Warhammer Online at Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMOG Gamers to the Next Level!

Questions by Cody “Micajah” Bye (Managing Editor) and Garrett Fuller (Industry Relations)

Answers by Warhammer Online's Jeff Hickman (Executive Producer) and Josh Drescher (Associate Producer)

After almost a week of post launch activities, it seems like the new kid on the MMOG block is here to stay. With Mark Jacobs proclaiming Warhammer Online as having the smoothest launch in MMO gaming history, it’s easy to see that the WAR staff is excited about the future of their game. To really gather the info about everything post launch related, the Ten Ton Hammer staff sat down with WAR’s Josh Drescher and Jeff Hickman to find out exactly what the team is working on and what sort of plans they have for the future. Enjoy!

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Ten Ton Hammer: To start, what's the deal with Bacon Salt? All we’ve been hearing about for a little while now is Bacon Salt. What’s the story there?

Goblin Shaman's LOVE Bacon Salt.

Josh Drescher: At Comic-Con, the good people from a company called Bacon Salt, realizing what there proper demographic was, decided that they should definitely go talk to all the Comic-Con people and give them samples of their products. I was on my way to do an interview with a media outlet and a young lady sticks two packets of Bacon Salt in my hand. All she said was “Here have some Bacon Salt. It makes everything taste like bacon.” After that I didn’t really look at it until we were sitting down at the interview.

It was towards the end of the day, I may have been drinking a little bit, and I got a little belligerent. I started reading off the Bacon Salt package rather than answering questions, and I actually found the reading very interesting. A couple days later, I get a message from the people that make Bacon Salt, saying “Hey, thanks for the shout out! Would you like some Bacon Salt?”

Anyway, they shipped a nice care package to the office and Jeff Hickman promptly stole all of it. So now I’ll get random email messages from Jeff on Saturday mornings saying things like “Bacon Salt makes my leftover Chinese food taste delicious!” or “Bacon Salt is great on my omlette!” So I’m hoping – like a NASCAR driver – to get sponsored by Bacon Salt. Thus I’ve been pimping their product on every interview because, according to Jeff, it’s delicious.

So the deal with Bacon Salt is shameless fishing for free goodies.

Ten Ton Hammer: (laughs) That’s awesome!

Josh: And secretly, now that we’re all done with the project, we want to get back into non-game development shape. We’re eating a lot more salads and vegetables. Unfortunately, we’re all committed carnivores, so we’ve tried using Bacon Salt to trick our bodies into thinking we’re eating delicious bacon instead of iceberg lettuce.

Ten Ton Hammer: Is MMOG development pretty hard on a person’s body?

Josh: You’ll find that any sort of exercise regimen that you were once a part is gone and any sense of eating reasonable meals at scheduled times goes out the window. You wind up getting up early, scuttling into the office, and eating Pop Tarts out of the vending machine.

(pauses)

Jeff’s here! Everyone say “Hi!” to Jeff!

Jeff Hickman: What were you guys talking about?

Josh: I was telling the Bacon Salt story.

Jeff: (laughs) That’s a great story.

Josh: And how you stole all my Bacon Salt.

Ten Ton Hammer: On to real questions! How are you guys handling the balance between the casters and the tanks? I know it’s been an issue in the past, but how do you think it’s going right now in this critical period with the game freshly launched?

Jeff: I think we’re doing great. I was just commenting today to the Combat and Careers Lead Adam Gershowitz that I think we have an extraordinarily well balanced game. Remember that people often assume that our game is balanced character on character and players on player. In reality, the game is balanced around realm versus realm. So any one player versus another player could get absolutely crushed, but when you start talking about six on six or twelve on twelve or hundreds on hundreds, it’s a different story.

That’s not to say that there should be overpowered characters or anything like that, there shouldn’t be, but I don’t think there are. I think everyone has tools that they can play against other characters, some better than others.

Ten Ton Hammer: What’s the timeline looking like to start putting in some of the content that was cut from the launch?

Jeff: You’re crazy!

Ten Ton Hammer: I’m crazy!

Jeff: I can’t tell you guys that. I can say that we’re thinking about it a lot and I can even say that we’re working on it. It might be sooner or it might be later.

Josh: If it’s right for the game, if it’s right for the realms, and if it’s right for the players it might go in someday. Maybe.

Jeff: Or it might not.

Josh: That’s true.

The community and their concerns is the WAR teams biggest priority.

Ten Ton Hammer: So what’s you’re biggest priority right now?

Jeff: We are almost 100% eyeballing the community, listening to what their complaints are, making lists of things they want to see changed or improved or added, and planning how to make those changes.

Josh: The last thing you want to do when you launch a big MMO is have your entire development team go on vacation for eight weeks in hopes that you’ll patch all the problems later on. We think that you should probably continue working, keep an eye on things, and make adjustments as necessary.

Jeff: Very good, Josh!

Josh: Not all of our competitors agree with that philosophy, but it still drives us forward.

Jeff: Of course we don’t do everything that players want, but we listen to what they say and make informed decisions about whether those things are good for the game or not. If they’re fine for the game, why wouldn’t we put them in? We want to make the players happy. That is what it’s about.

Ten Ton Hammer: Here’s a pretty specific questions about the skills. Dark Age of Camelot had the speed boost feature that made roaming the RvR zones a lot of fun. I know you have mounts in the game, but is that the core travel plan for the RvR zones? Or is there going to be some sort of speed boost that players can get?

Jeff: There are two answers to that question. One is mounts. The other is your guild banner. Every guild banner has an area effect and a speed boost comes along with it. When you pull out you guild banner, then everyone around you moves faster when you charge into battle.

I run around with my banner wherever I go.

Josh: He’s got one equipped right now. It’s the only thing he’s wearing.

Ten Ton Hammer: As far as other abilities go, crowd control abilities are the toughest to balance. How do you guys think your crowd control abilities are playing out in the game right now?

Jeff: I think it’s great right now. There are always going to be complaints from players when you slow them down or take them out of combat. But in general, all of our crowd control – or at least almost all of it – is short duration. They’re mostly roots or snares, it doesn’t take away their abilities; it just slows them down. So far, we have very few big gripes about crowd control in our game.

Josh: One of the other things you have to bear in mind is the type of people that you generally hear crowd control complaints from. They’re typically your melee oriented players that are used to being able to run around and catch a caster in the back of a group.

Because we have player collision in the game, you actually understand that it’s not necessarily a root that stopped you, it’s the fact that you’re trying to get by that Black Orc that’s standing in front of you on the bridge. You can’t just run through it. As a result, the crowd control feels a lot less present because those abilities aren’t going to do anything worse – especially at close range – than the characters that are bashing into one another.

If you’re not moving, you’re probably trying to run through a wall of armor.

At this point, the kill count leaderboards are full of classes like the Bright Wizard.

Ten Ton Hammer: If I go onto the leaderboards right now, most of the high ranking individuals are from particular careers – like Bright Wizards in particular – especially on the kill leaderboard. You talked about class balance previously, but is there any way to have a leaderboard that features classes that aren’t necessarily so “kill happy?”

Jeff: We’re actually working on some things to enhance the Realm War pages. We’re hoping to adjust some things in the next couple weeks as well as continuing efforts to spread the love wherever we can.

Ten Ton Hammer: What about the Tome of Knowledge? Obviously no one has gone through the entire Tome of Knowledge….

Jeff: Because it’s impossible!

Ten Ton Hammer: …but is that something that you’re going to expand in the future? Are new things going to come in every so often?

Jeff: Of course! Our goal is to continually expand on the Tome either through new unlocks or new areas that are included within the Tome. We’re definitely going to be pushing the limits of that particular feature.

Ten Ton Hammer: We talked with Mark [Jacobs] about the downtime and the pacing of the game. What are your feelings about the pace? It seems like there’s absolutely zero downtime and it’s a very intense game. Do you think there’s a point of burn out?

Jeff: That’s a great question and it’s something I actually worry about a lot. We want to try to balance the amount of downtime you have with the fun you’re having in the game. We’re finding right now that we don’t have to force downtime. Players will actually choose to have downtime. They’ll take a break and go to the city of go craft or something else.

But it’s definitely something we want to watch very closely. What we don’t want to do is enhance downtime artificially like having players sit down or fly around or all this other crap.

Josh: One of things we also have going in our favor is that we removed a lot of the obstacles that would prevent you from doing what it is you want to do during any specific session. That way you don’t feel like when you’re finally involved in what you want to do that you need to play for five hours because it would take you so long to get back to wherever it is you want to do. To run to dynamic RvR territories in each zone. To have public quests everywhere. To craft without having to find an anvil to stand in front of.

As a result, you can get in do what you want to do and get out knowing that every session is going to have that sort of instant gratification. It's a lot less prone to building that inertia that keeps you in the game for twelve hours until you pass out from exhaustion.  

Ten Ton Hammer: What are you guys doing to speed up scenario queues and that sort of thing? The time seems to really vary depending on the time of day, the faction side, overall server population numbers and that sort of thing. Is there anything that you guys are doing to fix that? Or should gamers just wait and see if the server populations even out?

Jeff: Depending on the server you're on and the time you're on, it's all dependent on the amount of players that are there because it's RvR. We try to make it as easy as possible for you to do other things while you're queued up. We also have some plans in place that will hopefully help the queues and the way you queue up. Some of it also has to do with the server populations that are still filling up from launch, and we'll see those scenario times drop dramatically as those servers fill up more and more.  

It is something that concerns us. We pulled the metrics on them right now, and they actually look pretty good. I think every once in awhile, depending on the server you're on, you'll run into some not great queues. Overall, on average, they're very, very good.  

Josh: It's also important to remember that you're looking at an abnormal amount of population at this point. As those servers mature, as the populations normalize, as people get past their initial character and decide they want to try some other characters, they'll roll characters on other servers, they'll make characters on opposing realms, etc. And as people become more aware of some of the strategic sides of the game on a macro level, you'll notice that there'll be a bit of a diaspara and people will begin to fill out and you'll see those queues come down a lot more.

Ten Ton Hammer: Now that the game has launched and you guys are through the first weekend, what's the single thing in Warhammer that you're the most proud of?  

Jeff: The entire game is absolutely fantastic. I play it every night. I love my game. I'm really really proud of it.  

Josh: I'm going to go a bit more pragmatic. I'm unbelievably proud of the launch we had. We knew we had a great game for months and months and months and months. We were never ever worried about whether people would enjoy it when they played it. But you're always a little bit gun shy to let a ton of people suddenly go live on the game.  Will the servers explode? Will a hurricane destroy your facility? To have a launch as smoothly as the one we had I think every person on the team deserves and extra pat on the back for just how awesome the launch was.

I'm actually very proud that my fiance actually plays the game. She's just loving it. She is not an MMO player. She is not a PvP focused person. And she is really digging everything in the game. I do feel bad for Justin Webb because he was the man largely responsible for the crafting system because she harasses him with questions now about what's coming down the pipe.  

WAR will certainly make a lasting impression on the MMOG industry.

Jeff: Our RvR system came together like we always talked about. The thing I love to see in the reviews right now - and the thing that makes me giggle with glee - is that Mythic finally put out a game that you can actually just go and RvR in. Have a good time, and just RvR all you want.  

We always said you could do it. And it's true. We just love that. We achieved something that people have been talking about doing for fifteen years. And we did it.  

Ten Ton Hammer: Finally, where do you see the genre going now? What's next?

Josh: People will be stealing public quests from us. People will be stealing the Tome of Knowledge. People will probably steal our RvR stuff. That's the honest answer.

Philosophically, I think companies will be focusing on cooperative and competitive gameplay. I think you're going to start see games moving away from the weird things we inherited from pen and paper roleplaying games like death penalties and item degradation. All the things that we cut out, people are going to realize that that is the way to go. You'll see companies move away from the "you're paying to play the fiftieth level and forced to run through the first 49 of 'em to get there." No other hobby does that.  

Jeff: You play our game at level one, and you'll be doing similar things when you're at level forty.  

One of the things that I want to highlight from what Josh said - and I really believe in it - is that competitive gameplay, PvP gameplay, is where it's at. I've always believed that. Dark Age of Camelot took a shot at it. I think we've crowned that achievement with Warhammer. But what's interesting - and I think it's a challenge that game makers will have - is that I've talked to other game makers and have seen them post things and they always try to break down what RvR is into "The Ten Rules of RvR." And they're always wrong. Always wrong.  

I look at it and know that Mythic knows how to do it. I can write down the ten things it is for you. But I just don't think people get it. I think games are going to continue to struggle with it. But I also think that it is where it's at.   

Ten Ton Hammer: Thanks for your time guys!

Jeff: See you later!

Josh: Bye guys!