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Moving past the Leipzig content, my next agenda with Mark was to determine what’s next on the Warhammer Online horizon. With only four remaining classes, there doesn’t seem to be much left to the game that hasn’t been explained already. Mark, as always, proved me wrong with his next few answers.

“I think seeing all the Elves in action will excite people,” Mark said. :”We think that the High Elves and the Dark Elves represent the sort of physical appearance that people find attractive, but I also believe that they represent a distinct part of the lore and history of Warhammer. I mean, you’ve got this split race that hates each other, but doesn’t at the same time. We hope that people really like that.”

“We also have the sacking of capital cities to show off yet,” he continued. “We think that’s going to be a very compelling part of the game. You look at Camelot or WoW, and what do you get to do at the end? You go into the battlefields or you raid, but is there ever one seminal moment in the end of those games?”

This demon makes you think twice about going after his city.

“What do you think about burning down a guys castle?” Mark queried (and personally I think it’s f-ing awesome and responded as such). “Right! I was actually out in England several years ago and we asked, wouldn’t it be cool if we could do that? And they said yes. Then I asked then if we could do it with major cities that exist in the IP, and they said go right ahead.”

I can hear your jaws hitting the floor from here in Kansas City. Yes, you read that correctly and your eyes aren’t deceiving you. There will be city sieging in Warhammer Online, and you’ll even be able to take out cities that exist in the IP. But what will players have to do once their cities are sacked? Will the cities regenerate? I posed this question to Mark and his response was quick.

“Of course,” Mark said. “The last thing we want to have happen is to have people not being able to do what they need to do. We don’t EVER want to provide a disincentive that might cause people to quit. So if every time I logged in I couldn’t go to my capital city; that’d be a horrible situation. It’d be even worse when you throw time differences and play patterns into the mix. What if people came in at three in the morning and were immediately able to sack the city, which the can’t do in the actual game, but the next time people log in their city is sacked!”

“But if players sack a city in WAR, NPC forces continually get harder as they try to kick the players out of their city,” Mark said. “We’re going to send in the clones. We keep sending in the NPCs until the people are eventually kicked out, and we want it to be a challenge to players to see how long they can stay in the city. We’ll give them rewards depending upon how long they were able to stay inside the city.”

Once their city falls, will players have an opportunity to take back the city before the NPCs force the opposing team out of the city? Will there be rewards for reclaiming the city too?

“Absolutely. I want to give players incentive to come and take their city back,” Mark said. “Even if they die, I want people to come back to that city because they want to have fun. You may die a whole lot, but it’s still fun. And if you’re successful at it, you get a nice reward.”

Since we’ve branched into the topic of PvP and RvR, I wanted to ask Mark about rewards for doing this sort of combat. In many recent games, PvP and RvR rewards have grown and are now becoming a very feasible part of the market structure in most games. I wondered aloud to Mark whether WAR would have PvP and RvR, and how much would be included.

“Tons of ‘em,” Mark answered. “We’ve done PvP and RvR more than anybody, especially if you look back at our MUDs too. We know the importance of rewarding people.”

Figuring out a balanced and fair way to issue rewards can’t be an easy thing, and Mark had already hinted at some of the areas of the game that they were still working on in our conversation. However, if it’s so complicated, I wanted to know how Mark and his crew actually figured out what sort of rewards that they’d be including in the final version of the game.

“There’s a giant dart board,” Mark said jokingly. “In seriousness, it’s a really iterative process. Everyone has dumb ideas, including me. Anyone that puts forward creative ideas will eventually introduce things that don’t work. I think it should be applauded when a company looks at what they did and addresses any mistakes they made.”

Eventually, you could end up sacking this city and burning it to the ground.

“That’s the beauty of online games,” he continued. “Offline games don’t have that sort of option, because the guys patching or fixing the game won’t receive any extra players from that fix. In online games when you change something your subscription numbers either go up, down, or continue to be strong. Afterwards everyone can look at the results and say, ‘Yeah, that makes sense.’”

But that’s also the temptation of online games as well, the ability to change things on the fly. Games and dev studios in the past have done some terrible things to their player base, and that’s nothing something that anyone wants to see happen again. I asked Mark, as a player to a dev, just how he resists taking that sort of step that really alienates the player base.

“Intelligence,” Mark said, laughing. “Wisdom and experience. Not everything my company has tried has been successful, but would I ever say to chuck the whole darn thing and start again? No.”

“When you have a game that has a population, and a mature one at that, you’ve got to be smart about what you do,” he continued. “The desire to tinker and overhaul may be tough to manage, but when you’re thinking about taking a giant leap, you’ve got to be prepared to stop yourself before you end up at the bottom of the cliff. Unfortunately, some companies have done that and it didn’t work out very well.”

This concludes Part One of our interview with Warhammer Online’s Mark Jacobs! You can see the rest of the interview by clicking here!

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