The Last WAR Presentation
MMORPG.com's Carolyn Koh caught up with a very tired team from Mythic Entertainment's Warhammer Online as they completed the last of their many, many off-the-wall presentations. In this interview, the guys talk about launch and sleep and reveal some interesting statistics from the game.
At PAX there was little that Associate Producer Josh Drescher, could tell me about Warhammer that we had not already covered at E3, GenCon or Leipzig.
“We’re polishing, polishing, polishing,” he said. “All customization is in. The facial scarring and tattoos for the dark elves, the jewellery for the dwarves and the accessories for each race and career. They’re all in.”
The collector’s edition, I was told. will have unique face models and accessories for each race and career. We ranged over a number of subjects and grasping at straws, I asked about the success and lessons learned from the open preview weekend. Nothing to report from that either, it showed them that their work on their servers had borne fruit as the servers remained stable. The architecture is all in place and they are simply working on performance enhancement in the client at this time. Confident from the test that their servers would be able to handle the expected heavy loads on launch day, it’s all the backend, boring server and hardware work that they are concentrating on right now.
“We plan to push this out then sleep for a month!” exclaimed Josh. “We’re ready.”
They have the numbers to test their game during this last phase of beta, with 200,000 beta players in North America alone. This is not the first game that Mythic has shipped and in the early days of MMOGs, the launch of Dark Ages of Camelot was a comparatively successful and stable launch.
The Jeff and Paul (Hickman and Barnett) presentation on Saturday was the same show they had done at Leipzig, and this would be the last show for them. “There’s nothing left for us to tell you,” Paul reiterated. “The NDA has been lifted, the launch is September 18, and you guys know it all.”
They did share a number of facts and figures with the audience as part of the show:
Warhammer was 3 years in the making, there are 250 members on the team, every dev has moved offices 3.4 times and 2 million man hours went into the making of Warhammer. In a comedic turn, Paul told us also that 10 Warhammer babies were born to the team; the average weight gained by developers was 8lbs, although Jeff actually lost weight during the process.
Other tidbits thrown out during the show included the most popular careers: Witch hunter for Order, Black Orc (or BOrc) on the Destruction side and green is the most popular color.
As always, Jeff played the straight man in this comedic duo. Playing to a greatly appreciative crowd, including splitting the room down in half to cheer for Order that Jeff represented and Destruction that Paul represented and pitting the sides against each other for the loudest cheer, they threw WAR sunglasses out to the appreciative audience. This show proved to be so popular, the line snaked around the convention center they had to cut it down and do it twice in order to accommodate the number that wanted to see it.
WAR? Bring it; we’re all ready for it.
