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 5 of 5

Adam Gershowitz, the "careers lead" on the game, addressed this. "One of the things we're doing is that you get rewards for winning, but the longer a zone is under the control of the winning side we start doing little things to bring the 'losers' up to par. Things like slowly expanding the number of guards that they have, slowly taking the winning side's advantage away. We're not trying to punish you for being successful; we're trying to make sure you get the feeling that the competition is always lively and interesting, and there are things we'll do to try and encourage population and class balance."

Barnett offered up more on the class balance. "People always say, 'What if everyone decides to play one side?' In every trial we've done, it's balanced out. It's frightening. It's almost as though we have made all of the sides compelling and interesting and we have made the combat and RvR so good and so balanced that people have said it doesn't really matter ... I'll just go slaughter people, kill a king, get a new hat, get a pig hat! Ride around on my wolf! [everyone howls] Which is awesome! Then we send all of these reams of data to Adam and say it's not balanced, and he rebalances it."

That Big Picture

Finally, Jeff Hickman ended the call. "Since we are focusing on certain areas, it is very rare that anyone sees the entirety of our game. People don't understand the real depth of what we're doing. There are so many layers of things to do, places to see, rewards, advancement... People often ask us, 'Well, you level from 1 to 40 and then what?' And I just laugh. Our game is not about leveling from 1 to 40. It's about leveling up your guild, going through the campaign, getting one of 20-plus armor sets ... it's a total hobby experience."

"It's very difficult to try to explain because we talk about things like guilds, and people say, 'Yeah we have guilds,' and I say no, no you don't understand, you can level up your guild, assign standard bearers, claim keeps, and we have many other special things we haven't even talked about, yet. There is just so much depth, I wish everybody could see all of the great stuff that we're doing."

Well, Mr. Hickman, we'll all get a chance to see it soon enough -- in fact, in the fall of 2008.