GDC09: WAR interview with Paul Barnett and Jeff Skalski
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.
