Q/A with Jeff Hickman reveals what won’t make release, what has changed, and more!

  • Post author:
  • Post category:MMORPG

A few posts down you’ll find a bunch of links to videos from the Paris event. All of them are pure gold. The one I found most interesting was the Q&A w/ Jeff Hickman where Jeff is asked questions by the press in a small room. It’s very casual and laid back and the questions are about anything and everything. The setting allowed for Jeff to sit back and be real, or at least as real as his job will allow him to be with an NDA. During the interview Jeff answered a few questions which revealed the following:

– Changing appearance as you level won’t make it into the game.

– Dwarf Mounts are the only mount that hasn’t been decided upon and its almost certain that it won’t be the mechanical chariot shown in concept art.

– City Sieges will be instanced thus restricting the number of participants per instance. 75v75

– Raids. Mythic doesn’t believe in them.

Initial reaction: DANGIT! Appearance changes to show level progression was a feature I was really, really looking forward to because it sounds so practical. Jeff explained the system that they have all planned out including the option to accept the appearance change or not. He talked about dwarf beards growing and chaos eyes glowing and even mentioned that they have a spreadsheet with every change for every race done. But then said that it won’t make it into the game because it’s too much work. That’s a real bummer. I’m genuinely disappointed and hope that they’ll find time to add that to the game in the near future. I think that will add a lot of depth and contribute to the scope of Warhammer.

Jeff talks about how the mechanic chariot just didn’t look good. I can appreciate the need for things to look good. I just hope they don’t turn out to be rams or goats… you get where I’m going with this I trust. Games Workshop has a list of appropriate Dwarven mounts that Mythic will work with. Personally, I think gyrocopters would be great!

City sieges instancing themselves — I’m on the fence right now in that “looking around at everyone else in the room” phase. City sieges, because they will be such a big draw for players, will be restricted to 75v75 and that means that some people will be pushed into other instances. All the instances contribute to the victory pool and matter, but somehow it’s just not sitting well with me. I understand that this is needed to stop the server from imploding and I get the fact that WAR will be catering to a now much larger audience than DAOC did… but I hope that it’s capable of sustaining that feeling of immersion. It could go either way right now.

“We don’t believe in that get giant amounts of people together in a PvE environment and go kill a monster… Almost all the PvE encounters in the game are designed for one group. We don’t believe in the lets get 20-40 people together and put together some big raid to do stuff…”

THANK YOU! I’ve been waiting for Mythic to finally say that they’re not trumpeting raiding in their game. There are other games that do that and that’s not what Warhammer is about. Warhammer is about the RvR campaign, and Jeff explains all of that in the Q/A video. WAR will have some great PvE though and Jeff goes into great detail about that including one of the specific dungeons, Keep Lords, and all that good stuff.  It just won’t require large amounts of people (except Keep Lords). Again, Thank you Mythic.

That’s all I’m going to talk about from this specific video. Watch it! It’s worth it.

  • Instanced sieges? Yuck. Hopefully I can get used to them but right now my reaction is that sucks- I want big epic battles, and instances just add to the whole theme park feel of an MMO. It’s a shame about the level changes too, since they’ve been talking about that as long as they’ve been talking about the game. I’m getting a hero class vibe from it, unfortunately.

  • Man, I’m sorely disappointed about the level changes not going into the game. I was totally wrapped up in how my chaos character would develop. Bummer. I’m also a little timid of city sieges being instanced. I want to see my friends by my side, knocking down the enemy gates and sacking the city. I don’t want to see, ” Oh hey I’m in City Siege 1, what are you in?” That will be a huge drawback for me. I’ll still play and enjoy myself, but I’ll be much happier in the open PvP and not the city sieges.

  • Whoah I must’ve missed the bit in the past where they won’t have Raids, that sorta impacts my views on how successful WAR was going to be in terms of what playerbase it could steal from WoW.

    I’m pretty surprised that if they have no Raiding and these other pretty important features that they’re struggling so much to get things finished and in for retail, that’s if it doesn’t get pushed back again. Maybe there’s bigger problems afoot? =/

  • With city seiges did they say they would have as many instances as needed for that? Because here is my question:

    Lets say the greenskins have 300 people wanting to attack the dwarf city and the dwarves only have 150 to defend.

    Do they:

    A – Create 2 instances because that’s all the lesser team could support.
    B – Create 4 instances because that’s what the bigger team supports.

    Either you have half the greenskins not being able to participate or you have all the instances with 2 attackers to every 1 defender and the defenders get steamrolled.

    When they say “Sieges are instanced” it makes me think they’ll do neither of things things and that they will only create ONE 75v75 instance. In the similar way as Pirates of the Burning Sea does for port sieges and in the end only 75 people can participate on either side. This will piss people off because if you have a bunch of schmucks go in there instead of your best players, you’re screwed.

  • @ Mordiceius: Yes, they will have as many instances as needed. That’s their whole reasoning behind using instances. They feel that SO MANY people will want to participate in each city siege that the server won’t be able to handle all those people in one specific area. To handle the load they’ll split into instances to handle all the people at a total of 75v75 per instance. Everyone can participate and each of the instances contributes to the victory pool.

    And remember that this is with CAPITAL CITIES. Raiding keeps in the open world RvR will remain uninstanced.

  • Capital Cities being instanced worries me, a large part of why WoW’s pvp is so broken is because pvp fundamentally didnt affect anything.

    Back in DAoC, yeah youd have 300 people raiding a zone, but as you took keeps and pushed closer and closer to the relic keep, suddenly defenders would realize “HEY WERE GONNA LOSE OUR RELICS!” and had real incentive to defend.

    In the heydey of DAoC I remember relic keep sieges with 300+ players on either side with a third realm sometimes helping or hindering the attackers or attacking a weakened frontier.

    Instanced city sieges in my opinion removes the immediacy and threat and world impact of sieges, theres no “incentive” to defend it really, no rallying force to defend your city and push back the oncoming horde, because ultimately it has no effect on you. Yeah you look like dirty little squigs, but so what? you can just run around and gank people because them attacking your city would mean nothing in the grand scheme of the game anymore, this was the big flaw of Battlegrounds in wow, and not a lesson the mythic development should be pulling from wow, as they did battlegrounds (thidranki!) better by far, and there was no limits there, at least when I played (I left shortly after Frontiers).

  • Also I have to ask, if its limited to 75v75, does that mean there will be no, or few, or only weak NPC’s helping? will you be unable to attack a “boss” because if you do 75 enemies of the other realm will come storming in and murder you? City sieges, should rally a great deal of defense and turn into a no holds barred battle, despite albions superior numbers in DAoC we rarely managed to hold all the relics, an honor held for the tree hugging hibbies most of the time.

    Sorry to continue the rant, but large player instances just worry me in many waves, it dumbs down things and can severely weakn your force (newer weaker people vs 75 more powerful better geared opponens = no chance of victory, no matter what you do).

    WoW Battlegrounds run into this problem, DAoC’s did as well, but it was common for people to rally up support for one of the level battlegrounds and suddenly field a huge force to push back the enemy and take the keep, nobody CONSTANTLY held anything, no matter how many advantages they had, and overall this was “balanced” (Until ToA, ew, I wont get into that).

  • I’d rather have a fun, instanced 75v75 battle than an unistanced lagfest. Sure, open world is better, but have you ever gone into a huge battle in EVE Online? One action a minute is not fun.

  • I didn’t expect changing/developing appearances to make the final game — we just haven’t heard much on it past mentions about a couple races, and Mythic’s definitely shifted their focus to trophies, which I think are a much better way to differentiate your character’s look as you level.

  • I’m sure the players who enjoy the game will move over, raids or no raids. Certainly its good news for those who love pvp cuz this shows where their focus is going to be more than anything. Raid content takes a lot of work to design and maintain and only the ‘leet’ get to enjoy it. Pvp content can be enjoyed by a much larger swath of the populace and if done well could be something really special.:) Thanks for the info bytes Keen.

  • That’s a real bummer about the character appearances. That was one of the cooler features to the whole game! I hope what he means is “that feature won’t make it in to the game AT RELEASE”, rather than “that feature won’t make it into the game, EVER”. I realize the trophy system will make up for it to an extent, but still, who doesn’t want to be a huge ork at rank 40 or tripping over your beard as a dwarf?

    I’m also on the fence about the instanced city seiges thing. To an extent I can see the point, but what happens when the attacked brings 150 people and the defender brings 50? You get 75 vs 50 battle and a 75 vs 0 battle? That second one isn’t going to be much fun, and is probably less fair to the defenders than a 150 vs 50. Conversely, what happens if the defenders have 150 people and the attackers have 75? You have a 75 vs 75 battle and a 0 vs 75 battle? Obviously the attackers can’t win the second instance, but does it even matter? I suppose they might be smart enough to make it proportional, such that the second example would be 37 vs 75 and 38 vs 75, but it’s still an annoying concept.

    Actually, scratch the ‘on the fence’ comment, I don’t like the idea of instanced 75 v 75 city sieges. It’s going to break the feel of the entire battle. Rather than spread players out between instances they should be working on spreading players out within the city by making objectives far apart and the cities quite huge. Make the cities instanced on their own beefy servers so that the zone can handle a heavy load of players, and design the cities to spread the attackers and defenders out to minimize the performance impact on player computers.

  • All i desired from WAR was a Daoc 2.0 without stealth.

    Instanced PvP siege – Nooooooooooooooooooo !

    Ive quit PotBs because of that.

    Maybe if they make multiple instances it may not suffer from the problems i had in PotBs… /hope

    How many times in Daoc was i in a good PVE farming spot and some server wide announcement about the ennemy approaching my relics got everyone running to defend. Pure chaotic fun. Everyone invited. Zerg lag fest. i like.

    I fear for those general chat : “Is there still room for defense?”

    or the infamous, Siege instance 1 is so great zomg best battle ever.. while being in Siege instance 2 ;/

    This week i heard two news that destroyed my hopes in the two games im looking forwar to.

    WAR – instanced siege 🙁
    Age of Conan – I heard something about Invisible walls. I cried a little. Awaiting non-NDA-breaking reviews. heh.

  • Yeah, sure it was laggy but I loved the huge relic battles where everyone rushed to defend… Instanced city sieges just removed the immediacy and realm pride I feel should be associated with it, throwing more and more bodies until its a huge chaotic battle to defend against all costs!

    I remember having to run max sized battlegroups and chat channels in DAoC because there was just THAT many people pvping and pushing for the warfare, which I assume they will also allow for keep sieging… then when you get to the grail of attacking the enemy, your limitd to 75? Doesnt make sense.