Warhammer Online Interview

This is the English translation of an interview posted in the German website war-welten.de.

Frage: Buffbots were a huge problem in DAoC, how are you trying to prevent that in WAR?

Antwort: At first, there is no /stick command in WAR. You would actually need to play both characters in order to keep you buffed or even to follow your mainchar. Furthermore there are no traditional support-classes in WAR. The Warrior Priest, for example, is able to buff and heal but if he isn’t fighting himself he is not building up Righteous Fury. Without Righteous Fury his abilities are a lot less effective. This is also true for the shaman and his Waaagh.

Frage: Are you playing classical pen & paper roleplaying games yourself and how would you compare WAR to pen & paper games?

Antwort: I’ve played pen&paper games as long as I lived in Germany. I’ve even tried the Warhammer pen&paper game, but my group chose to play “Das Schwarze Auge”. But I’m playing the Warhammer tabletop game. I set up my second army and we’re playing every lunch break in the office. It’s hard to compare the tabletop with the MMO, but you’ll recognize a lot of things and feel at home. We’ve heavily based the MMO’s design on the original tabletop models. Everything from clothing to colors, every emblem and every tiny detail is based on the tabletop game. When you enter the world, you’ll instantly feel at home, if you know the Warhammer universe.

Frage: What is WAR offering for casual gamers?

Antwort: Warhammer is not exclusively designed for powergamers! WAR should be a game. I don’t want to goof on World of Warcraft, don’t get me wrong. It did much for the market itself. But it seems like everyone is thinking WoW invented the genre. Everyone is comparing everything to WoW, saying “uh that’s just in wow” which makes my hairs stand to the end. MMORPGs have a more than 10 year old tradition and we need to change the concepts to make them more suitable for beginners. I like complex games but you can’t make them to inaccessible. As a matter of fact you can do nearly everything solo in Warhammer, but it makes more sense to level in a group, which is a part of online gaming. As always, powergamers will progress faster and will be first to achieve a lot of higher content, but nevertheless a casual gamer will have a lot of things to do too and will see a lot of the things a powergamer will encounter.

Frage: Will there be different difficulty settings for groups?

Antwort: The mobs have their individual level which creates the difficulty itself. Then there will be mobs with special abilities and heroic mobs which you should avoid by running for your life, if you’re solo. The harder mobs will grant, of course, bigger rewards.