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Warhammer: Age of Reckoning Q&A Feature
Derek dela Fuente
15/05/2006
After a number of failed attempts a Warhammer MMO is finally on the cards thanks to Mythic Entertainment. TVG spoke exclusively to the studio's director of marketing, eager to share their vision of the property...
When you hear the name Mythic Entertainment you instantly think Dark Age of Camelot, a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing-Game conceived and developed internally which has been highly acclaimed. Mythic have been around for nearly 10 years and are respected for being innovative and focused towards the online genre. Having acquired the Warhammer license to create another online experience, Age of Reckoning, many are looking towards this game to foster new ideas and extend the online experience.
TVG spoke with Steve Perkins, Director of Marketing, who was eager to spread the word about this title and answer our many questions.
The Warhammer online experience appears to have had a stuttering start, with Games Workshop originally collaborating on a project with Climax, which was ultimately cancelled in . Age of Reckoning is a completely new game, so can you describe the events leading up to you taking on the task of bringing the Warhammer MMO to life?
Yes, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (WAR) is a completely new game from Mythic and has nothing to do with the previous game. I can't actually speak on behalf of Climax and Games Workshop about their partnership but I do know that for one reason or another Games Workshop decided to cease work on the project with Climax. Prior to that decision, Games Workshop touched base several times with Mark Jacobs, CEO of Mythic, to discuss the infrastructure - billing, customer service, etc. - needed to support their MMO. Mark has been friendly with Games Workshop for many years dating back to his days developing MUDs. He had also known Paul Barnett, now Design Manager for WAR, for a number of years. Paul was consulting with Games Workshop on their MMO. When the Climax game was cancelled, Games Workshop called Mark and asked if Mythic would like to give the game a shot.
"We were offered the work that Climax had produced and immediately said no to that offer."
Our CEO had been a great fan of Games Workshop for a long time and the Warhammer world was a perfect one for an MMO. Games Workshop loved what we had done and the way we worked, especially Dark Age of Camelot. We and the same time also believed that the Warhammer property was perfect for us and for our Realms Vs Realms gameplay. From there we said, 'well what kind of game do we want to create'? We were offered the work that Climax had produced and immediately said no to that offer. We had our own technologies, resources, ways of doing things, and of course our own ideas for what WAR should be.
In our mind it was about how do you take these great armies; how do you place a player into these armies and get them to clash with other armies on the battlefield? We in effect knew exactly what we wanted to create and went about the task happy in the knowledge they understood our philosophies!
Regarding aiming the game at the hardcore fan, the game by its very nature, being a MMO game, is relatively hardcore. MMOs require a commitment to the amount of time and of money, having said that you look at a game like World of Warcraft, its streamlined play and they have made it accessible to a larger group of gamers, beyond a small hardcore group of MMO fans. They could have enticed many new gamers through the WarCraft strategy gaming ideas, through single player RPG or even through the mere hype of such a big title, however the majority are still however hardcore gamers. When we look at our game, we want MMO fans to really get into and enjoy it. The same people who have played Dark Age of Camelot, WOW, and Everquest. We also want to make it accessible enough for people who may never have played an MMO before and who maybe unfamiliar with PVP combat or knowing even how to get into a Guild. We want to make it an easy transition, and introduce them to not just doing mission and quests but grouping and fighting other people. Things that they may find intimating in other MMOs we wish to present it in such a manner that will find enjoyable and will want to take part and be open to the whole, Warhammer, experience.
Continuing on from the last question how close will you be working with Games Workshop, and how does this interaction work and do they sanction and clear all the in game content and do you have much of a free role?
It's a license deal but we pretty much have the freedom to go and do what we want, however, everything has to be approved by Games Workshop but a lot of the ideas we work on are collaborative ones. Mark initially met up with Games Workshop where they locked themselves in a room and hammered out a lot of ideas as to the overall design of the game. Although we have a massive design folder and we are given lots of freedom, needless to say Games Workshop are very concerned that the Warhammer MMO is reflective and is true to the Warhammer world. The good news is that our two companies have really clicked and the things we have presented them they are very happy with for they can see we really understand the world.
Warhammer offers some very enticing features. Please could you expand on the Realm vs. Realm gameplay feature that originated in Dark Age of Camelot and integrates PvP and PvE combat?
If you look at a lot of games out there you will see that PvPs initially started off, in games like Ultima, where people were just hacking/killing and it really turned a lot of people off and because of that you started to see a lot of games focusing on PvE encounters and so they limited PvP only to certain servers. When Dark Age of Camelot came along it was very much the fact that, hey, PvP can be fun if you do it right and what we did was create an area called the Frontiers and that was all PvP. So when you are in your homeland and you are going off doing your PvE missions, you're safe, you're protected, but if you did want to go off and fight other guys, participate in relic raids, you were able to do that by going into separate zone as opposed to going on a separate server, so you can easily have your own PvP/PvE experience. What happened was people unfamiliar with the PvE experience found there wasn't an easy accessible way to find out what it was all about because they were on two separate maps.
So what we are aiming to do with our game is to basically integrate PvP and PvE onto the same map. For example, there is a river that pretty much bisects the area and you can stand on one side of the river and you are in your PvE world and essentially the other armies cant hurt you; your safe and can fight monsters and go on your quests and if you are an Orc you don't have to worry about some Dwarf coming up and killing you. However, if you look across the river you can see Orcs and Dwarfs battling each other because that is a PvP zone. Another map is made up of ravines and plateaus. PvP combat takes place in the ravines and the PvE missions all take place on top of the plateaus which is cool for players who have not experienced PvP before. They can sit and view what is going on; see what it is like, become familiar with it all and realise it is not that intimidating.
This integration of PvP and PvE means we can do exciting thing with quests. Quests are internally categorized by colours: a green quest is essentially a PvE mission only, which means you don't have to worry about being attacked by another player, i.e. one of our scouts has a letter in the forest that has the battle plans so go find that scout in the forest; a yellow quest is PvE, a quest against monsters/NPCs that sends you into a PvP area, so whilst you are on this mission and in this area you must watch out for attacks; the Red, PvP quest, is one where if you're an Orc and the Orc war boss could say, hey the Dwarfs are attacking us, go out and kill 10 Dwarf players, which send you into a full PVP experience. This colour coding ensures good integration in all aspects of gameplay.
"...it is better than looking at the backside of your character constantly!"
What would you say sets Warhammer Online apart from many other games of this ilk?
There are two things; one is our design philosophy which is this idea that war is everywhere. Yes in other games there is a good and bad side but you never know that the two are in conflict. You are in your city, everything is peaceful, you are going on missions, collecting what is required and when you move into the wildness, you are fighting monsters and maybe seeing something that is supposed to be your enemy running around, no big deal, as you cant do anything to each other and no real reason to fight each other either. In our game, the idea that war is everywhere, it permeates everything you do! So when you are in your town you are safe from attacking players but you get a sense of war is going on all around you. The NPC monsters are not rats or lizards but a real enemy, so if you are an Orc the Dwarves are a real enemy; surrounding the village, breaking in once in a while, so even if you are killing NPC monsters, they are your enemy, which permeates everywhere and culminates in what we call our Realm Vs Realm gameplay!
Realm Vs Realm as it stood in Dark Age of Camelot was group based, goal orientated, PvP combat. We are now taking it one step further in WAR by using the Realm Vs Realm idea by not only applying PvP but also applying to PvE; its missions against enemy players! What it is doing is innovating things such as different types of quests, different levels of quests, like the colour coding I mentioned previously. Its innovating things like the types of quests that are available for the players and the two that come to mind are the public quest and conflict quest.
You walk into what we are calling the Hub, where you get lots of missions; go, come back get more missions, and as soon as you walk in something flashes on your screen which basically says this is your public quests, so as an Orc there is a Challeon working for our side and he is stomping Dwarfs and will only continue to work for us and continue to stomp Dwarfs, if we continue to feed him beer. So what you need to do as an army is to take him 500 pints of beer. As a player you could never take him 500 pints of beer but as an army everyone can start feeding him this amount and as long as he is being fed beer he is stomping on Dwarfs. So if you took him 1 or 20 beers you would get XP points for that public quest being completed. The basic idea is that the entire army is at war and you are a part of that army to reinforce the war effort and everything you do helps your realm and army!
The conflict quest is a type of quest that pits two armies against each other in a competitive PvE quest. Orcs and Dwarfs have been battling for control of a bridge. When you arrive the battle is over but there are wounded Dwarfs all over the place. If you are a Dwarf, you need to take them ale to revive them and get them off the battlefield. If you are an Orc you need to kill them and bring back their beards. It is essentially a race to see who can complete their quest first.
How important is the story to the game; with the focus very much on fighting and war will this not be more of a side issue?
No I don't think so. From a story point you need something to drive players through, they need to know what is going on, and things need to be happening in the world, so you obviously need to have a back-story which can be viewed on our website which sets up the Age of Reckoning.
Basically it tells how everything came to be, but once you are there, there are individual stories about each of the battles. So an example being the Orcs have been rallied by the really powerful tribe leaders and they have taken a Dwarf city and are now holding it and want to continue further. The Dwarfs from their perspective have got to get their city back, who are shamed by the loss of it, and so the stories provide a motivation for the characters for what they are doing within the game. Each of the different zones also has it own individual stories about it. So every zone you go to has a story happening within it and is location specific and is also specific to the war efforts going on around you. There are 33 zones in the game, so as a player you will get the chance to visit them all and you will learn the larger story of what is happening in the world and also in the game!
"We purposely removed our game from the current Warhammer timeline"
Can you give our readers some detail of the character advancement in the game with claims that it will differ from the standard MMOG offering?
Yes we are excited about doing something that no other MMO has done before with full facial animation, and this is looking great because from a character perspective with most MMOs they have a one passive look on their face. Now you are able to look happy, sad, or angry and you can set that, you can walk up to a player/NPC and you can see exactly how that person feels, which is another feedback mechanism that you can use from the game. Our user interface lets you see the various moods and how it will react to things set in the game world, it is better than looking at the backside of your character constantly!
Yes characters evolve throughout the game and you will see them change. The Dwarfs for instance as they get older and more powerful their beads grow longer, thicker and fuller; Orcs get taller more muscular and so when you hop into the game and see a 5 foot Orc things don't seem too bad, but suddenly you see this huge 8 foot Orc that is a different matter. So it's not all about getting more impressive armour and weapons but you are getting more physically impressive in stature. What it also means is that from a PVP standpoint when you are running and when you see an Orc that is 8 foot tall and running towards you, you must quickly decide if you're powerful enough to take this guy on. It's great for our art team who believe that everything should be viewable from about 20 feet away. We want to ensure that players look different from this distance so you can gauge exactly how they feel from the facial animation; to know how powerful they are and can even understand how to kill them via the trophies of their conquests with skulls spiked on their armour, medallions, all things that can make a character look unique and show the kind of experiences they have come through.
Also could you tell us what are the basic differences for the Humans, High Elves, Dwarfs, Dark Elves, Goblins, and Chaos, and how difficult will it be for Mythic to balance the races and can we expect the usual attributes?
Each of the races is very different. The Humans are proud but also very worried about the world, as they are constantly besieged by enemies and know that danger lurks around the corner whether it is monsters or former allies. The empire has certainly seen better days, corruption is rife and there is paranoia that makes them a little on edge. The Dwarfs are dirty and grimy and they love beer and that is what there motivation is. It's a great opportunity for players to get behind these characteristics of the cast! The Orcs, well, the team likes to describe them as sort of soccer hooligans, caught up in the moment and all they want to do is fight. They know nothing about the value of gold but they do know that taking gold will make the Dwarfs angry and if they can't fight a Dwarf or Elf then they could always fight themselves! Chaos, well they are very much like their name suggests unpredictable, spreading chaos through evil deeds.
The Dark Elves are not like those in D&D or other fantasy properties and they look physically like High Elves but they are dark in demeanor; they are nasty and evil and believe they are above everyone else and are corrupt. They have all the money in the world and are great magicians and because of that everyone else is below them and should be subservient to the Dark Elves.
Because each of these races is so different, the classes will be different for each of them as will the environments. The races are very influential on the kind of missions you go on and the class you can be.
How hard is to ensure the game has real intensity throughout the course of the adventure?
In the world of Warhammer there are no happy ending but our game needs to have an end game. What happens when you reach level 50 or 60, something needs to happen, there needs to be some kind of activity. In WoW there wasn't an activity, you got to a certain level and you said now what do I do? Well they added the Battlegrounds but you are in huge queues waiting all the time. For us it is important to have an end game and in Dark Age of Camelot the end game was fighting in the frontiers; the relic raids. The end game to Warhammer will be the city sieges, where each of the races has a capital city and the ultimate goal is to 'ransack' your enemy's city. In order to do so, you need to go in and control enemy zones and capture the land leading up to that capital city.
You are creating a whole new period and setting from the current Games Workshop material, has this been an easy task?
We purposely removed our game from the current Warhammer timeline and what that allows us to do is pull from 25 years of material, of characters, of battles and things we wanted in our game - sort of greatest hits of the Warhammer world! All this and much more we can bring together in our time line. What it also offers is the fact we are not beholden to a time line and there are fanatical groups who probably know just as much, if not more about the property than people making the game.
So would you see Warhammer: Age of Reckoning being compared to WoW as the ultimate accolade?
WoW raised the bar and it has brought a lot of new people to the genre and to online gaming. We'd like to see out game as the experience that people who are done with WoW would graduate to!
So in summing up, what would you say is Warhammer: Age of Reconing's biggest factor?
It's the fact that War is everywhere because of the Realm Vs Realm gameplay and the fantasy setting unlike any other out there.
TVG would like to thank Steve Perkins for answering our questions. Warhammer: Age of Reckoning is scheduled for release during Q2 2007, so keep an eye out for further coverage...
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