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.


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style="font-style: italic;">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.”


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style="font-style: italic;">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.”


To read the latest guides, news, and features you can visit our Warhammer 40,000: Storm of Vengeance Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Game Page.

Last Updated: Mar 29, 2016

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