Warhammer Online: Interview

Robin Dews: (Laughs...) I keep answering the questions before you ask them :)

As I started to explain above, what we set out to do was create an exciting, entertaining and innovative MMOG that is shot through with the dark, gritty, gothic atmosphere of the Warhammer. MMOG's as a genre are maturing rapidly. Ultima, Everquest and DaoC along with others have done a fantastic job in opening up a market for this type of game and we are fans of all of them.

However, success for us will not come from simply providing an exctiing and entertaining new outlet for Warhammer fans, these are already Games Workshop customers and form an enthusiastic global community. Our success will come from attracting thousands of new players who are either currently playing one of the big online RPG's and are looking for a new kind of challenge or from the many hundreds of thousands of gamers who have never tried a persistent world online game before.

Our intention is to design a game that will appeal to all three of these groups and that is: ambitious! gorgeous! and enormous!

Robin Dews: Between January and May 2001 and we had a long internal discussion about exactly what kind of game we would be making, what would be its main features and what kind of emotional experience we wanted to provoke in our players. By the summer of 2001 we had the core design nailed and so we are just over two and a half years into a three-and a half year development cycle. As you might imagine, running a large team over that kind of timeframe comes with a big price tag and so like all developers, we've had to be very disiplined with the project to ensure that we can deliver within time and budget. This has inevitably meant that some ‘cool stuff' that we envisaged at the outset has simply not made it through the crucible of development but that's simply how it works...

Robin Dews: We plan to start the beta in early 2004 and run for about six months. We will only know once we are into it if that plan is long enough and indeed that is the whole point of the beta. The goal is to get a fully populated world shard up, stable and running by mid summer, ready for a late summer release. You can come back to me on that one in the spring of 2004 :)

Robin Dews: Internally the feedback on the game is good. It looks fantastic and has superb realisations of the characters, monsters and environments that make up the Warhammer world. Each milestone gives us a little more functionality and we now have a full landscape in existance with new villages, towns and settlements being placed every day.

Robin Dews: Absolutely! We set out to raise the bar on the kind of visual experience player could expect from an MMOG and we know that our engine will deliver the goods. You might need to beef your PC a little to see all the eye candy, but believe me it is all there!

Its interesting that you draw a comparison with World of Warcraft. Blizzard make some great games, but their approach WoW is very very different from ours. From what I can see on their website, they have come up with a characteristic Blizzard look - bright, colourful and slightly cartoony. It works very well for them, but we wanted Warhammer Online to provide a far more spit and sawdust kind of experience!

We're really not doing this to compete with Blizzard or Lucas Arts (honestly!). Like every game and miniature that Games Workshop has produced in its twenty-five year history, we're doing this because it's fun, exciting and interesting! I've played almost all of the current MMOG's and they all have good bits, but none of them have the same dark, gothic feel as Warhammer!

We're doing this because we wanted to play a Warhammer MMOG and could afford to spend the time, creative energy, money and passion it requires to deliver a project of this type. We hope that many people will also follow our passion and enthusiasm and enjoy living out an online life of squalor and adventure in the heart of the Warhammer world!

Robin Dews: Right now, we're working very much with so-called ‘placeholder' artwork for the GUI. This is currently functional, but it sure isn't pretty! A good GUI should simply cease to exist in the player's mind and simply allow them to experience the world in a direct and intuitive way. To that end, we will build in as many customisable features as we can build and afford!

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