WAR (Warhammer Online)

"Why don't we ever wear pants to these things?!"

"It's EAMythic!" Two words yelled into the speakerphone that couldn't possibly prepare you for what's about to come. After a fast roll-call, Eddiemae gets us under way right quick. I have to say, for her to keep this group of lunatics (you decide which - us press or EAMythic) in line is not only a tough job, but I have to say, personally damned funny to be included in.
Right off the bat they go into ribbing the poor woman, and from there it went down hill at ludicrous speed. Yes, I used a Spaceballs term - it's only fitting, trust me.

So here's where we began....Josh began with talking about where we are right now with the Closed Beta. "We've just finished testing up some of our mid-level Elven Content....".....and here's where everyone else jumped in. "It's the targetted, interative.....we're not just letting people randomly walk around the game. We're opening targetted bits of the game and we're saying to them, 'we need you to press all of your energy on this one particular piece, so we want you to test it and break it and we'll repair it."  Then Jeff jumps in with where we are right now. "We're currently testing the Campaign Game, the highest RvR sections of our game, where players are in, right now as a matter of fact, testing the fight between Altdorf and the Inevitable City, fighting the land between the two cities, testing the keeps and seige and battlefield objectives and scenarios and all things that happen in that area."

This is as far as Jeff is allowed to get, because Paul immediately jumps in with a story about his special little board he has in his office.

"Today a new name went on my board, I have this board, right? And people have to come to me, they have to confess! Like they do to a.....like a Priest. And they have to come and tell me that they were playing the game, but they were actually playing it. They weren't really playing it like some sort of belligerent developer, but they actually get caught by their co-workers going "you're really playing it!" So Mike who works over in content, great worker, absolute superstar, got called out today, his shoulders were hunched over, hand clawed on the mouse, frantically fighting, and one of his co-workers was saying 'dude, you look just like you like when you're playing one of the games you pay money for!' so he had to come up to my office, he had to confess, added his name to the board, got the date and time, at what point did he suddenly realize he was playing an awesome game! So that happened today, that was great. There you go."

And then silence which gets broken by Eddiemae....

"....Alright...so...."

*Laughter Errupts*

So we get to the topic of feedback by the testers. Are they happy? "Absolutely" says Jeff. At this point he reads off some feedback "written into our feedback system last night" and I chuckle a bit because, to be honest, I think one of the things he read off was mine. "This phase is awesome. I love the campaign. That is all." And Jeff ends with "these are quotes from testers last night...so yes, we're very pleased." 

With this, the question comes up about how exactly does the gameplay differ from that of Camelot, being that it's RvR and based on the concept started with DAOC.

"We know what we're doing!" Paul shouts from the background. That pretty much sums it up right there, folks. They know and have learned what was fun, what wasn't, what can work and what can't. Not only that, but they can and are doing things that make the game so much more expansive and deep.

"Boiling oil on men's skin"

Yes you've read that right.... What they have found out during testing of seige is that women in particular have a thing for pouring boiling oil on men. Jeff's lovely wife especially "giggles with glee for hours on end" as she pours boiling oil on enemies below. Apparently according to Paul "this is it, this is what women want to do. I always look up when I got into castles now after that."

Silence always follows things like this because, no matter how prepared you are for the randomness of these things, you never really are. I think they get a kick out of trying to catch us off guard. I would wager it's difficult to give us detailed explanations on things like Alliances and how much deeper Guilds are with Paul randomly shouting "put your pants back on!" But they all try quite hard. So in between random yells about pants, pig hats and boiling oil, a question gets in about how many people they expect it would take to take a capital city. The answer from Paul? "16 fathoms plus 3 whales...that's how many...you can quote me on that." Clearly real actual numbers won't get revealed for something like this, but the answers are fun and probably remarkably close to reality even in jest. The one thing for sure is that they don't want running a guild, scheduling things, and alliances to be a full time job. In-game messages and the WARHerald helps keep players informed in everything at all times whenever they wish.

Then we hit on an all important question that is always on everyone's minds.....what they plan to do to prevent one side that wins from getting stronger and stronger, thus creating a vicious cycle of the defeated getting constantly weaker while the winners getting so progressively stronger, that it creates a permanent imbalance on the server. This time the EAMythic Team was silent....and the buck gets passed to Adam. "The longer that a zone is under control of the winning side, we start doing little things to sort of bring the losers up to par. Things like slowly taking the winning side's advantage away slower and slower as time progresses." Josh jumps in with " Offering things like buffs to the underpowered Realm, trying to give them the opportunity to get back on their feet. What we're NOT trying to do is punish you for being successful, but what we are trying to do is give you a sense that the competition is always lively, interesting, and there are a number of organic things that we are doing to try and encourage population balance, class balance - which is what Adam spends his entire life trying to do.......and so if it doesn't work...it's all Adam's fault...."
Of course, Paul has something to say on this one too! "People always say things like 'but what if everyone decides to play one side?!' and so far in every trial we've done, it's balanced out. It's absolutely frightening. It's almost as though we've made both sides compelling and both sides interesting and we've made the combat and RvR so good and so balanced that people have gone 'it doesn't really matter, I'm a great time whichever way, burn a city here, kill a king there, get a new hat...get a PIG HAT! A PIG HAT! Ride around on my Wolf...."

At this point...everyone howls...yes howls. And pig hats.

So the short answer is, there are organic things they are doing to try and attract at a populatuion level and mechanical things you do to make sure that the numbers make sense. So rest assured gang. Like we've always said. There are ALOT of things in place to deal with any possible imbalance issue, population, careers or otherwise.

"A Jolly Good Time"

Who are they targetting...the top 10% or the average gamer. This is a question that people have been hammering on about for years now and the game isn't even out yet. We have a definate answer for you too. "YES!" says Paul. Thankfully Jeff has a much clearer answer to it or our heads would probably explode at this point trying to figure it out from there. "We're targetting everybody. It's not about what you can get, it's how long it takes you to get it. If you persevere as a player in our game...and I really hate to make it sound like you're struggling because it's not about that, it's about achievements, it's about being skillfull at playing the game. Everybody has access to the end game content. Everybody has access to the items. City Seiges are about alot of people, but not about big giant raids. You can walk into a city alone because there WILL be other people there for you to fight along side. Because it's a Realm vs. Realm game, you always have friends. It really is accessable to everybody."

And yes, Paul comes in with more. "There's an obsession with designers to build for the top 10% because they're very loud and they're very successful. And that actually leads you to doom and destruction. When you build say, like a Golf Course. You can build a Golf Course so that only Tiger Woods can actually get to par, but that would be madness. What you do is you actually build a GOOD Golf Course, and if Tiger Woods decides to go and shoot something, you know what? He's going to score HUGE. But everyone else is going to have a damned good game, and they're going to understand and have things to aim for. It's the same sort of logic. We've built our end game so that it is fun and compelling and attractive and a great hobby. And if you're in the top 10% and you're one of those people who is incredibly clever and quick and obsessively brilliant you're probably going to excell at it, and that's ok because everyone else treats it like a jolly good time."

So there you have it gang.

We tried to squeeze out Crafting info, but no luck. Everyone hid....except Jeff and Paul. What we got was "plants, stuff to drink, caves and fungus. You can do anything as long as it helps with the act of war. We don't have time for bakers and candle-stick makers, but we have time for Butchers." That's as far as it went. Sorry, gang!

"Did they say Fall of 2008?"

Yes. They said it in many tones, in many ways, they even sang it. This is the targetted date and that's as exact as we will get right now.
With that we moved along to length of time it takes to get to the max Renown Rank. "Alot!" They won't give hours on this one. "While our leveling is fairly quick, actually, our Renown Leveling is much slower. That's where we want people to spend the time and earn the most. Killing other people. Not that hard to learn, not that hard to get competent, difficult to get brilliant at. Easy to learn, hard to master."

"Water Cooler Questing"

At this point, PvE comes up. Will they create the same madness and war in the PvE aspect that is in the RvR aspect. "Every system of the game is intertwined. The RvR experience and the PvE experience....you can experience them independantly, but at some point you're going to realize that you rely on the players that are focusing on the other side of it in order to accomplish the goals that are important to YOU. A good example is the Campaign level of the game. Everything you do in the game, this includes PvE, helps you in the war effort. Quests, PQs, Tome Unlocks, Crafting. Everything you do helps the overall upper level RvR. It all trickles up through the Tiers. As a result, in that Fourth Tier you need people to be questing, to be successful at the lower Tiers in PvE and PvP, so the higher Tier RvR players benefit from the PvE players all through the game. Everything that's going on in the game impacts whether you have this, that or the other thing. Everything in the world is focused on that war effort impacting everything that you do."

And somehow Chaos Bunnies get into the conversation.

And Paul chimes in. "My boy relentlessly annihilates his dad and he laughs and won't ever let me live it down. So I have an aversion to PvP. So what I like doing is I like going off on my own and doing Player vs. Environment so I don't have some 9 year old kid pummeling me into the dirt. And so what I like about W.A.R., is that when I go off and do that, I'm left alone, I have a complete game experience, I am one of the malcontents who just want to do PvE and be left alone, but I can level all the way through the game, I can take on Giants, I can kill Dragons, I can help with Seige equipment, and what happens when they start burning the city to the ground, I can wander over and I can go into the city, do all sorts of crazy quests, pillaging and murdering and not have to worry about anyone else. Whereas my boy, all he's done is the PvP part of the game, all he wants to do is kill people forever and he's happy too."

And yes, there is PvE Seige, where you can use Seige Wepons on NPCs for quests! At this point, a speed rant comes about PQs and they remind us of the PQ that was designed by the Press at the Press Conference back in August 2006. I personally can't wait for that one, as we reported, we had a blast helping create it! Incidentally, there are over 300 PQs in the game...they are truly everywhere! "What we want to do is have people stand around the water cooler at work and talk about all of the great things they did with the PQs the night before" says Jeff.

Scenarios and Guilds

As we got on about Scenarios - which basically repeated the entire podcast on them from the officlal site, an interesting point that I know plenty will be interested in knowing is that there are over 30 of them and they are available at every level in the game.
At this point, I would go into what we talked about as far as Guilds go, but honestly, it's all totally covered in the latest released Guild Podcast. So I won't bore you with repeating it.
But.....what about the people that don't want to be in large guilds? Will they be at a disadvantage to the larger 200+ person guilds? "No. We have things in place to try and equal things as much as we can. We don't want guilds being massive just for the sake of getting as much XP and leveling as fast as they can. We're not saying that large guilds can't gain XP a LITTLE faster but it's not something that has a massive advantage."
They touched ever slightly on 'anti-zerg mechanisms', but we didn't get much in the way of real detail other than "if you know what you're doing, you will always beat the zergites. You will slaughter them if you actually know how to play the game."

"Paul Barnett Hates You"

So just how viable IS solo-play? "Very viable!" screams Paul. "It's the only play I do, because I hate everybody. And I have a great time!"
Jeff let's us know that "you'll get a different experience playing solo than you would with a group or guild or with a Warband, but you can experience almost all of the content fully as a solo player." Paul has a small correction. "You can experience ALL of the content fully! I don't talk to another human being in that game and I've taken part in PQs - other people just have to be there, attacking the King - other people just have to be there. You can take part, but you can't do it ALONE. Point is I've had a BLAST of a time never actually having to talk to anyone."

Josh takes this opportunity to let us know that "when you're not quite as anti-social as Paul, it's very hard to stay solo for very long in the game. It's designed to take players like Paul who are malicious, belligerent, anti-social, malcontent and trick them into making friends. It's the Holy Grail of video games - tricking you into having a social life!"

Paul continues "I'm always getting invited into groups. I'm always getting tells of people saying 'hey you're really good join our group' and they won't leave me alone!"

In order to be in a group in this game, you don't have to run around a city for 3 hours going "looking for group, looking for group, looking for group", and then you have to log off because you've run out of time.

And finally Paul again "for those of you that say you hate everyone and you don't want to be forced to group....you don't have to."

This is when we were informed that a good title of the articles would be 'Paul Barnett Hates You'.

As we came to a close, the viability of leveling only in PvP came up. Yes it will be viable, yes it will be just as viable as leveling in PvE. They are currently looking at all kinds of insane data to make sure that this goal is absolutely met. It is attainable and it will happen. Period.

"Emotionally Engorged"

When asked for some final thoughts, Paul begins the story that spawned the title for this article....."So we had a guy from Black Box.....an EA studio that makes a game called 'The Need for Speed', he came down, hanging out, asked in all honesty, he says 'the Tome of Knowledge - it's just a book, right? I don't see why you keep going on about it.' Then during the evening when we were feeding him food and being nice, he basically kept going on about 'it's just a book, you keep telling people it's great, I don't understand it, it's just a book!' The following day we sat him down in this very room we're still doing this conference in, and we leave him alone for 2 hours, we came back in, he stood up, he came over and he said 'I take it all back, the Tome of Knowledge is just awesome! I have an emotional attachment to it!' he had an emotional reaction! He was emotionally engorged!
The point is, we keep telling people about it, but the more you experience it, the better and more enjoyable it becomes!"

"YAY, ONLY-WAR!!"

As Eddiemae let us all know it was time to say goodbye, shouts of "NoooOOooOOOo" were heard from the EAMythic Team. After some random ranting and plugging about the Collector's Edition....and pig hats, it was time to do a final roll-call of the media in on this call......and when it came to state who I was and what site I came from I was met with cheers of "YAY, ONLY-WAR!!!" To me, that's the best way to end this call and this article.

Thanks guys. =)