Jeff Hickman of developer Mythic, executive producer of Warhammer Online, has told the Austin Game Developers Conference of what they regret the most in launching the MMO.
The three things that have ”haunted” Mythic were making it too easy, having ”little reason” enough to socialise with others, and for an in-game economy that ”just missed the mark.”
”If you’re not online, you’re not going to be here. In the future, gaming is about social applications: Facebook, MySpace, and about bringing people together in a lot of different ways,” Hickman noted on the future of videogames, reports Gamasutra.
Soon enough the Mythic boss moved on to ”mistakes we made with Warhammer that we should not have made,” where he cited three main grievances that hurt them bad, ”three things have haunted us for a year with Warhammer,” he confessed.
The Challenge
”There’s a big difference between easy play and ease of use. And one of the lessons that we thought we learned from ourselves and other games, was that it’s important to have ease of use, and it’s also important to hit the right balance between easy gameplay, challenging gameplay, and too difficult.”
”We thought we hit that, but Warhammer, in PVE, in the beginning, is too easy. It doesn’t make you thrilled to do it,” he explained, adding, ”The game has suffered immensely for it.”
The Social
”We all talk about online gaming as ‘social’. It’s a thing we’d call probably foundationally the most important thing about these games. It’s fun to play these games with friends.”
”We had great ideas for all of these really cool social tools, and we built them into the game. But the game doesn’t require friends. Part of it is that it’s too easy,” he continued, noting that ”you shouldn’t force friendship, but it’s important, and there’s a balance there.”
”You can do so many things solo, that friendship, at least in the beginning levels, is not necessary, and it’s super dangerous for your games.”
The Economy
”Our economy… we just missed the mark,” he began.
”If you look at the reasoning behind the economy, you’ll see things like, ‘Hey, we’re not going to let gold farmers in our game.’ ‘We’re going to try to make sure we have controlled inflation.’ We had all the best reasons in our game, but what it caused us to do was build a game where economy is not important enough. Economy brings people together.”
”We want to identify the big things that are important and change them. Economy specifically – it’s one of our weaknesses, and it has to be a big strength when we hit Korea. And it’s a focus that pours over into North America,” revealed Hickman.
Yes Mythic’s Warhammer Online has had a difficult beginning, but the developers believe they’ve identified the causes for it and plan on rectifying them. They have two really good things though, ”things that we made breakthroughs on.” Public quests and open groups.
Do you traverse the Warhammer landscape, videogamer?
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