On Call With Warhammer Online
The devs from EA Mythic wax enthusiastic about their new project via conference call.
5/2/2008 3:05 PM | 0 Comments | Page 4 of 5
William Abner
Status: Most likely playing a sports game of some sort
In this case, it was Barnett who made the specific point. "There is an obsession with designers to build (their games) for the top 10 percent because they are very loud and they are very successful ... and that actually leads you to doom and destruction. When you build, say, a golf course, you could build a course so only Tiger Woods can play on it, but that would be madness. Instead, you build a good golf course and if Tiger Woods decides to play on it ... he's going to score huge, but everyone else is going to have a damn good game. It's the same sort of logic. We build our endgame so that it's fun and compelling and attractive ... and a great hobby. If you're in the 10 percent ... one of those people who are just incredibly clever and quick-thinking and obsessive and brilliant, then you are probably going to excel at it, but that's OK because everyone will treat it as a jolly good time."
The Public Quests
If you have followed the development of
Warhammer Online you know all about the Public Quest system. Basically, it's a way for people in the same area to band together to complete multi-tiered objectives, earn cool loot, and help the war effort.
A few more tidbits were given during the call. There are over 300 of these quests in the game -- so many that even the producers haven't seen them all and find new ones from time to time. They are the keys to telling the story of each specific zone and they run the gamut from simply fighting the undead to more political missions all the way to the standard "save the princess" missions -- but if you're on the side of Chaos, you get to do the kidnapping.
Jeff Hickman described an example quest to us all. "I went into a Public Quest that I hadn't seen yet. We were playing in Tier 3 Empire vs. Chaos and I was playing a Witch Hunter. I came upon a quest, and it was this Chaos ruins, and there were a bunch of Chaos Zealots there gathering up these stones of power. So the people in the Public Quest area, friends and people who I didn't even know, we had to first kill all of the Zealots that were there and then we had to pick up all of the stones; after we did that, the quest stepped into the next phase.
"We got rewards for doing the first phase, and then in the next phase these Chaos Sorcerers emerge and start summoning all these demons, so you have to kill them as fast as you can before they summon too many of them. At the same time this is happening, this Chaos Magus on a Chaos Disc of Tzeentch all of a sudden comes flying over your head and starts to hover above you. After you kill all of the Sorcerers, the Magus starts summoning all of these Flamers of Tzeentch. After you kill them, he comes down for the final battle. I did the quest four of five times. Each public quest is something like this."
Game Balance
In a realm-vs.-realm game, balance is always a potential issue. If one side continues to dominate the other, it can lead to high levels of frustration for the losing faction. If the orcs are continually being beaten down by the dwarfs, that has the potential to throw the entire balance off-kilter.
