PAX08: WAR's Paul Barnett and Jeff Hickman interviewed, page three
Massively: This one's for all the Warhammer lore fans. Tomb Kings or Vampire Counts? If you had your pick-
Jeff: For what?
Massively: Tabletop, let's say...
Jeff: You mean personally or for our game?
Paul: Bear in mind that what you're talking about there is wet undead and dry undead. Wet-undead is generally European and dry-undead generally north African. My preference -- because of my culture and where I come from -- I'm a wet-undead person and wet-undead is generally one that appeals to most Westerners-
Jeff: Sexy.
Paul: Therefore Vampire Counts, wet undead, that's what I go for every time. That's my calling. I like the imagery of the dry undead. There's something cool about caskets, souls, mummies, Egypt and the rest of it, but on a basic core driver, wet-undead every time for me. That gets me all ...frothy.
Jeff: I agree one-hundred percent.
Massively: Each faction right now has a total of up to four careers, in the future at any time can we expect to see a fifth or a sixth career?
Jeff: It's possible.
Massively: It's possible?
Jeff: We've talked about it.
Massively: Everyone loves Greenskins.
Paul: Everyone loves the Greenskins. What we're looking for here is utility. We're looking for utility, we're looking for "What can we add that makes the best possible impact for the majority of the subscribers and the players in the most productive way?" So you want to be careful with your designers, sometimes they can get a bit carried away. They get an idea in their head and they go "Oooh, we should have this idea!" Not because it's what we need-
Massively: -'cause it's cool.
Paul: Yeah, so what we are looking for is "wants" We need what we want and then what we need. What we need is more important than what we want. Just because you want vampires doesn't mean that you need vampires. Everything goes on that.
Massively: The open group system and the Public Quest system and the way you just jump in and find groups and find friends and find people to play with is amazing and great-
Jeff: Thank you.
Massively: -and a huge step forward, we think. It's increasing the visibility of grouping and the social aspects of MMOs.
Jeff: We're putting the "Massively" back into MMOs.
Massively: Exactly. Being Massively.com we love that.
Paul: Shameless.
Massively: What we're wondering is: In the future, will we see further steps for say, more visibility for guilds? Making guilds in-game, joining guilds, advertising guilds possibly?
Jeff: Yes.
Paul: We love guilds.
Jeff: So, the first unit is group, then the next unit is guilds and that expands into communities. This is why we do alliances and realms, it all builds on each other. So it's super-important for us to enable people to find guilds, to be in guilds, to love guilds, to progress guilds. It's why we have a living guild system like we do.
Paul: Because it's unique and wonderful and fantastic.
Jeff: Absolutely. So we've talked about and as a matter of fact we had a preliminary system in-game for looking for guilds and that kind of stuff. It wasn't as good as we wanted it to be, so we pulled back on it a little bit. We'll probably push that out after we've launched the game. Yeah, there'll be something like that eventually.
Massively: Thanks for the interview.
Paul and Jeff: Hey, thank you.
