3 very different and interesting announcements in this interview with Mark.
First, the big one.
4 careers are being taken out of the game.
“Four of the classes that we’ve been working on, we just couldn’t get
great,” he continued. “We looked at them and we said these careers are just
not great… and we tried, and they weren’t coming out well.”
This left them with a decision similar to the one that they were left with
for the cities, do they continue and try to get it, or do they shelve them?
In the end, after looking at the metric data that they have been collecting
throughout the beta process, they saw that there were four careers that just
weren’t working for the players.
“We tried,” Jacobs said, “we tried to see if we could make them better and
we just couldn’t make them great. So we had a choice. Do we put in some
non-great careers just because they are iconic, or we cut them out and put
them in post-launch if we can get them right, or do we not put them in at
all?”
In the end, whether it’s the second or the third option is still unknown.
The four careers that are going may surprise players (and even includes one
of Marks personal favorites). The list is as follows:
Choppa (Greenskin)
Hammerer (Dwarf)
Blackguard (Dark Elf)
Knight of the Blazing Sun (Empire)
This means the removal of two tanks and two melee DPS classes.
Next, instead of having each race's capital city ready for launch, Mythic are
only going with 2: Altdorf and the Inevitable City. The rest will follow
after.
There was something missing. It wasn’t enough fun, it wasn’t interesting
enough, it wasn’t “alive” enough. From there, the team was faced with a
choice. They could either keep going down that path, working on all six
cities and trying to get them finished before launch or make the hard
decision to shelve four of the cities until post-launch and make sure that
Altdorf and Inevitable were as full and rich as their design had intended.
Mythic chose the latter.
“we decided to focus our energies on two capital cities; one for Order and
one for Destruction, and make them fabulous, said Jacobs. “Not good, not
great, but fabulous.”
“We wanted to make our Capital Cities the best cities in any MMO. We think
we’re doing that, but it came at a price and that price is that the other
cities aren’t going in the game right now.”
While he and the rest of the company do realize that this is going to
frustrate some players, they also see three upsides to the decision:
1 Each city will now be polished as much as possible. “These things,” he
said, “are getting our full attention. They are a tremendous effort by the
team on all levels.”
2. Capital cities are more than just “a place for people to hang out, buy
stuff and run around making Chuck Norris jokes,” says Jacobs. He went on to
talk about the detailed nature of these cities and how, no matter how good
you or your team is, you’re not going to get it 100% correct on your first
time around. Starting with two cities will allow the team to learn from
their mistakes so that when the other four are incorporated, they will be
better and the devs won’t have made the same mistakes six times over.
“Nobody gets it right the first time. Not WoW, not Camelot, not EverQuest.
Everyone changes their game once it goes live. We have to expect the same
thing will happen with cities.”
3 Players won’t be distracted or divided between cities and will be able to
focus their collective efforts on a single target and a single defensible
position. “By only starting with two, we can really focus the community,
focus the player base, focus the guilds, the teams, that are all working to
sack the city.”
And thirdly, Mythic partners with Punkbustern an effort to make sure that
their upcoming RvR game (Warhammer Online) is as free from cheaters, hacks and
the like as possible.
“As you know,” said Jacobs in an interview, “we have fought a long battle
against hackers, cheaters and other assorted slimeballs who think that it’s
both fun and fair for them to have an advantage over other players.”
“We obviously did a lot of things in Dark Age of Camelot that worked,” he
continued. “ We banned cheaters whenever we found them. We made a tremendous
effort to sort out and deal with hackers and companies or individuals who
promote this sort of stuff. Did we do a perfect job? Absolutely not, nobody
does, but we did a pretty good job.”
In 2008 though, he said, Warhammer is seeing a much wider distribution than
its earlier counterpart and the landscape of MMOs has changed, leading to
more and more people who look to cheat. Rather than facing down these
cheaters and hackers on their own, Mythic is taking on a partner in
Punkbuster, a company with a strong reputation in the online gaming world.
The Punkbuster news is great news, IMO. Cities, I doubt there'll be *much*
upset at that, good reasons and cities are still in, just not all of them.
The dropping of 4 careers, though? What are your feelings on this, and the
careers themselves? Happy they're dropped? Freaking out?
Let us know :)
