style="color: rgb(204, 153, 51); font-size: 18pt; font-weight: bold;">WAR
Interview With Josh Drescher:

The Magic in Patch 1.1



style="color: rgb(204, 153, 51); font-size: 10pt; font-weight: bold;">With
Associate Producer Josh Drescher, Associate Producer Spyke Alexander
and Senior Designer Brian Wheeler





Patch days for Mythic
Entertainment's Warhammer Online are always exciting, as players wait
to experience the latest new additions to the game. Before Patch 1.1
hit the Live servers, Ten Ton Hammer sat down with a few of the game's
gurus to get an inside look at the changes.
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Two new classes, easy Public
Quests, Hyperlinking and even Chickens are all covered in our
interview with Josh Drescher, Spyke Alexander and Brian Wheeler.

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Ten Ton
Hammer:  Were the two new classes
chosen to be tanks for a certain reason? Were people
finding a lack of tanks that they wanted to play?

Josh
Drescher:  There are a number of
reasons why we chose to reintroduce those two
careers to the game. Foremost among those, we were happy with the
quality that
the careers and combat team were able to accomplish post launch. In
many ways
what you’re seeing now with the addition of these types of careers is
not unlike
a director’s cut of a movie. You go in after the fact, and maybe
you’ve
got some time to look back at some of the choices you made, at the
reasons you
cut something out for the sake of the initial product. Now that you
have a
little bit more time to think about it,
you can come up with some solutions that do in fact benefit the overall
product
by reintroducing them. That’s what happened with the Knight and the
Black Guard.

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Ten Ton
Hammer:  Take a quick guess. Which of the two classes is proving
more popular?

Josh
Drescher:  It's pretty even at
the moment. Taking a look at all of our careers across all the servers;
between
the most popular and least popular there’s just a few percentage points
difference.

I would
say if you’re going to choose one or the
other you should choose the Knight because he’s better. That style="font-style: italic;">is because
I play Order, but he also has a better hat. style="font-style: italic;">*random argument over Order and
Destruction in the background* Sorry – it’s a polarizing game.

Ten Ton
Hammer: How are the other careers
being affected by the Knight of the Blazing Sun and Black Guard? Can we
expect changes to the older classes?

Josh
Drescher:  Other than the
types of balancing we would have done regardless
of integrating new careers, no, there are no changes being made to any
career
in response to the Knight and the Black Guard. There style="font-style: italic;">are plenty of
changes being made, just keeping with the
standard
ebb and flow of maintaining a live MMO.

Every
other
career we put into the game we put in during
beta basically. I can say with relative confidence that this is the
smoothest
integration of a career pairing that we have experienced since
development on
the game began.

Ten
Ton Hammer: How have the new tanks
affected
Open RvR?

Josh
Drescher:  It certainly
made it really easy to find a tank in the tier
1 areas at the moment! Generally when we address career balance, we
always
try to
do it at a Realm level, not at a racial level or career specific level.
That is
why, when you see an addition of careers, you’ll always see it in
tandem.
One for Order and one for Destruction. This does, to a degree, fill a
strategic
hole that
had existed, where each of these careers had a parallel on the other
side. Black Guard plays
most closely to the Ironbreaker. Knight is fairly similar to the
Chosen,
in
terms of the role they play on the battlefield. In that regard it does
bulk out
the strategies that are available to each realm. But in terms of
overall
balance,
our hope is that it just gives people more options.

Ten
Ton
Hammer: Regarding the Public Quest changes.
In an earlier interview we had with Mythic, you said the best PvE gear
came from PQs. is that still the case?

Josh
Drescher:  Absolutely. We
have not simplified all of the Public Quests. We have gone through and
made sure that in each zone, there is
one easy PQ that’s basically been recalibrated to be tackled by one to
3 players
on
average.  As a result it’s obviously going to yield the lower
level Public Quest loot for that zone. The essential loot tables are
unaffected. So
if you
want the highest level loot that is available in that Public quest
zone, you’ll
still need to get together a more standard size PQ group, and tackle
the
tougher PQs in that area.

Our goal with the easy PQs was
just to
guarantee that
you never got into a situation where you enter a new zone, and there’s
no way
for you to accomplish any of the Public Quests. We wanted to make sure
that as
the game matures, and the population moves into different parts of the
game,
that we don’t leave behind a swath of unplayable content for everyone
else. It needs
to be fairly friendly for new players that come in, and the easy PQs
are one of
the first changes that we are making to address that as the game
matures.

Ten Ton
Hammer: If there are
going to be easy PQs in each Chapter, will that weaken
participation in the more difficult PQs in the area?

Josh
Drescher:  Our hope is
that people will still regard these more
difficult PQs almost as mini-raids. You’ll get together with
people from
your guild or your friend’s list, you’ll come together and tackle the
more
difficult PQs. Those are intended to be more long term content that
remains
available in the world, and we believe that the strong itemization at
those
more difficult PQs will continue to provide an incentive for players to
continue to engage those over time.

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Ten Ton
Hammer: Player Statues - Will there be more  reward categories in
the future?

Josh
Drescher:  Certainly
there could potentially be something down the line. For now, though,
we're exclusively
focused on RvR successes.

Ten Ton
Hammer: When will players see the first Statues named?

Josh
Drescher:  I don’t know when that will happen
after the patch goes live. Either instantly, or one
week after the patch launches. I suspect the latter.

Ten Ton
Hammer:  Will there be any other benefit to the winners? A special
temporary buff or the like?

Josh
Drescher:  Other than
having an enormous statue of yourself erected in
public? No.

Ten
Ton Hammer: Patch 1.1 boasts a lot of UI improvements.
Which are you most excited about?

Josh
Drescher:  Absolutely the
Chat Hyperlinking. That is the thing the
community has been most vocal about. That has been the thing, if I’m
being
honest, that the internal development team has been most vocal about.
Let's say you’re in RvR, you’ve just
been killed by
some specific player with some specific ability, and you have no idea
what that
particular ability actually did. Was it a long range attack, was it
something
that happened up close? Previously you had no simple way to assess that
ability.

Hyperlinking in chat now gives
you a way to scroll through a
context
menu of things like player abilities, things that show up in your
chat log,
player names, etc and get additional information. You’ll get info on
what that ability was, what career it came from, what type of damage it
did. It will let you
know more about this player that’s been saying something interesting style=""> while we’ve been fighting. The most useful of
these is item linking. It gives you the ability to know what’s going
with each
piece of inventory item that comes through the chat buffer as you’re
playing
the game. I would say that is probably the style="font-style: italic;">marquis UI change.

Ten Ton
Hammer: How customizable will the Hyperlinking be?
Can it be used in macros, or is the information restricted to point and
click?

Josh
Drescher:  It essentially
populates a context menu in most cases. So for
example, if I right click on a player’s name, it’s going to give me a
preset
number of options. We’re not really going to provide players a way to
add or
subtract things from that list. We want to have fairly tight controls
over what
information that gives you. We don’t, for example, want to make it
really easy
to scan a ton of people in the zone. You shouldn’t expect to see much
of an
expansion of the scripting capacity with this update.

Ten
Ton
Hammer: One last thing we heard about, are those Chicken Runs. What can
you tell us about those?

Josh
Drescher:  My favorite
thing to come in 1.1, and I realize that I’m
probably in the minority, but I’m a huge fan of the Chicken system.
Basically what
Chicken Runs are in the third Tier of the game – in the Greenskin zone
for
Destruction, and the High Elf area for Order - there are quests that
you
can be
sent on, that are what we call Chicken Run quests. They basically
involve you
being sent back to Tier One, back to the Open RvR lakes. There you
run the gauntlet in chicken form, trying to accomplish different tasks
while
in chicken form, without getting killed by the lower level players that
are
there.

It’s sort of a tongue in cheek
response to the fact that tons
and tons
of players were doing that on their own. They would move en masse when
a
guild
would decide, "Tonight, we’re going to go into Tier 1, turn into
chickens, and
see what kind of havoc we can trigger in our tiny little pecking form."
This is
nod to the creativity of the fan base, and to the strange affection
that many
people have displayed to the chickens.

This obviously means that there
are
lots of additional Tome of Knowledge unlocks related to chicken form,
and the
different things you can do in chicken form. As an additional bonus, if
I’m a
low level player and I kill a high level chicken, I basically get the
kind of
experience I would normally get from killing a high level player. So
everybody
wins with the chicken run!