Warhammer Online: Interview

Robin Dews: Of all the current crop of MMOG's, I've yet to see a game that has gotten the balance right between experience gained from combat and experience gained from engaging with the quest or narrative system of the game. This results in the kind of never-ending level-driven monster bashing that characterises some of these games.

What you have to remember is that Warhammer Online is a skill-based rather than a race/class/level based game and as a result has taken a very different approach levelling and skills to most current MMOG's. For a start, we don't have any character classes - such as Ranger, Warrior, Mage etc. You create a character with certain innate potentials, but how you develop that character in the game is very much up to you.

The second thing we've done is to abandon the idea of levels as a sort of mean ‘composite score' of how powerful you are in the world. As a piece of design, ‘levels' do work, but boy are they crude and they lead to players running on the kind of never-ending levelling treadmills that we see in EQ and other games.

As we've said, players can gain a measure of their standing in the world by the current level of their ‘fame' (or indeed infamy!) but this value is not directly linked to how tough a fighter or good a caster they are. By breaking apart the link between ‘level' and ‘combat competence' in this way, we believe that we are creating a unique and very characterful game.

And at the heart of the Warhammer Online is a skills and careers system that lays out the scope for character development and advancement. In the game, each career is a kind a ‘wrap'- a package within which you can unlock and learn a range of skills. For example: join the Ratcatchers and you can learn ‘Trapping' and ‘Skaven Lore'. Equally you could go for a Poacher career and also learn ‘Trapping' but also have the opportunity to practice ‘Hunting', ‘Hide' and ‘Forest Lore'.

The original Warhammer Fantasy Role-play game worked in a similar way and so we were very familiar with the concept. In computer game terms, what we've done is taken the idea of a technology tree from a game such as Age of Empires or Civilisation and applied it to the skill system for a character based MMO - it's pretty exciting.

It should mean that your character should never ‘top out' and that if you do become bored of your current in-game activity you can go back down the career trees and take another path. It also means that you keep your character name and friends lists etc. which makes for a much more sociable game.

Robin Dews: Of course we look at other MMOG's to see if they have any good ideas we can steal :) but it's not something we obsess about.

It's hard to put this any other way than saying that all of the people involved in the design, development and delivery of Warhammer Online are enthusiasts. We're tabletop gaming enthusiasts, we're role-play enthusiasts (who still think that WHFRP is the best role-play system ever!) we're computer games enthusiasts and we're massively multiplayer game enthusiasts. We're also business enthusiasts who know that in order to run a profitable company you need to create a fantastic product, back it up with superb customer service and offer it to people at a realistic price.

There you have it…those are our ambitions for Warhammer Online. To make a fantastic game, that immerses people in a visually stunning world and that makes enough money for us to keep expanding and growing for as long as our players want to play - phew!

Robin Dews: Right now, I'm just in love with the landscape...For a long-term Warhammer fan its just amazing to be able to move across a landscape that up until now has only existed in my imagination, to peer into the depths of the Reikwald forest and see Beastmen lurking in the gloom. I spend at least a part of each day just checking out the latest build to see what is new.

As to what will surprise others...the size, scale and reality of the towns, villages and cities really does make Warhammer Online look like no other game.

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