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

Ten Ton Hammer:  Were the two new classes chosen to be tanks for a certain reason? Were people finding a lack of tanks that they wanted to play?

Josh Drescher:  There are a number of reasons why we chose to reintroduce those two careers to the game. Foremost among those, we were happy with the quality that the careers and combat team were able to accomplish post launch. In many ways what you’re seeing now with the addition of these types of careers is not unlike a director’s cut of a movie. You go in after the fact, and maybe you’ve got some time to look back at some of the choices you made, at the reasons you cut something out for the sake of the initial product. Now that you have a little bit more time to think about it, you can come up with some solutions that do in fact benefit the overall product by reintroducing them. That’s what happened with the Knight and the Black Guard.

Ten Ton Hammer:  Take a quick guess. Which of the two classes is proving more popular?

Josh Drescher:  It's pretty even at the moment. Taking a look at all of our careers across all the servers; between the most popular and least popular there’s just a few percentage points difference.

I would say if you’re going to choose one or the other you should choose the Knight because he’s better. That is because I play Order, but he also has a better hat. *random argument over Order and Destruction in the background* Sorry – it’s a polarizing game.

Josh Drescher:  Other than the types of balancing we would have done regardless of integrating new careers, no, there are no changes being made to any career in response to the Knight and the Black Guard. There are plenty of changes being made, just keeping with the standard ebb and flow of maintaining a live MMO.

Every other career we put into the game we put in during beta basically. I can say with relative confidence that this is the smoothest integration of a career pairing that we have experienced since development on the game began.

Ten Ton Hammer: How have the new tanks affected Open RvR?

Josh Drescher:  It certainly made it really easy to find a tank in the tier 1 areas at the moment! Generally when we address career balance, we always try to do it at a Realm level, not at a racial level or career specific level. That is why, when you see an addition of careers, you’ll always see it in tandem. One for Order and one for Destruction. This does, to a degree, fill a strategic hole that had existed, where each of these careers had a parallel on the other side. Black Guard plays most closely to the Ironbreaker. Knight is fairly similar to the Chosen, in terms of the role they play on the battlefield. In that regard it does bulk out the strategies that are available to each realm. But in terms of overall balance, our hope is that it just gives people more options.

Josh Drescher:  Absolutely. We have not simplified all of the Public Quests. We have gone through and made sure that in each zone, there is one easy PQ that’s basically been recalibrated to be tackled by one to 3 players on average.  As a result it’s obviously going to yield the lower level Public Quest loot for that zone. The essential loot tables are unaffected. So if you want the highest level loot that is available in that Public quest zone, you’ll still need to get together a more standard size PQ group, and tackle the tougher PQs in that area.

Our goal with the easy PQs was just to guarantee that you never got into a situation where you enter a new zone, and there’s no way for you to accomplish any of the Public Quests. We wanted to make sure that as the game matures, and the population moves into different parts of the game, that we don’t leave behind a swath of unplayable content for everyone else. It needs to be fairly friendly for new players that come in, and the easy PQs are one of the first changes that we are making to address that as the game matures.

Ten Ton Hammer: If there are going to be easy PQs in each Chapter, will that weaken participation in the more difficult PQs in the area?

Josh Drescher:  Our hope is that people will still regard these more difficult PQs almost as mini-raids. You’ll get together with people from your guild or your friend’s list, you’ll come together and tackle the more difficult PQs. Those are intended to be more long term content that remains available in the world, and we believe that the strong itemization at those more difficult PQs will continue to provide an incentive for players to continue to engage those over time.

Ten Ton Hammer: Player Statues - Will there be more  reward categories in the future?

Josh Drescher:  Certainly there could potentially be something down the line. For now, though, we're exclusively focused on RvR successes.

Ten Ton Hammer: When will players see the first Statues named?

Josh Drescher:  I don’t know when that will happen after the patch goes live. Either instantly, or one week after the patch launches. I suspect the latter.

Ten Ton Hammer:  Will there be any other benefit to the winners? A special temporary buff or the like?

Josh Drescher:  Other than having an enormous statue of yourself erected in public? No.

Ten Ton Hammer: Patch 1.1 boasts a lot of UI improvements. Which are you most excited about?

Josh Drescher:  Absolutely the Chat Hyperlinking. That is the thing the community has been most vocal about. That has been the thing, if I’m being honest, that the internal development team has been most vocal about. Let's say you’re in RvR, you’ve just been killed by some specific player with some specific ability, and you have no idea what that particular ability actually did. Was it a long range attack, was it something that happened up close? Previously you had no simple way to assess that ability.

Hyperlinking in chat now gives you a way to scroll through a context menu of things like player abilities, things that show up in your chat log, player names, etc and get additional information. You’ll get info on what that ability was, what career it came from, what type of damage it did. It will let you know more about this player that’s been saying something interesting while we’ve been fighting. The most useful of these is item linking. It gives you the ability to know what’s going with each piece of inventory item that comes through the chat buffer as you’re playing the game. I would say that is probably the marquis UI change.

Ten Ton Hammer: How customizable will the Hyperlinking be? Can it be used in macros, or is the information restricted to point and click?

Josh Drescher:  It essentially populates a context menu in most cases. So for example, if I right click on a player’s name, it’s going to give me a preset number of options. We’re not really going to provide players a way to add or subtract things from that list. We want to have fairly tight controls over what information that gives you. We don’t, for example, want to make it really easy to scan a ton of people in the zone. You shouldn’t expect to see much of an expansion of the scripting capacity with this update.

Ten Ton Hammer: One last thing we heard about, are those Chicken Runs. What can you tell us about those?

Josh Drescher:  My favorite thing to come in 1.1, and I realize that I’m probably in the minority, but I’m a huge fan of the Chicken system. Basically what Chicken Runs are in the third Tier of the game – in the Greenskin zone for Destruction, and the High Elf area for Order - there are quests that you can be sent on, that are what we call Chicken Run quests. They basically involve you being sent back to Tier One, back to the Open RvR lakes. There you run the gauntlet in chicken form, trying to accomplish different tasks while in chicken form, without getting killed by the lower level players that are there.

It’s sort of a tongue in cheek response to the fact that tons and tons of players were doing that on their own. They would move en masse when a guild would decide, "Tonight, we’re going to go into Tier 1, turn into chickens, and see what kind of havoc we can trigger in our tiny little pecking form." This is nod to the creativity of the fan base, and to the strange affection that many people have displayed to the chickens.

This obviously means that there are lots of additional Tome of Knowledge unlocks related to chicken form, and the different things you can do in chicken form. As an additional bonus, if I’m a low level player and I kill a high level chicken, I basically get the kind of experience I would normally get from killing a high level player. So everybody wins with the chicken run!