Interview: EA Mythic’s Josh Drescher Talks Warhammer Online

If you read my editorial on the subject, you likely know by now that Warhammer Online was one of the few bright spots of the otherwise dismal E for All.

And, along with it, one of the brightest spots for me personally was being afforded the opportunity to sit down and discuss the game with Josh Drescher, one of its senior designers.

The EA booth in the hall was not particularly conducive to high-quality audio, so, we trekked to the only area that came to mind which was relatively quiet and had a place to sit down: The food court.

As we went, Josh issued to me a prophetic warning: “I talk a lot, so you should feel free to trim this down.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said, “I prefer when people talk a lot. Most people’s answers tend to be shorter than my questions.”

“Believe me, you won’t have that problem here,” he assured me.

Little could I suspect the Pandora’s Box I was opening with this seemingly innocuous exchange.

The man was as good as his word, and then some. I had barely even managed to get through my starter questions when our allotted interview time had been exhausted.

However, Josh was kind enough to agree to a second round. We were initially going to conduct it in person during the following day of the con, but, his scheduling did not permit, so we did it through email, instead.

I was originally planning to split this article up into two halves, the first with the transcript and audio from our sit-down interview, and the second with the answers from our email exchange.

Having only his prior interview performance as an indicator, I kept my email questions to a minimum, expecting to receive War and Peace in return.

I was therefore somewhat surprised when I received his responses, and found them so succinct and to the point that they would have been unable to stand on their own against the verbosity of the first half of the interview.

So, I elected to take them as “follow-ups in absentia” and just shoehorned them into the transcript in the order I would have asked them in person.

As such, a disclaimer for those who are only listening:

The audio is the abridged version of the interview. There are additional questions which are only available in the transcript.

Click play to listen to the interview.

The MMO Gamer: My standard interview starter to get the ball rolling: 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.

Josh Drescher: My name is Josh Drescher. I am an Associate Producer for Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. I also act as a Senior Designer on the project. What that basically means is I’m partially involved in the high-end level of design, and then I’m also doing oversight, management, and boring project related stuff.

And then I go out and do lots of dance for the press type of things, because I don’t freeze up in front of the camera.

The MMO Gamer: Like this.

Josh Drescher: Like this. This is the most intimidating interview experience of my life. I’m not normally this close to a trash can.

We can set up that EA has actually just moved to the food court, and that’s where we’re demoing the game this year.

The MMO Gamer: It’s a lot more high-traffic than the hall, and you don’t need a badge to get in.

Josh Drescher: It actually is.

The MMO Gamer: On the off chance that someone who has never so much as heard of WAR has just randomly stumbled across this interview, tell us, in your own words: What kind of game are you trying to make here?

Josh Drescher: Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game with a Player vs. Player large-scale combat focus. We actually call it Realm vs. Realm to differentiate it from the sort of single-player dueling-style PvP that people are kind of used to in MMOs.

In our game it’s actually entire armies vs. other armies, fighting in the actual game world to control and take over territory, to basically invade enemy cities, burn them to the ground, kill all the vendors, kidnap the king, drag him back home, stick him in stocks, throw tomatoes at his head, that type of stuff.

Mixed in with all the standard things that you would expect from an MMO: Your quests, and your crafting systems, the social side, guilds and guild combat, raids, dungeons, all the good PvE stuff that people are used to with the RvR component layered on top as sort of the next layer of immersive combat.

The MMO Gamer: I’d like to start off with the question on everyone’s mind at this point. I suppose you can guess what it is.

Josh Drescher: It could be one of three, so I’ll just see which one it’s going to be.

The MMO Gamer: The beta stoppage.

Josh Drescher: Yup.

The MMO Gamer: What were the reasons for making this decision, and what development improvements do you hope to make between now and December?

Josh Drescher: This is actually the second time we’ve done this, people weren’t aware of the first one because it was an internal beta for about a year. Partially it comes down to a matter of there’s a point where you kind of have to stop putting new things into the test and just decide it’s time to iterate.

We’ve taken all of this feedback in, we’ve gotten some hard answers in a lot of places, things that we put in that we were really curious about how people would react to it, and a lot of the time that’s been very positive, and we’ve gone, alright, we’re going to focus on the things people like.

Then, to be honest, there were things people didn’t like, or they just felt weren’t implemented well, or they didn’t feel quite right. As a result, Mark Jacobs, the GM of the studio, really wanted to make sure that built-in to our plan for development was going to be time to go back and iterate over everything that we’d already put out in public.

We’ve done that a couple of times internally, when we did our first development pass of the Dwarf and Greenskin pairing, we finished that and it was all but art-locked, and then we moved into the Empire and Chaos pairing, and the Empire and Chaos pairing just came out a lot more immersive, it was a stronger experience, and Mark looked at it and said, “Alright, please take two months to go back and fix up the previous content and make sure that it’s all on par with where you are right now.”

So, a great deal of the beta closure has basically revolved around taking positive and negative feedback, and making tough choices based upon that feedback to make sure that we’re not just belligerently running ahead with what we believe is right when we’re sometimes getting feedback saying, “We’d like it a little more if it was like this.”

A good example would be persistent world RvR, where we really had initially focused very, very heavily on the instanced scenario RvR combat, and players enjoyed the scenarios, they’re really well-balanced, and they’re all cool and full of vistas and interesting stuff like that, but at the end of the day there’s something really strong to be said for moving through the persistent world and not knowing if I run through this occupied city, are there five guys in there that are going to try and kill me, or are there fifty guys in there that are going to try and kill me?

There’s something exciting and engaging about that, and as a result we’re really going to try and emphasize that side of the game a lot more, kind of bring in a little bit more of the Camelot feel, where in the open world RvR there are actual places that you can take and hold, things that have more meat to them, instead of just, “Congratulations! You’ve run through the city and touched three points, and now you control the city for five minutes.”

We want it to feel more alive, and more realistic. So it’s entirely positive stuff in terms of why we did it, it was an entirely internal decision, we got no pressure from above, from EA to try and make us do anything, they let us handle all of our development and beta stuff internally. We just felt that it was the right time to give the players a break and go alright, thank you, take a couple months off, and when we come back in December we’re going to let the guilds in, we’re going to put the cities in, we’re going to put the elves in, and it’s going to be a different game, and you’ll be able to see, “Oh, Ok, they really do listen to us,” it’s not just throwing things against the wall and never getting anything out of it.

The MMO Gamer:So in short, the rumors of Warhammer’s demise have been greatly exaggerated?

Josh Drescher: Oh yeah. There is absolutely no chance that the game is not going to be out and playable next year. There is a zero percent chance of a cancellation, of anything negative happening.

It really is just a matter of, as EA has looked at what we’re doing, we’ve kind of become something more than what they initially expected, which was a successful sub-WoW type of thing, and they looked at it and went, “We actually think this might be enormous, they keep going to shows and people keep lining up for hours to play…”

If you look at the EA show space here today, the only thing that’s got more room than us is Rock Band, and that’s only because they have a stage. If we had a stage we would be the biggest thing at the show.

The MMO Gamer: You mentioned that, among other things, the elves are going to be added in to the game during your beta hiatus. Could you discuss some of the changes they’re bringing along with them, in terms of their unique classes and areas?

Josh Drescher: Unfortunately, we won’t be unveiling most of that until closer to the beta relaunch. Obviously, we’ve announced some of the Elf classes already, so it’s a safe bet that you’ll be seeing some of those at the very least

The MMO Gamer: You also said that you were moving to focus more on world PvP rather than instanced scenario-style PvP. I have been told in the past that you planned to have over 40 different scenarios spread across the world at launch. Is that still the case?

Josh Drescher: Potentially. It’s one of the things we’re evaluating now. Scenarios were a weird case where many players actually told us that—at times—it felt like there were too many options, and that it was hard to know where to go and when to see the best action. We’re certainly not averse to the idea of contracting some elements of the game if it means channeling players into the best, most engaging areas.

The MMO Gamer: Expand a bit if you could on your plans for world PvP. City combat, in particular, sounds interesting. What sort of rewards could a player expect for capturing an enemy city?

Josh Drescher: Loot, obviously. The absolute best stuff if the game will be earned through city capture.

In addition, there are a large chunk of quests, boss encounters, etc. that are only found inside of a captured capital city and that all come with the expected rewards for events of that scale.

Beyond that, we have a number of tricks up our sleeves that we’ll be discussing in the coming months, but not just yet.

The MMO Gamer: I’d like to go back to something you said earlier, about Warhammer being a battle between two armies. From a design point of view, how do you take Warhammer, the table-top game, and condense that down into an MMO, which is traditionally about small groups of players?

Josh Drescher: Part of it is we’re not actually attempting to remake the table-top game. Warhammer as a property—though, the thing most people think of when they think of Warhammer is, obviously, the table-top fantasy battle game—there are the books, there are role-playing games, there are PC games of all sorts, comics, graphic novels, all that stuff, and it all scales up and down the spectrum.

When you read the novels, they’re generally about single characters. When you play the RTSs, those are closer to the table-top experience. There are actually versions of the table-top game that are small-group skirmish oriented.

So, part of it is we’re just not trying to make the table-top game. We’re trying to make that world, and place people in that world, and have it be immersive and compelling and interesting. But then also in terms of how you make it a large army style thing, one of the great things about MMOs is there’s just sort of an organic creation of a sense of belonging, purpose, and faction, that just happens without a lot of effort on your part as a developer.

We saw this with Dark Age of Camelot, where really we didn’t do a whole lot to build up the mystique or mythos behind Midgard, or Hibernia, or Albion, it was enough that people just recognized they were on a team, and hatred just sort of bubbled out of them organically. So we’re just relying on the naturally spiteful nature of humanity to drive people into aggression, and combat, and constant fighting and war.

Again, Camelot was all about large-scale battles on the battlefield, so you put a place in the world for the small controlled groups, your PvE content, your public quests, and some of the scenarios, and then you open it up for the inevitable exponential growth into massive conflict. And that’s what we’re doing.

The MMO Gamer: Getting into that question a little further… While table-top games and MMOs generally don’t tend to mix—as the creators of DDO found out the hard way—are you making any attempt to preserve some of the rule sets from the table-top game to appease some of the more hardcore Games Workshop fans?

Josh Drescher: The tough and honest question is you should never design for the hardcore player. You should design in a way that those people will still enjoy it, still feel that they’re being respected, but we’re never going to release a game that is aimed at the one-percenter, the person who really, really, really only ever wants to experience this tiny little core of the IP.

At the end of the day, you’re going to see tons of nods throughout the game that are intended to indicate that this really is part of the lineage, the lifespan of Warhammer as a hobby experience, but it’s not going to be a 1:1, you know, “Here are your tons of D6 dice, go roll them because Rick Priestly doesn’t like counting higher than 6,” and all the reasons that the table-top game is the way it is, going back through 25 years of crazy British people out at Games Workshop—oh the stories that I can’t tell!

We feel confident that they will be pleased with a lot of the things that we’re doing, that they’ll feel it’s a respectful handling of the thing that they love. We’ve never really had a negative experience at any of the Games Day shows that we’ve gone to, and those are basically wall-to-wall hardcore Warhammer people, and those are the guys that line up for the longest amount of time, are more focused on playing multiple times in a day than anybody else we’ve seen at any show, so we’re pretty confident that they’ll be happy.

The MMO Gamer: Alright then, could you share a few insights on what the design process of WAR is like?

Josh Drescher: For a project this size, there are a lot of folks involved in the “design process” at various points. From the top, we all work from Mark Jacob’s overall design and vision for the game, its features, style, etc. Senior designers take those designs and break them up into component systems, flesh out certain portions and write technical documentation.

The MMO Gamer: What would you personally classify as the game’s most innovative feature?

Josh Drescher: The RvR campaign.

Having something that’s in the main game world, and is critical to the success and performance of each faction that can be attacked, overrun, and destroyed is something that just hasn’t been seen in mainstream MMOs up to this point.

Having a full-scale war, with an ongoing ebb and flow and a legitimate “front line” that is impacted by player’ performance in RvR combat is a huge leap forward as well.

The MMO Gamer: Conversely, what was the most frustrating design or technical problem you’ve ever had working on the game?

Josh Drescher: Because the Warhammer IP is so huge, you wind up with the problem of “too much of a good thing.” It simply wouldn’t have been reasonable to try and put everything from the IP in right away, so tough choices had to be made early on when it came to what we would include at launch and what would have to wait for expansions.

That impacted everything from the career system, to the races, to the geography, and narrative progression.

The MMO Gamer: I’d like to take a moment to compliment the writing staff that you have. They’ve made good use of the material… When you talk to an NPC, an orc sounds like an orc, a dwarf sounds like a dwarf, and a human sounds like a LARPer.

But—and, any time I say something like that I have to put a “but” on the end of it—it wasn’t what they were saying that was bothering me, but the content of it. In particular, the quests they were offering. I played through four of the newbie areas prior to our interview, and every single one of them started you off with either a FedEx or a “go kill rats” quest.

Do you think that’s getting new players off on the right foot?

Josh Drescher: We’ve actually tried different things over the years, in multiple games and in multiple ways, to try and figure out what is exactly the right answer for introducing new players to the experience.

The problem that you run into is there’s something that is right for a brand new player, and then there’s something that would be ideal for the seasoned MMO veteran, who doesn’t need to be taught how to use the mouse to interact with the world, who doesn’t need to be taught how to interact with an NPC, or what’s killable vs. not killable, or how to judge the relative strength of a mob that they’re facing…

And, short of expecting the new player to basically sit through a two hour lecture on how to play the game, or to read through a five hundred page manual that’s introducing you to the MMO experience, you do sometimes with that early content have to err on the side of clarity for new players.

As a result, every now and then you are going to get a situation where the seasoned veteran who really wants to dive directly into like a boss-level raid experience—log in, and there’s a five hundred foot dragon I have to fight, and I need to make sure that I’m using my seven hundred available starting abilities, and the twelve armor sets that I start with—and if you attempted to give that to a brand new player they would be overwhelmed by the experience and it would be infinitely more negative for them than something that’s a little bit more gentle but potentially oversimplified for the seasoned veteran.

It’s one of the reasons that—to be honest—you can log in to the game and just decide, “Screw it, I’m running directly to the PvP area.” And, you might not do well in your underpants—

The MMO Gamer: That was actually going to be my next question, so we can segue into that in a moment… but first:

You said in that the quests I took issue with primarily exist to familiarize new players to the genre.

Just this past week, there was a statistic making the rounds on the internet stating that there are more WoW players than there are farmers in the United States. Though, as the joke goes, the two are not mutually exclusive.

Do you really think there are that many people left on Earth who don’t know how to kill ten rats? And, if there are, that they couldn’t be sated by an optional tutorial?

Josh Drescher: There’s a Scrabble game in 1/3 of all American homes and yet new copies of it still ship with instructions.

Anyone who simply assumes that players will just “get” the rules and mechanics of a game simply because a large number of people have already played similar games is setting themselves up for failure.

The new player experience is absolutely critical to a title’s success and a core element of that experience is making sure new players understand how to interact with and in the game world.

Every, single sensible and successful game - console, PC, board or otherwise - has a mechanism through which new players can quickly and easily figure out how the game works. It’s just common sense.

The MMO Gamer: The primary reason I’m so hard up on the starter quests-aside from having killed a few too many rats in my time-is that as a writer, I’m very big on “the hook.” I believe that the first few moments of a story are just as important to get right in a good book as they are in a good MMO.

So, tell us a little bit about WAR’s hook. From the time someone hits Create Character and enters the world, what are they going to experience?

Josh Drescher: One of the core goals we had for our starter areas was to develop an immediate sense of place and purpose. Even without taking a quest, you should be able to look around and intuitively understand what’s going on. “I am here. This is my turf. We’re clearly fighting THOSE people because we’re launching catapults at them/they’re bombarding us with cannons.”

It should be automatic. You should reflexively know you want to run down the hill and kill those dwarfs, then get up onto the battlements of their fortress (but HOW?) and help destroy it. From there, the narrative introduces you to the specifics of the conflict, its background, your purpose, etc.

The MMO Gamer: Getting back to my segue:

If someone doesn’t want to quest at all, I have been told in the past that from level one to cap you can do nothing but RvR. So if I buy the game six months after launch, roll my first character, and I find myself with a hankering to beat some people to death with a hammer, would I be able to do that straight from level one?

Josh Drescher: Yep.

We actually, during the beta, did something a little bit nefarious, we were concerned there would be just a total focus on the RvR, because we were expecting it to be old hardcore Camelot players would just rush the game and do nothing but RvR.

So we actually turned off XP advancement in RvR for most of the beta to force them out into the PvE stuff, but, we’re actually going to have that turned on for the actual live game, so that if you decide, “I’m never doing a quest, never doing a public quest, never talking to an NPC that isn’t sending me into battle in RvR or selling me the severed heads of my enemies,” you can do that.

Is that going to be the most effective and efficient way for you to level? Absolutely not. If you decide from level one that you’re going to run out into the field of battle, without any good armor on, without a weapon other than the starting weapon that you’ve got, without any additional abilities other than your starting abilities, you’re obviously going to be at a disadvantage compared to someone who goes out, experiences the world, plays through some of the other content, and then is also augmenting the experience with RvR.

Similarly, if you’re a PvE player and you never want to do RvR, are you going to have access to every single thing in the game? No. Because there are things you can only get from RvR. There are things you can only get from PvE. Your experience is going to be ideal if you experience both, but there’s nothing forcing you to do that.

The MMO Gamer: I had the opportunity to interview Adam Gershowitz, your combat and career team lead a few months ago at Games Day LA, and he mentioned in that interview that in WAR you have decided to go with the familiar “four archetype” system for classes: Tank, healer, ranged DPS, and melee DPS.

What was the primary reason behind that?

Josh Drescher: The primary reason behind that is if you look at the genetic lineage of fantasy gaming, and you look at it from basically every angle, it really does come down to there are a set quantity of things that need to occur in the game for it to be coherent and productive.

You can have a game where everyone is a Barbarian, but, you know, you look at the old Bartle test and you go, psychologically not everyone is a Barbarian. There really are a lot of people who like to stand back and go, “I’m throwing heals at you, it’s wonderful and lovely and light!”

And, there are a percentage of people that don’t want to be out there hacking and slashing, they actually like the idea of protection, and things like that. So it kind of has over thirty or so years of actual fantasy gaming experiences, the sort of wisdom of that process has told us: These are the four archetypal elemental roles that exist in these games.

You can obviously push them in different directions, there’s a difference between a big heavily armored guy that’s swinging a sword type of melee DPS, and a rogue who is going to be small, fast, agile, stab you from behind instead of standing in front of you punching you in the face.

So there’s a lot of movement within those archetypes. But, in terms of when you’re trying to make sense of the design, and you go, “Alright, where’s the starting point? What’s the ground floor? What are we building on?” We’re building off of those archetypes. So, that was the thought process there.

The MMO Gamer: On the question of PvP balance… In most games, every class has its own Achilles’ heel: mage kills warrior, priest kills mage, warrior kills priest, and so on.

Is that the type of balance you’re going for in WAR? Or will every class have an equal shot against every other class?

Josh Drescher: I think if you were trying to make it so that everybody had an equal shot against everyone then you’d really sort of be hamstringing the social aspect of the game. The group experience at that point sort of deteriorates into, “Why don’t we all just roll whatever is the thing that due to some math glitch, this is the thing that does one point more damage than everything else, so let’s all be that, and we’re guaranteed success.”

That’s not a fun thing.

It’s interesting when you look at the feedback you get from players, they go, “I always get killed by Blah! Blah is overpowered!” Well, no, actually, it’s exactly right, because if you look at poor Blah, he’s explaining that such-and-such is killing him all of the time.

It really needs to be the sort of experience where a group of players who understand the design, who understand the world, who know how to play their characters, who understand the strategic strengths and weaknesses of each career, are going to be able to work together and be substantially more effective than a group of people who just want to be 100% effective against everything all of the time and then cry if they’re not.

So yes, it’s not quite the paper-rock-scissors thing that gets so much derision in certain areas at time, but it absolutely is a designed deficiency, where you go, we’re not going to give someone who can do a ton of damage heavy armor also. We’re not going to give someone who can attack you at range a shield, that type of thing.

The MMO Gamer: Let’s talk about possible special rule set servers for a moment.

Back in DAoC you had what was colloquially known as the “Care Bear” server-I believe the official name for it was Gaheris-where everyone had suddenly learned to get along with each other and play nice, with no RvR.

Are you considering implementing anything similar in WAR, to appeal to the pure PvE demographic?

Josh Drescher: Obviously, we want to make the game accessible to as many people as possible, so those sorts of things are certainly on the table, but nothing’s been finally decided yet, much less announced.

The MMO Gamer: Going in the opposite direction… While playing the demo I got to experience first hand your very amusing anti-griefing mechanic, whereby higher level players who wander into lower level world PvP areas are transformed into chickens if they don’t turn around within an allotted amount of time.

Is that going to be the case on all servers? Or are you considering setting certain ones aside for the gankers of the world to unite on?

Josh Drescher: That’s one of many mechanics in the game at the moment that will be evaluated closely during the guild beta. We all love it because it takes an… um… affectionate jab at a certain kind of player, but we’re absolutely going to be looking carefully at what happens with it and many other systems when the game is fully populated.

The MMO Gamer: As one of the senior designers on the title, are you satisfied with the decision to try and get the game a T rating from the ESRB? Do you personally think it might be better served by an M?

Josh Drescher: I personally think that it’s not better served by an M.

One of the things you get into when you make the decision to go M, you find that starts to drive you in a really sort of awkward direction.

The best example I can give for this is why everyone was worried about The Simpsons Movie. One of the things that kind of makes that experience The Simpsons experience interesting and compelling and fun is the sense that they’re getting away with something and that you as a participant, as a viewer, as a consumer of that media are part of an inside gag, they’re getting things in under the wire that they probably shouldn’t be, and that becomes funnier even though it’s not profane.

If you take any sort of gag from a show like that and you sprinkle in profanity, you actually lose a significant amount of the compelling nature of the content. And so there’s nothing in the game that—people don’t squirt flowers instead of blood, people don’t not die because dying would be bad, it’s just a matter of, the women aren’t topless, there isn’t a torrent of blood rocketing from a guy’s jugular vein, and I don’t think there’s a need for that.

I don’t think that it’s necessarily more compelling than something which actually requires a little bit of creative effort. And, also, once you’re in the M rating you actually have to make that worthwhile for the trade-offs that you’re getting, so you actually find yourself littering the entire product with Evil Dead torrents of blood shooting out of the ground, and it’s F this and S that and etc.

There’s just no need for it.

So, the T for Teen rating we’ve had plenty of wiggle-room, I’m sure there are plenty of places where we’ll have to make tiny changes, but, at the end of the day I think you get a stronger product by trying to work towards that sort of marker than just going “There are no holds barred, anything goes, make it a porno game!”

We’re not making a porno game.

The MMO Gamer: That’s comforting.

Now, I’d like for us to delve into a bit of rumor and innuendo, if we may.

There has been a good deal of discussion on this subject on the internet, and I’d like to hear what your thoughts on it are, to give you an opportunity to speak to your critics directly:

How would you respond to those people who have already dismissed the game as “Nothing but a WoW clone”?

Josh Drescher: There are going to be a percentage of people that you can never reach no matter what the product is.

There are, I’m sure, people who looked at WoW when it came out and said, “How dare they rip off the Warhammer IP.” And I don’t think there’s anything that Blizzard could possibly have done no matter how great their product is—and it is a great product—that could win over that percentage of people.

You have to learn to take that type of criticism in stride and go, you know, there are a percentage of people that all they ever do is say negative stuff on fansites dedicated our game. And I have to wonder, what exactly compels you, after you’ve already decided that you have no interest in something, to constantly focus your attention on it?

If I decide that I don’t want to watch a TV show, if I decide that I hate the new sitcom that everyone loves, I’m not going to then constantly force myself into discussions of how little I enjoy that show, I just let it go.

So, my expectation is actually the percentage of people who go “That’s it, it’s just a WoW clone,” we’re probably going to get their subscription money anyway. They can’t possibly imagine that part of their life going away, they can’t let it go. So, we’ll get their money, and it’ll be like angry, spiteful money, but it’s all the same in the bank.

The MMO Gamer: Another subject there’s been a lot of talk about—I’m sure you’ve read a lot of it yourself—the EA deal.

Set the record straight for us: Has your day-to-day routine changed at all since the EA purchase? Have they altered production?

Josh Drescher: They’ve done nothing to alter anything about the make-up of the studio, how we do our development, or anything of the sort, other than to basically say, “Here are resources that are available to you to use as you see fit.”

So, for example, we can now draw on other studios for tech and wisdom. We can send our guys out to EARS—Redwood Shores outside of San Francisco—and say, “Alright engineers, go learn from these guys who have been doing different things, things that you haven’t experienced, and bring that back.”

So it’s meant more money, more time, more people, and more resources. Obviously that has significantly impacted production, but in a positive way.

It was absolutely not something like where they pulled the mothership up over the building, ripped the roof off, and went, “One out of ten of you must now be killed at Bing Gordon’s feet!”

Bing Gordon’s actually a really nice guy, he shows up at the studio every now and then, plays the game, hangs out with some of the devs, gives us his feedback, which is always an interesting combination of wisdom and creative genius stuff where you don’t even know where it comes from. So we certainly integrate that kind of feedback, but we definitely haven’t run afoul of the mythical evil EA machine. I’m not entirely sure it’s out there.

The MMO Gamer: So there haven’t been any ritual human sacrifices…

Josh Drescher: No more than there were before.

The MMO Gamer: Worshipping the Old Gods to appease EA shareholders, whippings to improve efficiency?

Josh Drescher: Again, nothing more than we did previously. As an independent developer we— [a band strikes up a rousing martial tune in the foyer]

I think a high school marching band just showed up downstairs…

The MMO Gamer: We’ll just leave it at no, then.

And that’s a damn shame, because that would make for a hell of a story.

Josh Drescher: [Sympathetically] Yeah.

The MMO Gamer: Thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us, and we hope we can do it again some time.

Josh Drescher: My pleasure.

The MMO Gamer will have additional coverage of Warhammer Online in the days and weeks ahead. In the meanwhile, you can pay a visit to the game’s official website: http://www.warhammeronline.com