TenTonHammer.com - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

by Cody “Micajah” Bye

For most tabletop gamers - whether you build miniature armies or settle in with a nice bout of roleplaying - when you see that your favorite product is being retrofitted into a video game, you’re either quite nervous or thoroughly excited. You imagine that all of your favorite characters, locations, abilities, and deities will be making their way into the game. You desperately hope that the any video game lives up to the world that you have conceived in your head. If it doesn’t, it makes you feel like an Dark Elven Black Guard came and stabbed you in the gut and let you bleed out like some sort of stuck pig.

Looking into the compound that held the Warhammer Online demos.

That may be a gruesome image, but the feeling is all too real for some people. That’s why the team at EA Mythic and the folks behind the entire Warhammer product line, Games Workshop, have been working hand-in-hand to make sure that Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is a game that not only lives up to its reputation, but delivers an experience that remains true to the original source material. To make sure this happens, Games Workshop employs men like their business development manager, Jon Gillard, to keep an eye out on all their products and gaze a watchful eye down on the eventual product.

At Leipzig GC ’07, Ten Ton Hammer’s managing editor, Cody “Micajah” Bye, had the opportunity to sit down with Jon Gillard and explore exactly what it takes to bring a tabletop game to the massive online universe. Being an utter newb to the Warhammer tabletop game, I wanted to really see what sort of differences there are between the game with painted figurines and the epic online realization of that same table top game.

First off, I wanted to know whether each of the character classes in the game are supposed to represent the more “elite” troops you find in the Warhammer tabletop game. From what I’m familiar with, in the standard Warhammer game, you have your common “rank-and-file” troops and then you have your bigger, nastier guys that are in your army. To me, it seems like it wouldn’t make sense to translate a common soldier to a game where you’re playing a “hero”, but perhaps EA Mythic had altered the original design of certain characters to really make that class work.

I turned the question to Jon, who responded quickly. “It’s a mixed bag,” Jon said. “I think what they’ve done is take things that would make good character classes. This has been the overriding idea for us the whole way through where we [Games Workshop] say, ‘Use the background, use the world, use the lore, but make a good MMOG.’ This is always our take on any computer games or any licenses that we doll out.”

“We don’t want our developers tied to the tabletop game,” Jon continued. “The tabletop game is only one realization of a real universe. In the same way any of the novels that we do (or comics, cards, etc.) all have this overall theme of warfare, because we built our game to be a tabletop war experience, but we don’t feel like they should be slavish to certain things.”

EA Mythic and GOA prepare to show off their first demonstration of the day.

“We’ve had some of our licensees come up to us and ask us if they could introduce a new character type,” Jon said. “In Warhammer Online, the Greenskins have the Orc Choppa, which isn’t exactly a troop type straight from the tabletop game., it’s more of a combination of some standard soldier you’d see in the game.”

"That said, some of the classes in Warhammer Online are straight from the tabletop game. The High and Dark Elves are examples of this, but even in that vein the guys at EA Mythic still have to make those classes fit into their game from an MMOG standpoint.”

With that much necessary finagling of the character types and how they’ve interpreted that from the table top game, it’d make you wonder how well the Games Workshop guys have accepted this “retro-fitted” version of their original game. “We love the guys and gals at EA Mythic. We knew those guys even before we made the deal to make Warhammer Online,” Jon said. “We have a lot of faith in their ability. I don’t think they’ve done anything that’s upset us to this point. I’m sure there have been times when we had to say, ‘No, you can’t necessarily do that.’ But we see these things as being part of our relationship.”