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

Ten Ton Hammer: Are we going to start to see the other cities make their way into the game? Will we see the Elf or Greenskin and Dwarf cities at some point?

Now it's time to go kill some Tomb Kings.

Jeff Hickman: This is still on the shelf for now, but don’t misunderstand that. It is not in the garbage can. We can still take it off the shelf. We definitely talk about it, especially about the Dark Elf and High Elf, specifically because we have some plans for them. We do talk about Greenskin and Dwarf also. It has definitely not gone away, it just comes down to what is the best time to do it. How can we achieve it in the right way? How do we leverage it into the way the campaign is played right now? So ya, definitely in the future at some point.

Ten Ton Hammer: Do you find you have more players on your RvR servers as opposed to say your roleplay servers? How do they stack up?

Jeff Hickman: I think we have a good mix. I think we have more Core servers than anything else. We have RvR servers, but aren’t all of our servers an RvR server? You can get such a great PvP experience on every single server that having a server a full blown RvR server may not be as impactful as in other games. I think our RvR servers are very popular, we just don’t need as many as some other games because we have RvR everywhere.

Ten Ton Hammer: How will MMOs start to shape up in the future? Will all games eventually be online and multiplayer?

Jeff Hickman: I think it will be very similar that it has been from a budget stand point. If you look at the last ten years, there are going to be some very big MMOs out there. There will be some big companies that have the funds, team, and resources to make huge MMOs. But there will always be small games out there as well. Games like Puzzle Pirates, these smaller niche MMOs that are really successful.

I think the next 3 years are going to be very tough from an economic stand point. If you look at MMOs, they are by far the most difficult game to build. Simply because they are the hardest to get to work, from a technical stand point. You are putting thousands of people in a world together and make it all work and feel right. It is phenomenal. Most MMO companies fail before they get to that point. Add the difficulty of making an MMO to the economics right now and I think we will see much fewer MMOs over the next 3 years than we have. I also guarantee in the next few years you’ll see some big games come out, we know of big companies working on MMOs. Bethesda is working on something, Trion, 38 Studios, Red 5, not even mentioning Mythic. You will see small to large companies working on games right now. Many of which will have success.

Ten Ton Hammer: WAR is now seeing the trend of players go back up. You are doing a lot for players in the game as well as players coming back to the game, where do you see the game growing from now?

Jeff Hickman: My hope is to continue to expand the things that make our game great. We have always been outspoken and up front about the core pieces of our game that we point at which we point at and say that is us. Its RvR, Public Quests, the Tome of Knowledge we definitely have a list. There are certain things that do really well, there are some we need to improve on. No matter what we are going to stick to that core. We have some stuff in the works for the end of 2009 already that are going to knock your socks off, for high level game play. It is focused around RvR, it is focused around what makes us great.

We have plans for public quests, how do we take them to the next level? We are already seeing other MMOs implement them, as we predicted years ago. How do we stay ahead of that curve? We want to do even more with them. The Tome is awesome, and we keep expanding on it. We keep expanding on all of these pieces of our game, and I think what we will see is people finally start to dig into the systems that up until this point have not had a huge impact on the game. The one I will point to is the living guild system, the leveling of your guild. There is a lot planned for guilds. All sorts of different rewards and things for guilds which we saw a little in patch 1.2, with mounts for guilds and new crafting stuff. So what will we look like in a year from now? Bigger, better, and continually focused on the things that make us great.