Comic-Con: Warhammer Online Q&A

With Comic-Con over, our articles are trickling in from our writers. First up is an interview about Warhammer Online with Lance Robertson, Producer with EA Mythic. Over the few weeks we’ll see more articles from that event as well as SOE’s Block Party which was held at their headquarters. Jump to read the interview.

I was fortunate enough to be able to have a Q & A session with Lance Robertson, Producer with EA Mythic, at this year’s Comic Con.

The MMO Gamer: How customizable are the characters?

Lance Robertson: We are going to have a lot of changeable faces, for certain races like the Greenskins. There is really going to be a lot of variety.

What we really want to concentrate on though for the customization of your character in general is more your silhouette so to speak. I’ve got spikes on my shoulders or I have trophies hanging off of my body that shows pretty much how much of a badass I am. Our artists call it the 20 Foot Rule. We really want to make it so that the guy from 20 feet away is obviously different from the other guy in terms of their race, career, and how high a rank they are.

The MMO Gamer: How many different races are there going to be?

Lance Robertson: There are six races.

The MMO Gamer: Which are?

Lance Robertson: There are two sides to the conflict. Um, there’s Order and there’s Destruction. The Order races are the High Elves, the Dwarves, and the Empire who are humans. On the Destruction side, we have the Greenskins, the Dark Elves, and Chaos.

The MMO Gamer: What kinds of methods of travel will there be in the game, if any?

Lance Robertson: There will be methods of travel. There will be mounts, but we’re not really talking about how we are going to get people around just yet.

The MMO Gamer: How do PvE missions assist or hinder the RvR battle that is going on?

Lance Robertson: Well, there are a lot of ways to get bonuses for your realm help with the ongoing effort. The entire storyline of the game is bound up in the war itself. So every PvE thing ties into that. One thing we learned from Dark Age of Camelot was that we had a great PvE game and a great RvR game but they weren’t as co-mingled as we wanted. What we’ve done here is that everything you are doing supports the war in some fashion. The story is carrying you from conflict to conflict all the way up to the grand campaign at the top, which is all about capturing zones and then cities.

The MMO Gamer: For players that don’t want to be in PvP combat, is there a way for them to toggle on/off their PvP status or a safe zone where they can go?

Lance Robertson: Each zone has a PvP enabled section to it. If you don’t want to go in there, then you’re safe. It’s voluntary. You can go into those areas to fight the enemy or not. That is your choice. The game supports PvE top to bottom or RvR top to bottom, so I could level all the way up just fighting enemies or level up just fighting monsters and doing quests.

The MMO Gamer: I was reading on the site that there is 25 years of Warhammer. Where does this game start in relation to the history Warhammer? Does it start in the middle, the beginning, or do you pick it up at the end?

Lance Robertson: We’re actually lucky in that regard because Games Workshop has basically set aside anything in the Warhammer fantasy universe that we want to pull from. It’s kind of a time out of time. The Age of Reckoning is a special time where everything is available to us. They have a timeline, but they are not so definitive that it pigeonholes anything in particular. All the cool names that all the Warhammer fans know and love will be available to us. And we can kill them.

The MMO Gamer: So you can kill the big guys?

Lance Robertson: Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That is one of the draws is you’re going in to their enemy cities so I can kill their king. You know, stuff like that.

The MMO Gamer: Speaking of going into the enemy cities, say laying siege to a city, how many players do you envision that taking?

Lance Robertson: It depends on the defenses.

The MMO Gamer: Say like a capital city.

Lance Robertson: Capital cities…erm…I’m not really going to talk about numbers specifically, but dozens, hundreds, scores, a lot of guys and it’ll be a great fight. It is the crowning moment of the game to sack somebody else’s city. I mean it’s all about kind of bragging right. I went and I took your land and your stuff. I ran through your city, kicked all your doors down, and lit all your buildings on fire. Then I went in there and killed your king. I stole something from him and took it back to my city. That’s what it’s all about.

The MMO Gamer: What else should we know about Warhammer?

Lance Robertson: Something you should probably hear about is our public quests. Not only are we doing a lot of innovations as far as PvP but we’ve got a number of things in there that are really cool. A couple of quests are things where you can wander into an area and there will be a dynamic story going on in stages. I can contribute to the overall effort of my side in that area. And this is not necessarily PvP you know, it’s slaying just monsters. It’s a quest I get just going into the area so I don’t go to an NPC and I get my little quest and I’ve got my blinders on and I’m only in my own little story. Everybody in the area is engaged in this. The point is that I’m gaining influence with the boss of the area.

There is like a chief NPC in most of these places where he’s telling me what to do and then I’ll go over to this other area where there is a giant wandering around. The story is that the squigs are bothering the chief and as I get into the area, a mission pops up on my screen saying that I must kill 30 squigs. The cool thing about it is that I’m not the only one doing this, but everyone in the area contributes. The number ticks up for everybody as they kill all kill squigs.

And then the story will progress to the next stage where it changes and I then want to get the giant drunk so he’ll help me fight the dwarves. Then it switches again and all he says is “Bring me beer! Bring me beer! Bring me beer!” So then you get him beer and get him drunk. Then he goes over and blows up this door where the dwarves are and so as the story changes, it changes for everybody.

It’s not an instance. You’re out in the world and it is happening for everyone. It is a great way for us to encourage community play by meeting people. You won’t have to be grouped with people. You can be solo, have a group, and you can play it however you want. It’s repeatable so the story will play through and you can do it again.

One of the things we’ve found in beta is that people are playing these things 2, 3, 4 times in a row. They’re like “This mission is cool! Let’s do it again.” The public are really good for us. These are playing out really nicely.

The MMO Gamer: Do the public quests play out the same way every time or is there a “Pick Door A to have this ending or pick Door B to have that ending”?

Lance Robertson: There is some of that. Generally, the ones we are showing right now are similar and they progress from stage to stage to stage and they have set goals for each one. Some of them will be changeable and some of them will drive out into RvR as well so the entire questing story and RvR is intermingled.

Like I said before, it’s voluntary so you’re not forced into one style of game play. What we want to do is encourage people to jump into RvR and so there will be quests that send you that way. You don’t have to take them; we just think that is the engaging way to play the game. That’s what the game is about. Where people get hooked long term is once they get into RvR.

We found with Camelot, those are the solid hard core people who really, really love the game. Building that in from the bottom to the top is really the way to go for us. It’s not like we bolted on the PvP afterwards and called it good. It’s been done from day one that way.

The MMO Gamer: For players, like myself, who are not huge on grouping, is it really necessary for you to group or can a solo player make his way all the up to the highest level attainable?

Lance Robertson: Solo players can level all the way up. Now in certain situations you’d probably want to group, but there’s no one holding a gun to your head saying you’ve got to or you’re completely incapable of progressing if you don’t group. I like to play games that way so I’m certainly making sure that that happens too.

But group play is going to be fun; we’re going to have a lot of great guild stuff, but we’re really not talking too much about that now. It’s going to be the next evolution in guild play in terms of the way guilds grow with you, the way you contribute to your guild, and the things the guild will give back to you. It’s a lot more than just a convenient chat channel with commands to make someone an officer. It’s a lot larger than that.

The other big innovation I can talk about is the Tome of Knowledge and this is the very basic version so far. What it is, it’s a book like This Is Your Life in the game. It is a giant encyclopedia or sticker book or collectible book of the game. As you go through it, things will unlock like the first time you see a squig, it unlocks and then you get experience for that. Then maybe you get some more information and after you’ve killed a whole bunch of squigs, you start to get other things like special abilities that go with that or special titles.

It is very much about the bragging rights of the things. I can hold up my Tome of Knowledge and say “Ooo, lookey what I did!” and, “I’m better than you.”

We’ll carry that forward into the guild system where we can, like say I’m an officer in my guild. I can say “Look at what we’ve done. This is the type of guild we are. Look at our Tome of Knowledge and you can see what type of guild we are. These are our accomplishments. This is why we’re great. Come join us.” So there are a lot of good things to be had with that.

The MMO Gamer: So the Tome can be seen by other players? Do you have to show it to them or can they inspect you and take a look at it?

Lance Robertson: You show it to them. You have to grant them the right to look at it.

The MMO Gamer: What about beta?

Lance Robertson: Well, we’re in beta now. Hundreds of thousands of players have signed up for beta so it’s enormous and the response was great. We’re really excited about that. All of this is playing out pretty much the way we anticipated and we’re on target for early next year.

The MMO Gamer: When does the next phase of beta open?

Lance Robertson: We are bringing people in slowly but surely in batches. The next big phase will be fallish when we let in tons and tons of people and it will be a little bit more open. Right now it is closed, so invite only. We haven’t quite gotten to the press version of that yet.

The MMO Gamer: Not at the stress test level yet?

Lance Robertson: No, no, there is some of that. What I meant was letting in the press and things. Right now, you know, we have this big list that we’re choosing from where we are strategically picking and adding people as we go, making sure we have all the right population in all the right areas for testing purposes. Like I said, we’re real happy with how that is going.

The MMO Gamer: With people being able to pick sides, do you see any the possibility of one side being a lot more powerful than the other side simply because all the players want to be on this side versus that side?

Lance Robertson: That’ll happen. That’ll certainly happen, but we are making the game such that they’re not automatically more powerful based on numbers. We’re doing a lot of the things in terms of the scenarios, which is another factor in our RvR system.

Scenarios are matched instanced bits of the world where you can jump into those and they contribute the most to the campaign game of capturing zones. And because they’re matched, they’re automatically balanced power wise. We populate as many scenarios as we need for any given zone for everybody to be able to fight nicely, but that also means that you just can’t zerg an entire zone to take it over so the scenarios will balance that out.

I would like to thank Lance Robertson for his time and great information about Warhammer Online.