Warhammer team culled some 230 classes to reach their core set

by Michael Zenke Aug 7th 2008 at 10:00AM

Filed under: Fantasy, Classes, Warhammer Online

If you think the recent removal of four classes and four cities from Warhammer Online was tough for the team, just think about what was in Mythic's original design doc. Paul Barnett, speaking to Videogaming247 at the recent Develop event, noted that the team had to go through a lot of back and forth to get to the core list of 20 classes they currently have. The problem is, as he's pointed out in the past, the IP actually initially worked against them by 'requiring' them to put in far more classes than they could ever support.

The result, as Barnett put it, was the need to bring clarity to the situation and concentrate on what the game was actually about. "It's about finding clarity when parts of the project can go a little askew. For instance, we did a lot of work on our chat windows, but we did too much work on them and we started losing focus and my job is to bring clarity back to it. Same thing happened with careers. We went down a terrible path where we had too many careers. We have 250-odd at one point and we boiled it right back down to 20."

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Tags: classes, mythic-entertainment, paul-barnett, war, warhammer-online

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Keen said on 11:21AM 8-07-2008

Mark Jacobs pointed out that this website heinously misquoted Paul Barnett and does so on a regular basis.

http://vnboards.ign.com/warhammer_online_age_of_reckoning_general_board/b22997/108146639/p1/?5

Lars Petersson said on 11:42AM 8-07-2008

Cheers for that...

Although, considering how many different unit types/careers there are in the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying and tabletop games they probably could squeeze in 230 classes some day...

Tony said on 11:47AM 8-07-2008

I imagine at some point they probably did have some massive list... but what actually made it past that and into any sort of conceptualization stage? I'm sure not many more than currently exist.

I think the title of the article on Massively sounds more like what actually happened... where as videogaming247 screams out "Mythic cut over 90 classes from the game!" like they're trying to take advantage of other recent news and make a big story for themselves lol.

danarchy said on 12:35PM 8-07-2008

Jeesh you guys are moody today, air conditioner in mom's basement break or something?

Tony said on 1:58PM 8-07-2008

Who are you even talking about? lol

Iconic said on 3:14PM 8-07-2008

"Oh Dude, we had like, totally, at least... seventy classes. Million. Seventy million classes I mean."

recursive said on 6:34AM 8-08-2008

Lol. OMG that game MUST be good.

Larry-Steve said on 7:31AM 8-13-2008

Just taking a step back to actually grasp what Mythic did, they made 4 classes for each faction. They decide to hack 1 from each except Chaos and High Elves approixmately 1.5 months before release because they 'didn't fit' and that they were going to use the new time to 'polish'?

How much time was spend developing those classes only to be canned or set aside in the end? How much 'polish' do they think we're going to reasonably believe they added in what little time they had left?

What they decided to can was a HUGE decision already a LONG way into development. You think they would have made a decision like that MONTHS and not WEEKS prior to the announcment of when the game would released. I'm still going to play, but it all seems a bit shoddy and poorly organized when you take a step back and look at the picture.