Jacobs Warhammer launch interview pt. 2

On the flipside of that coin, do you remember if there were any specific points in time when you sat back, looked at the game and thought "this thing is really going to make it"?

MJ: Well, you have to understand, I'm never satisfied with a game that we do. Never. It would be hard for me to point out a moment where I thought "we're going to be big," because I can always see the problems. I can always criticize, just like I do with Camelot and just like I do with other games. The closest I think I've come to that was recently when I was playing in some of the scenarios. It wasn't like a light bulb went off, nothing like that.

When you play the game for a while, and you listen to people, you start to get a vibe from it. The vibe from the people is what does it. You listen and hear what they're saying, or not saying sometimes. When you do all the work in the community like I've done, you realize that all you really need is to hear fewer complaints. If the boards are constantly full of people going off about a game, it's in trouble. If the proportion of that is lower, even if there isn't a ton of praise, a game's got a shot. Unfortunately people like to say bad things more often than good things, right?

You just mentioned your analysis of other titles, which has been in the press of late. Some players seemed to see your comments about World of Warcraft's 'invulnerability' as throwing down a gauntlet. Did you intend it that way?

MJ: No. I'm not throwing down the gauntlet. There are two things about WoW: it's the most important MMO of our generation. No question. But the flipside to that is that it is not invincible. I know how to beat WoW, if I really wanted to. It means more time, more money, and more risk. You beat WoW by waiting for it to age a little bit, and then you have to make a game that's better than WoW in pretty much every aspect. That's a hell of a commitment.

Blizzard spent an incredible amount of time and money and it shows. That's why I never have said that our goal is to beat WoW. Our goal is to have a great game, hopefully be number two of all time in North America and Europe, and make people very happy. That'll be great!

Beating WoW, really, means that you have to do what only one company has done in the 11 years that MMOs have really been popular. That is, to really expand the market by a huge percentage over what the previous guy did. Blizzard did that, they blew out EQ/Final Fantasy's numbers by tenfold. We'd have to top that by a lot. That's just a level of hubris I just don't have.

This all stemmed from Bobby Kotick's original comment about Blizzard and a billion dollars, correct?

MJ: The question to me back then was, did I agree with Bobby Kotick that it would take a billion dollars to compete with Blizzard? My answer is no. It was no then, and it's no now. There are two ways of competing. If you're competing and you have to win, you have to be number one, that's going to be really expensive ... not a billion, but really expensive. The other way to compete is to be happy with a really good chunk of users as number two. Any company that is in business in a field dominated by an industry giant is, by definition, still in competition. Just because you're not number one doesn't mean you haven't succeeded. Frankly depending on what you spend on a game, the length of time you keep subscribers, you can be more profitable at number two than number one.

Blizzard is obviously different here, they just have so many more subscribers. But if you look at Camelot, for example, we spent two and a half million on developing the game and 660,000 on marketing it. At 3.1 million, approximately, we were more profitable than a lot of other games that were right around our numbers. We cost so much less to make.

I'm happy to compete with Blizzard, to fight it out for RvR supremacy. I'm sure they're going to have some great systems, and throw some new wrinkles into things with Lich King. We're looking forward to it.

You mentioned Dark Age of Camelot, and obviously the high end RvR game in that game has a lot in common with Warhammer Online. Can you talk about the lessons you learned from your first game, what lessons you took away as a conceptual framework to use on Warhammer?

MJ: Boy, just about everything. RvR in Warhammer, if you look at Camelot, has a lot of things in common with what we've done before. Others are totally new. The sacking of the cities is new, the endgame feel is very different than what you see in Camelot. But, of course, we have Keeps. We have Open RvR areas. We have the whole idea of RvR and what it means to the players. Certainly we've done a much better job of balancing things from the start.

Seven years of running Camelot have given us a very good idea of what the classes need to do. Hopefully we've learned something like our expansion Trials of Atlantis, which pissed off just a few people.

Ultimately what I think we've learned from Camelot is how to give people different things to do. Different options for players to do on the PvE and RvR sides. Our dungeons and public quests and regular quests give players different ways to level on that side. What we tried to do when we laid out this game, "look you can level up any darn way you want." If you want to level up doing just RvR you can, if you want to just to PvE you can. If you want a combination, you can do that. I hope that's what people do!

We had some really great storylines in the Camelot quests. I think it was ... the third time EA was in talks with us to buy us, it came out that a bunch of them were Camelot fans. Several of them were interested in buying us because of the strength of our storylines, over other games. Not all of them are great, of course, but I think we have some really great epic ones.

Warhammer has been about taking lessons from Camelot, taking lessons from Imperator, even taking lessons from WoW, and trying not to make mistakes that have been already been made.

Have you had a chance to play the game now that you're in production? What class do you play?

MJ: I've been playing on and off for the last few weeks, I even had the chance to play today. I play a bunch of different classes on both sides – I tend to like Destruction a little bit better. The only types of characters I don't play are healers; I'm just not very good at them.

I'll be playing both sides on a number of servers post-launch. I've done this all along with Camelot as well, to play the game for enjoyment and to find out what people are saying. I listen to the chat, I sometimes join a guild and listen to what they're saying ... it's great to hear the unfiltered opinions of the people playing the game. When you play with other people, not just people from Mythic, when you really listen to what they're saying – they're not saying it for an audience like they are when they post to a forum. Talking on forums can lead to saying things just for effect, it colors their words.

You can't listen to everyone all the time, but I think it's important to get out and listen to a wider range of opinions. We have surveys, feedback inside the game, all the different ways we interact with our players. For me one of the most valuable is just to play, and listen to what they have to say.

Thank you sir, for your time. We hope the rest of the week goes as well as the head start.

Mark Jacobs: Thank you.