Warhammer Online: Interview
Wouter "Hyrrix" Ryckbosch, 2003-11-11

Yesterday, we had an extensive preview of Warhammer Online ready for you. The most extraordinary thing at this moment, seems to be that the game is not being hyped as many other mmorpg's are at the moment, even though the Warhammer franchise must be among the most popular ones out there. Time for us to go talk with the developer folks about the how's and why's of the project.

Robin Dews: First by way of introduction... my name is Robin Dews, and I'm the General Mananger of Warhammer Online Ltd. WOL was formed in early 2001 as a joint venture company between Games Workshop and Climax. We realised at the outset, that designing, developing and delivering an MMORPG was going to require a much longer-term commitment of time, energy and resources than could be provided under a simple development agreement and so WOL was created. Prior to establishing WOL, I'd worked for GW for more than a decade, recently as the Design Studio Manager and prior to that as White Dwarf magazine editor and so my background was in product development and community management...not a bad combination for an MMORPG!

Robin Dews: The team behind the game have been assembled from a number of places. A large group came from a company called Charybdis who worked on a Strategy/RPG called Art of Magic. Other were recruited along the way and included many ex-GW artists and designers who gone on to do other things in the computer games industry but were drawn back to Nottingham by the allure of working on a Warhammer game. And of course at a high level, much of the vision and direction for the game has come from such GW illuminaries as designer Rick Priestley (who wrote the original Warhammer Battles and Warhammer RPG games) and aritsts such as Dave Gallgher and John Blanche who have created a unique catalogue of concept work for all of the characters, monsters and environments that will be found in the final game.

At the outset of the project, we spent a great deal of time thinking, talking and imagining exactly what kind of game we would set out to deliver. Some of these ideas were great (but undeliverable!) some were deliverable (but just dull!) and some were plain barmy!. Eventually we distilled our ideas down to a new kind of RPG that would tackle some of the emerging convetions of the genre by giving them a distinctly Warhammer flavour. We lumped all this together under our project mission statment of "Make It Real!"



Since it was first published as a set of tabletop wargame rules almost twenty years ago, Warhammer has spawned a whole range of games and supplements. Warhammer Fantasy Role-play (WHFRP) became a best selling role-playing system. Man O' War enabled players to take to the high seas and fight naval battles in the Warhammer world. Warhammer Quest was a classic ‘dungeon bash' board game and the recently published Warmaster allowed players to fight tabletop battles on a sweeping epic scale.

Rather than simply being a game, Warhammer and its science fiction cousin - Warhammer 40,000 - have grown to become widely known fantasy worlds that encompass tabletop wargaming, Black Library fiction, comics, role-playing games, computer games, collectable card games and art-books etc.

We see the Warhammer world as a exactly that… a World that we can explore and discover in as many ways as possible. Like a real adventure, each journey into its interior is exciting and fascinating as we discover new possibilities and opportunites. Massively multiplayer games are simply one of those opportunities. Before the internet and the ability of a desktop PC to render a 3D world in real time, these types of games simply couldn't have existed.

We think the format of an MMORPG both draws on the heritage of Warhammer and also gives us a fantastic range of possibilities and opportunities for us to explore the world in new ways and in the company of thousands and thousands of other Warhammer enthusiasts.

Robin Dews: Like most good things in business, art and life, it was a meeting of minds! Climax came up to see us, because they had some technology that enabled them to create procedural landscapes and there were a number of people on their team who were Games Workshop and Warhammer enthusiasts.

We looked at what they could do, and after the initial - "Wow cool!" we started to think more seriously about what kind of game we could create with this technology. These conversations continued throughout late 2000 and into early 2001 until we reached the conclusion that what we wanted to do was create a character-based online role-playing game.

Robin Dews: Why is this world so appealing to people - there's a $64,000 question!

Most fantasy games draw their inspiration and setting from Tolkein (obviously) but also from the same sources that he used as the inspiration for Middle Earth - Anglo-Saxon and Norse mythology and poetry etc. In practice this means that they largely have what I'd call a ‘Dark age' feel and of course Dark Ages of Camelot makes no bones about their inspiration.

Warhammer has always been rather different and it's why it has very distinctive character and feel in this landscape of rather ‘generic' fantasy games. We call Warhammer a ‘renaissance' rather than a ‘dark age' world. On a superficial level, this means that it has guns, swords and magic as its technological base rather than the traditional ‘sword and sorcery' fantasy settings. The European Renaissance was an incredible burst of creative and intellectual energy that completely outstripped the ability of the society to support it. Thus while most of the populace were living in disease and squalor, Leonardo was creating ideas for flying machines, computers and tanks and the Inquisition were ready to burn Galileo for suggesting that the Earth revolved around the sun! We kind of like this period as it allows us great scope to play games of ‘what if?'

It's this combination of fantastical technologies, with magic as a heretical and perilous sorcery and the merciless poverty of everyday life that gives the Warhammer world much of its character - and makes it such a cool place to set games in!

However, the game is a great deal more than simply a strong and characterful background. At the outset we set ourself the task of also creating an exciting and innovative MMOG that started to challenge some of the emerging conventions of persistent world online games. We wanted to re-dress the balance between combat and questing in a way that would encourage players to actually explore the world rather then simply grinding away at endless monsters in order to gain a new ‘level' (before starting the task all over again...). This also meant that our world had to be large and believeable and so Climax have expended a huge ammount of time, effort and creativity on developing a large visually stunning game world. If you've played an MMOG before then you should find much that is familiar in Warhammer Online, but with some interesting and entertaining twists and turns. If you are a Warhammer fan who's never played an MMOG before, then you are in for a real treat!

And at the end of the day… if you are going to ask people to pay you money to participate in your world then you'd better have something good to offer - I believe we do!