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In general, the most recent announcement the Warhammer crew has made was concerning the recently announced Elven races and classes. To me, both of the races and their models look terrific and I feel like EA Mythic is doing a terrific job at rolling out content when their fanbase needs it. However, I wanted to ask Mark what his thoughts were about the response to the Elves and whether he thought that people liked it or not.

“There will always be people who dislike certain things that you do,” Mark said. “There’s an old saying in MMOGs, ‘Even if you wanted to make an MMOG for free, there will still be people who aren’t happy.’ You can never make everyone happy. Does everyone love our new Elves? Absolutely not. Does the vast majority of people love what we’re doing? Oh yeah.”

“Just as we talked about earlier, you can only play female Witch Elves,” he continued. “We already had a harsh reaction from that. And I’ve told people this on forums before, that the moment you start following this game, we’re going to piss you off. And that’s because we’re working with IP. It’s bad enough when you’re creating you own intellectual property, but when you’re working with an established world, there’s zero chance that you can make every fan of that IP happy. You probably won’t even make 90% happy. It’s the same issue when somebody takes a novel and converts it to film; you get people with established visions in there head and they’re disappointed when they see it done differently. It’s just the cost of doing business.”

There are fans of the Warhammer IP that will never be satisfied with what EA Mythic brings to their computers.

However, there are also individuals out there like me that never followed the original IP but are extremely interested in the outcome of the online version of the table top game. One of ideas that originally drew me to WAR was the simple fact that every combatant in Warhammer Online can wield a melee weapon and deal gobs of damage to their enemies. From a developer's standpoint, adding that feature must have been a huge effort because nothing like that had ever been done before. I asked Mark how different the experience had been to add this "good at melee" component to each character.

“The whole point with Warhammer Online was that it is all about WAR,” Mark said. “It’s all about battle. Are we turning the industry on its head with this game? No. Are we changing things and doing some things differently? Absolutely! All you gotta do is look at what we’re doing, and you’ll see that most games don’t do it our way.”

That whole process couldn't have been a walk in the park though, because the balancing of many of the classes in other MMOGs is reliant upon certain entities being bad at melee. Was it as difficult as I thought it would be?

“Sure,” Mark answered. “The toughest aspect of any MMOG is balance. Art, content, all that is much more compartmentalized than balance. It’s much easier in many ways. Balance is such a pain, such a delicate issue, and is so often so messed up. It’s something you have to fight with forever.”

“One of the cool parts of MMOGs is that you often have 50, 100, 300 people fighting each other with spells going off and other NPCs getting in the action,” he continued. “Do you know what the bad parts of MMOGs are? That you can have hundreds of people fighting each other at once! It changes everything. I’ve never met a designer that had a game that was the same six months after launch. Nobody’s that smart. It’s not going to happen. These games have such a huge amount of intricacies that are interacting with each other that it’s practically impossible to get perfect the first time.”

Every class in WAR will have a melee combat component.

“As time goes by players are going to think of strategies and ways of defeating enemies that you wouldn’t have thought about,” Mark added. “One of my favorite examples was in Camelot. We built this great world and we go out in the Frontier and let players know that they can’t go back into other players home towns because in home towns, you’re safe. So what did some people do? They walked around every single point in the world looking for holes. Who could’ve imagined that in 1999 you’ll have people who have nothing better to do than walk around and look for a hole in the world? You can’t even see it! You have to physically walk around every single point.

“And guess what, some people found it!” he continued. “We’re like, ‘How in the hell did he get there?’ We thought somebody had hacked a developer account, yet it was just a simple method of finding a hole.”

At that point, I was absolutely certain that throwing a player versus player element would make the whole thing even more excruciatingly challenging. So, I interjected that thought to Mark and said, "Does PvP make it worse?"

“It’s worse,” Mark said. “That’s why with Imperator we were going down the PvE route. If people aren’t quite balanced in a PvE game, we raise someone up so they’re an equivalent power base. But in a PvP game, it gets much more personal. If someone is killing someone else then we raise the power level of another character, they’ll want to come to our house and chew us out. You have to be even more balanced. Then if you do the raising up thing, then everyone’s gotta be raised up. Unfortunately, once you lower someone down, everybody will cry, ‘Nerf!’ and people start complaining.”

When we reached this point, Mark and I both looked at our watches and realized how long we had been talking. We both decided to wrap up the conversation and Mark wanted to say a few final comments to the Ten Ton Hammer fans.

“I’m thrilled with the awards,” Mark said. “Keep following the game and we’ll try not to disappoint you!” 

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