GamesCom 2011 - Interview with Carrie Gouskos – Warhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes
dmcdonagh
2011-08-19
Read our interview with Carrie Gouskos –Warhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes by EA GamesCom 2011 Community Reporter Adam Freeman:
If you’ve moved house recently, the one thing you want in your life at the end of your day is a good de-stressing session with a favourite game. You root around in the boxes you thought you wouldn’t need to label, check all of the saucepans for lost discs and serial-key manuals but, after an hour, you start to lose hope. The logical thing to do in these situations would be to devote the time to actually unpacking, but that would be far too sensible and nobody is sensible when it comes to moving house.
You sit down at your desk, dejected, staring at the monitor and wondering what to play, and then it hits you. Within minutes you can download a Free2Play title and restore happiness to your life. Before departing for Gamescom, I spent the final few hours of my days recapturing the magic of Battlefield 2 on Battlefield Free2Play, gunning my way across the Gulf of Oman and storming through the streets of Karkand like we’d never parted ways. :
My view on the free to play model has, sadly, always been a fairly negative one, as though the games that followed this practice were somehow of a lesser quality, never as much fun and would require me to empty my wallet in order to compete with the rest of the game’s dedicated following. However, all of that changed for me with Battlefield Play4Free and, despite my excitement for all of the AAA EA titles on show during the EA Press Conference earlier this week, the one that had me craning my neck over the crowd of furiously tweeting Press, was the latest addition to the EA Free2Play arsenal: the newly announced Warhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes. :
As a gamer who has spent a very long time on MMOs, that spark of attraction was always going to be there as soon I saw heard the Warhammer Online brand named as next up on the stage. To tip that into a decided interest was going to require something different, something special. Enter a six, versus six, versus six more, Player vs. Player Free2Play online RPG experience. :
Sitting down with Carrie Gouskos, a Producer with Bioware Mythic on Wrath of Heroes the very next day, the EAUKGC2011 team took the opportunity to chat about the game, leading me to start to wonder just how wrong I’ve probably been about all those Free2Play titles that have come before. Here’s the interview:
Carrie, thank you for taking the time to talk to all of us! We only got a brief look at the game during Monday’s conference so could you run us through the talking points for Wrath of Heroes?
“So it’s three teams, eighteen players if you’re really good at maths! It’s an experience that’s the best, distilled parts of Warhammer, only with more accessible gameplay. It’s Free2Play and a very small download; currently it’s under a gig and we’re going to try stay under a gig.”
“So you jump into the game and play what we call scenarios and, I think probably one of the best things of all, is that it’s all about collecting heroes and being able to swap out who you’re playing at any moment. So if you come in and see that your competition has thrown down a better match up than you, normally, you’re kind of ‘Oh Crap, we’re screwed!’ but First Person Shooters have figured it out, that when you realise that you need more medics, you send someone to make a medic. For Wrath of Heroes it means that if you have the hero in your arsenal, then you can go ahead and pull it up and then switch when you die. ”
“Along with it being Free2Play and the fast switch heroes, the other thing you have is the three team combat, which is something we learned from working on Dark Age of Camelot. We found that when you have three realms you naturally balance each other out ,and so if there’s a dominating force of one realm, then the other two will work together and then bring them down, followed by that great moment of backstabbing when you’re working together with another team and then ,all of a sudden, one of them turns and then they’re like ‘Oh! But I thought we were working together!’ It’s great for strategy and it’s what’s at the core of what PvP is for us, but it’s also about finding the essence of what makes PvP exciting in RPGs and making it something that anyone can pick up and play. ”
“One thing I didn’t mention is that each of the characters have five abilities, so this is not about setting up this perfect set of armour, finding all of that and creating some epic character, it’s about everyone being given the same tools and how much better are you with the same toolset, so that’s kind of at the core of what we’re trying to do. ”
So it’s Free2Play, has it always been designed with that in mind and what sort of payment options are we going be looking at?
“Yes, it’s been designed as Free2Play, built from the ground up with that in mind and our plans for the paid options is kind of inspired by games like League of Legends ,where we think that the idea of ‘We’ll give you some and you can earn or buy other options’ and it’s that kind of progression vs. time thing. We want to make sure that for people who have a lot of time that they’re able to go ahead and earn what they need to earn, and that people who have a lot of money and whose time is more valuable than that can just drop some money down. ”
“At the moment we’re looking at selling heroes, and then everything else we’re kind of exploring still. We have a sense of what we want to do but we’re focusing on the gameplay first. ”
Obviously, what’s key to this is your selection of heroes, this Toolbox as you suggested it. Can you just talk about the initial depth of the system, the options available to the player and what you have planned for further development?
“A lot of the heroes in the game right now are based on careers in Warhammer Online, which makes sense as we already have that built and all that stuff. What we’re debuting at Gamescom is one of the characters that was not playable in Warhammer Online ,which is a Vampire. What we did is we first looked at all of the Warhammer Online characters and we said ‘What is the essence of a Shadow Warrior or of a Black Orc’ and then what are the most fun abilities that you would use when you’re playing those characters. ”
“When we started in testing, we had around twenty and since then we’ve whittled it down, we’re showing seven here at Gamescom, and at the point we launch, we’re not sure how many we’re going to have available ,but we’ll have some idea of how many we’re going to have available for free or on rotation and whether or not you can buy or earn some of them. ”
It’s obviously all PvP, are there any PvE elements that you’re looking to put into Wrath of Heroes, any sort of crafting or social hub for players to use outside of combat?
“In terms of social hub, there’s already a lobby, which again borrows from first person shooters and the idea of sitting around in a lobby, just engaging with people. We haven’t built the social layer yet, that’s really what we’re going to do with closed beta, and we’re going to see what the players want during that. What we’ve been hearing from other people making Free2Play games and what we’ve been seeing is that these are the kind of games where the community drives the features. Obviously, we can’t put everything in as we want to be streamlined and focused and to make sure that we have a game where someone can jump in and jump out without a lot of complication. If we put everything in it, it’s a thirteen gig download again and so it’s really about listening to the community, listening to what they really want, making sure it’s the right thing for the game and then just streamlining it as much as possible. We think it should be fast and action orientated, dynamic and explosive and it’s all because we’ve kept it really focused. ”
Clearly, you have a lot of passion for the game already, how much passion is there for Warhammer itself within the studio?
“There’s actually a Warhammer table right next to my desk, a giant Warhammer Table and we often have gaming nights and painting sessions, I really like the Warhammer 40K tabletop, but I love the Warhammer fantasy stuff so much. Almost everybody at the studio has some relationship with the table top and we have four guys on staff that used to work for Games Workshop, so we really have a lot of in house love and knowledge for it. We visit Games Workshop pretty frequently as they’re one of the most amazing companies in terms of their focus, their passion and their dedication to what they do about making miniatures and the hobby. It’s inspirational and it’s very much in line with what Bioware represents in terms of cultivating the fans and the customer and the hobby, the love, and so it’s about the respect for that, which we’re very much trying to keep intact. ”
Community always plays a massive part in a Free2Play, especially MMO styled title, when you get back to Virginia are you going to be turning to the community for their suggestions on what Heroes should feature in the game, maybe run some competitions on Facebook and see who would like to see who in the final build?
“Wow! You’re really good! That’s a good idea! We’re going to look to do that I think! ”
In terms of lore, how smooth is the relationship between the studio and Games Workshop to ensure that the game is as authentic as possible?
“We have a great process in which we submit everything, so art, sound, script, websites, video, everything goes through Games Workshop and yes, they’re very good for letting us know what doesn’t truly represent their IP and ask us to bring it over so that we can work it out. It’s actually a process that we’ve been doing for so long through Warhammer Online over the last six or seven years now that we’ve got it down to a science, but obviously for really big things we go out to see them. I’ve been to the Games Workshop Mecca, I saw them making all of the miniatures, but couldn’t take any pictures, but it was just beautiful and it’s good to have that kind of relationship. ”
You’re sharing assets between Warhammer Online and Wrath of Heroes, is that all that you’ll be sharing between the games and will there be any further integration for existing subscribers?
“Assets, bugs, a lot of things can be a shared responsibility for us just in terms of pure development and when it comes to treating the subscribers, they’re absolutely going to be VIPs. In some ways we think that this could be an entry level point for Warhammer Online where someone comes in and they go ‘Oooh this is cool but you know what? Actually, I want more, I want something more complex, richer, deeper’ and if they’re willing to become a subscriber then great, we can provide all that access to Warhammer Online, plus whatever else we can then put in for the existing subscribers for use in Wrath, on top of all that. ”
“We haven’t finalised that yet, so we don’t know what it is, but we want to do them right because they’ve been loyal to us for so long and we really, really value those guys. I’ve been working on Warhammer Online for five years now and it’s this huge part of my life, so it’s very important to me to serve that community and to make sure that they’re happy. ”
Free2Play has obviously emerged as this whole new branch of EA, do you work much with the teams on titles like Need for Speed: World, Battlefield Heroes and Battlefield Play4Free and do you get much feedback from them in terms of how they went about switching into this kind of business model?
“Absolutely, absolutely. I’m on my second trip to Sweden this year and I went to Vancouver a month ago and I know it’s easy to think that EA is like this big huge corporation where everything’s sectioned off, we always hear people saying that, but what people don’t realise is that because it’s so big, there’s such a wealth of resources and such brilliant minds at our disposal. I went to Sweden for three days and I kept finding people at the studio who wanted to tell me every single experience on both Battlefield Heroes and Battlefield Play4Free and they were so willing to share ‘Oh don’t do this! Whatever you do, don’t do this!’ or ‘You should definitely do this, we found that it works really well’, which is one of the best things about working with EA is that because its ‘the’ big company, we can absolutely go and talk to people. ”
“There are some studios we don’t all that much contact with, like the guys at Need for Speed: World who we’re sharing our demo room with this week, but it’s great to spend time with them and if there’s ever anyone who we want to talk to then we just go to our lead designer and he’s able to set us up with that conversation. ”
Are we to expect at some stage the announcement of a HeroLog!?
“ [Laughing]I actually like the name AutoLog! I think it’s one of the most tremendous features and I would love to announce that we’re using it, but we aren’t yet. But again, it’s a tremendous feature and, as you said earlier, even though it’s not something we can do, we have the ability to talk to the guys at Criterion and figure out what works best for Wrath of Heroes and go from there really. ”
Thank you very much for your time Carrie and best of luck with the game, you announced on Monday that the Beta is starting soon?
“Signups for the Beta is available now at http://www.WrathofHeroes.com so signup! We’re hoping to start inviting people within the next few weeks. ”
Adam Freeman
GamingLives.com
