GDC09: WAR interview with Paul Barnett and Jeff Skalski
by Brooke Pilley 
Mar 31st 2009 at 6:00PM
Filed under: Fantasy, Interviews, Warhammer Online, News items
Massively's very own Shawn Schuster had a chance to catch up with Warhammer Online Creative Director Paul Barnett and RvR Producer Jeff Skalski at GDC 2009. They chatted about the recent player (re)acquisition campaign, server merges, Land of the Dead, and much more.There has been a strong push to attract new and ex-players to Warhammer recently. Are we witnessing the rebirth of WAR?
Skalski: The title of our live expansion arc is Call to Arms and this has meaning both inside and outside the game. Outside, we have the recruit-a-friend program, free trial, and retrial. We are trying to make potential players aware of all the improvements we have made to performance, game mechanics, bugs, etc.. We are heavily focused on this free live expansion and have no immediate desire to release a boxed expansion.
How has the feedback been to this player acquisition campaign so far?
Skalski: Feedback has been generally good, though it is obviously subjective. We are always trying to improve Warhammer based on player feedback, especially on core features like RvR. What do players gravitate towards? Let's focus on that. There are also many things in the game right now that weren't ready for launch, such as zone domination and the four careers. We hope this will help give players a great experience.
Barnett: These games are never finished. As soon as you start piling players in, you start finding new and interesting problems that you never had before. We needed to beat on our performance issues, get our stability better, locate and isolate crazy game changing tactics and strategies. With that, the Lich King, and the worst recession in living memory, not as many people found the game to be the right mix for them as we'd hoped.
You learn things like scenarios, which were put in as a pressure valve for open RvR actually had the complete opposite effect - they became the main magnet and open RvR was left behind. You need to go in and retool your main misconceptions. We have a lot of fixes in WAR now and the game feels a lot better.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Godzoox said on 10:47AM 4-01-2009
"You learn things like scenarios, which were put in as a pressure valve for open RvR actually had the complete opposite effect - they became the main magnet and open RvR was left behind"
They were told for a year this would happen by beta testers/Forums I like how it dawned on them that it didn't work...
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Mr. Digital said on 1:08PM 4-01-2009
It's too bad Massively didn't ask the real questions, like why Paul is such a douche and why they decided to make Warhammer Online a parody of what Warhammer is supposed to be, instead of following the setting and the mood of the game appropriately.
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Vandell said on 3:29PM 4-02-2009
"Rated T for teen."
Many things read in books come out quite gory in-game l, unfortunately. P:
Mr. Digital said on 4:45PM 4-02-2009
It's more than just a matter of it being gory or not. It's also the fact that the Warhammer setting is supposed to be very dark, very serious. You can make it dark and serious without making it gory if you want to maintain a certain rating. But the game just comes across as being silly, like a cartoon.
It might not bother some people that are encountering Warhammer for the first time, but I know there are a lot of Warhammer fans that were excited about the game because they wanted to adventure around in the world of Warhammer, but instead got this parody that's a mere shadow of what it's supposed to be.