and Career Strike Team Lead, which briefly conjured up in me an image of him trudging through the jungles of Nicaragua toting an AK-47), but, an artist nonetheless.

There are precisely two things that I know about art: No one can ever tell you exactly what it is, and to be considered truly great at it, you have to be dead. These facts, combined with my own artistic abilities, which cap out somewhere in the upper stick figure range, have led to me avoiding art like the plague for the majority of my days.

This left me with his other specialties: classes, combat, and gameplay, three areas which I had not gleaned enough from my thirty minutes of hands-on time up to that point to hash an entire interview out of.

So, I tried to keep my questions as down the middle generalist as possible, sticking to areas that I hoped anyone working closely with the game on a daily basis would be familiar with… and therein came the problems.

Press the play button to listen to the interview.

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The MMO Gamer: First of all, my standard interview starter: For those among our readers who may be unfamiliar, tell us a little bit about yourself, and what it is you do for EA Mythic.

Adam Gershowitz: My name is Adam Gershowitz, I’m the Combat and Career Strike Team Lead. What I do at EA Mythic is I’m in charge of one of the design teams that’s basically in charge of all the career development, combat mechanics, and gameplay.

Previously, I was also the art director in charge of the character team, so I can answer a bunch of questions about that, as well.

The MMO Gamer: Quick yes or no question: Have you ever worked in sales?

Adam Gershowitz: Yes.

The MMO Gamer: Good, that’ll help. Because let’s say for the moment that I am the stereotypical potential player. I want you to sell me this game.

Of course the only problem with that is, I am already comfortably ensconced and heavily invested in another MMO. My character’s got it all: The house with the two horse garage, the uberguild which is remarkably free of drama, the Flaming Girdle of Swank Iron… Why should I give all that up, pull up stakes, and come start over fresh in WAR?

Adam Gershowitz: Well, that’s a tough question, because quite honestly if I had all that stuff I’d have a hard time moving, too.

What I would basically say is the one thing that we’re offering people that a lot of other games out there aren’t, is a really, really solid player versus player RvR experience. We’re taking all of the things that we’ve learned from Camelot, and a lot of new stuff that we’ve observed from playing a lot of other games, and we’re trying to roll it all up into one big campaign experience from level one to level forty and beyond that will draw people back and want them to play competitive games.

A lot of other MMOs, it’s all about your personal achievements, and what you’ve got on your character, like the Uber Girdle of Swankness. Warhammer is all about group achievement, individual achievement, there’s a lot of things to unlock, there’s a lot of things to do. There’s a sense of persistence in the world because you can go out and achieve things, and those achievements will be recorded, and in a lot of ways they’ll be for everybody to see. So your bragging rights aren’t just to your server, your bragging rights are visible to anyone who wishes to look.

Like I said, it’s all about a very persistent, very competitive, RvR world.

The MMO Gamer: RvR, just for the sake of it, doesn’t seem to be much of a carrot in many other games. In World of Warcraft, for instance, until they patched in the epic rewards, I don’t know of a lot of people who actually engaged in PvP. But, even after the epic rewards, many people only seemed interested in the purples they got, rather than the fighting it took to get them.

So, my question is, what carrots are you going to implement to ensure that people are actively engaged in the war portion of Warhammer?

Adam Gershowitz: That’s a tough question to answer, and really not one that’s my area of focus. So, I’ll answer it to the best of my abilities.

The carrot for RvR in our game is, honestly, you can go one to forty doing RvR. There’s some pretense of player population problems, and stuff like that, that if you want to do a certain type of RvR, you may be a little bit more at the mercy of who else is playing with you. However, we’re doing our best to balance the world in such a way that the RvR is engaging from levels one to forty, that you can get similar types of rewards from RvRing that you can get from PvE. So you don’t have to PvE to RvR, you don’t have to RvR to PvE.

We have a hundred renown ranks that are separate levels of achievement up and beyond your level one to fifty. They’ll give you meaningful rewards, you’ll be able to get titles, you’ll be able to get new tactics for your character, you’ll be able to unlock new items off of merchants.

So, what a lot of other games do, RvR is a second thought, it’s something that’s added in to the game, but PvE is the focus of the game. We’re really looking at a dual focus. There’ll be lots of achievements, not to mention there’s the entire campaign system. You go from start to finish besieging a capital city. There’s six in the game right now, one for each of the races. That’s not a short-term commitment, that’s going to take some time to do. So hopefully players will want and enjoy doing one whole campaign that they’ll want to run one of the other ones, or be able to run multiple ones with different people that they play with.

The MMO Gamer: Players in DAoC got server-wide rewards if they captured a relic from an enemy team. What rewards would you get for, say, capturing an enemy capital?

Adam Gershowitz: In a similar vein, I’m not one of the RvR guys so I wish I could tell you the very specifics, but there are different types of rewards for different scenarios.

There are different types of rewards for doing different things, participating in different parts of the RvR: there’s buffs, there’s special items that you can unlock, I can say some of the best items in the game come from working through the capital city stuff, and you will have to visit more than one capital city, so it’s going to be encouraged to go to multiple places and achieve multiple things with your realm mates.

The MMO Gamer: But man can not live by RvR alone. Let’s talk about the PvE side of things. Is there going to be enough content there to placate someone who might say, not be interested in RvR on a Saturday night, but would rather get his guild together and go kill a dragon?

Adam Gershowitz: Yes. Like I said, since we’re focusing on doing a fairly even split, the goal is to allow the player to level straight through either way. There is a lot of content out in the world, we’re going to have a couple major dungeons at launch, with everything that comes along with a major dungeon.

We also have the public quest system. The public quest system, which I’m sure you guys have heard of a lot before, as it’s one of our major features, is basically active events that are going on in the world. There’s multiple stages, they’re built to start out where a small group of players can complete it, you need a larger group to do the second stage, a larger group the third stage, and it’s a really great way for a group of people to get together as a group of fifteen or twenty and go from public quest to public quest and do these types of larger world events. In fact, it’s even better because you may pick up and meet new people along the way, because other people will be participating around in the area, and they won’t be competing against with you, they’ll be working with you.

The MMO Gamer: So if someone has say, an uberguild in WoW that’s used to raiding Black Temple on a nightly basis, would you have a contemporary to that in WAR?

Adam Gershowitz: Honestly, I’m not a hundred percent sure about that. That’s something the content team would be able to answer. My focus is mainly on the career stuff. But, there are some of the public quests in the game that are extremely difficult to do, and they’ll take a lot of people to get done.

The MMO Gamer: Alright, let’s talk about your specialty, then. Tell me about some of the classes I can play in WAR that I can’t find anywhere else.

Adam Gershowitz: The way the career system works in Warhammer is it’s a class-based system, so we’ve taken iconic careers, classes, people from the Warhammer universe, and we’ve kind of pulled them out. No matter what you do, every single race will have one of the four major archetypes: the tank, the healer, the melee DPS, and the ranged DPS. This is to make sure that everybody has a role, everybody has a purpose in the game, there’s no muddling of the lines, and also to make sure that every realm—if you wanted to have an entire guild full of just Empire people, you could do it, you have everything you need.

Now, the important thing to note is each one of them is slightly different, they all play in a slightly different style. A really good example of this is the Shaman. The Shaman is a healer, but we built him to be a participant healer instead of just sitting back on the sidelines and heal, heal, heal. So, what he does that you won’t see in an another MMO is he actually builds up WAAAGH! [Note: Yes, that’s how you’re supposed to spell that], and what WAAAGH! does is he gets worked up, he uses offensive abilities to work himself up into a frenzy, he’s now filled with all of this energy which he can then use to power his healing spells for a much reduced cost. So, in layman’s term, you nuke, you nuke, you nuke, you heal, and what happens is, every time you nuke, you get a bonus to how much the cost of your heal is. So heals initially are very expensive, but if you nuke a couple times it’s much cheaper to heal, so it’ll allow players to balance their nuking with their healing, and not really feel “I’ve got to sit back and reserve all of my mana just in case there’s an accident.”

The Knight is actually quite an interesting class, he is a tank, but he’s a bit of more of a support tank. The Knight has commands, these commands can be issued in such a way that the Knight can sit back as a battlefield commander, and just help his group by directing these buffs, these group buffs and these individual debuffs on targets and groups, and he doesn’t necessarily have to just get up there and mix it up, he can walk back and he can stay back as your battlefield tactician type. Or, he can get in and mix it up. So there’s two ways that you can play the character, you can be up front in the face, defending your allies, blocking, doing melee attacks, or you can stack back and play a little bit more of a tactician.

The MMO Gamer: After DAoC and now WAR, is Mythic trying to carve out a niche for itself in the genre as “The Company That Makes Games About PvP?”

Adam Gershowitz: RvR has always been a company focus. Everybody at the company has been very passionate about doing games with RvR. We like to make well-rounded games. If you notice, both DAoC and WAR both have a good amount of both, mainly because we’re all gamers and we like to do both.

In terms of what the company line is, that’s a question better suited for Paul or Mark or one of those guys, but, we’re gamers making games for gamers, and we like to do both things, so I imagine that as long as that’s still the case we’re going to continue to do that.

The MMO Gamer: I don’t know if you’ll be able to answer this question, but, I know that Games Workshop has voluminous amounts of canon available in the Warhammer universe, but if you ever find that to be insufficient for your development needs, do you have the authority to add new material on your own, or are you constrained to work within the boundaries of what’s already extant?

Adam Gershowitz: Well, we’ve got a really good working relationship with Games Workshop. I can’t talk for the other teams, but I can talk for the types of things that we’ve done on the careers team and the art team previously. There are things that don’t work for an MMO that need to be there. In those cases we work closely with Games Workshop, with their IP and with their volumes and volumes of information to kind of build items that are more appropriate.

A really good example of this, at least from my end, was the Zealot class. The Zealot career is something new, Zealots have been floating around, the word “zealot” has been floating around the Warhammer IP for a very long time, but there hasn’t been necessarily a Zealot fantasy miniature in the tabletop game for quite some time.

So, when we looked at the careers, and we said we need a healer type, what type of class would be fun to play? We want a crazy orator, dark rituals, sacrificial type of guy, and we said here’s what we’re thinking of, and we worked with Games Workshop and basically went through the Zealot and said, the name Zealot, is that good, bad, or indifferent? What type of things would he do? Would it be OK for him to engrave rituals on the ground, and have a harbinger of doom over people’s head, to summon dark energies into the world, and do these types of things? So we worked with GW to kind of build a piece of IP that is unique to WAR, but also fits within the whole IP.

The MMO Gamer: I noticed during the demo that you’re using a relatively low-poly engine for this day and age. Could you discuss some of the reasons behind that?

Adam Gershowitz: Performance is king. Especially when you’re focusing on a game with RvR and you want to have a lot of people on screen running around doing a lot of things at once. There are two major reasons why we went this direction: The first and foremost is framerate. We want to have a lot of people on screen, we want battles to feel epic and powerful, and if you use cutting-edge technology you’re severely limited to the amount of things you’re going to have on the screen, unless people have an extraordinarily high level machine.

The second level is accessibility. You know, we are making a game, and we want to have good server population, so we wanted to be accessible to as many people as possible. We don’t necessarily want to force them into upgrading, and we don’t want to just be elitist and we don’t just want the very best machines. The engine is low-poly—now, admittedly it’s significantly higher than you would think, and there’s a lot of detail there, but it allows us by not using some things like normal maps, etc., it allows us to make more work, make more artwork in the game, it allows us to do more with what we’ve got, and it allows us to show a lot more on the screen.

The MMO Gamer: So who would you say your key demographic is for this game? PvPers? Games Workshop fanatics? Jaded DAoC players?

Adam Gershowitz: Honestly, that’s a weird question, that’s probably one they haven’t told me, I’d ask the marketing department. If I was to just throw it out there I’d basically say, people who are interested in competitive games where they can make achievements both directly against other people, or unlocking things in the game, the game is really meant to be RvR group and the adventuring group, the type of people who like to go out and make achievements, and see to the fact that they can earn things in the game, and their playtime is actually meaningful. I wouldn’t say that we’re relegating just to the hardcore or the casual, we’re trying to mix it up and go for a broad market.

The MMO Gamer: Was there anything we didn’t cover in this interview you’d like to tell our readers?

Adam Gershowitz: That’s a tough one. What I’d like to say is, come out and see us at the shows. We always have booths up at all the major shows, we’re more than willing to talk about the game, we’re very excited about it, a lot of people don’t realize that if you come out to the shows, come out and see, you’ll get a chance to play the game, probably get a better chance to get into beta, and more importantly you’ll be able to get some face time with all the devs, because we do send the people that like to work on the games out to these things, and we do want to talk to our fans.

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

Adam Gershowitz: No problem, thank you very much.

Adam was a very pleasant fellow, and I appreciated him answering questions that were outside his realm of expertise to the best of his ability. He also has the distinction of being the only interview subject I’ve ever met who asked me if I had gotten through all of the questions I had planned to, with the implication he wanted to keep going.

“More or less,” I told him.

That was largely correct; I asked all of the direct questions I had planned, but there were further follow-ups I would have liked to ask that fell into the areas beyond his purview.

He advised me that I may have been able to get more direct answers by asking some of my questions again of the additional staff manning the demo area, and I did so at the next available opportunity. You may read about my additional round of questioning in my WAR first impressions article, which should be posted shortly (with a link here when it is).