Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Q&A with WAR Producer James Casey

Warhammer Online's Producer, James Casey, was kind enough to take some time and answer a few questions.  The WAR team is pretty busy these days, so the amount of questions was kept low.  Thanks James!  Read on for the Q&A.

1)  With the arrival of 1.4.2, the power gap seems to be in a better place.  One consequence of the high end armor set changes is that certain careers feel as if their gear is less effective than previous tiers.  Are there any plans to make the affected sets a bit more attractive?

The high end sets still give advantages and options, but we understand that some people may not feel that way. We will be looking at the feedback and we are looking at ways to complement those sets.  The purpose of the changes in 1.4.2 and 1.4.1 were to bring them back into manageable parameters and give us a foothold for the future.

2)  6 vs 6 scenarios are something Mythic has experimented with in the past, but they have always been temporary.  Will we ever see one added permanently to the rotation?

I’d like to have one at some point if it’s balanced and fun.  I’d like to also do some tweaks to existing scenarios and play with the queue size.  Similar to the 18v18 weekend, I want to start small and do weekends that are not full Warfronts, but have tweaks.  Or maybe Weekend Warfronts with a twist.  The idea being that we get to a good point on a 6v6 that would allow us to put it in the ‘current’ rotation for at least a patch cycle.

3)  I thought I heard the Ironclad was being reworked and Grovod Caverns was going to get a twist.  Are those still happening?

Yes.  Grovod has had some work to it, but needs some final loving touches and game play touch up, but we’ve had a few things take a bit of priority from it.  It’s still on our radar and Ironclad is set to follow that. J

4)  In the April Community Update crafting improvements were mentioned.  One question I, and I am sure other WAR players, have is about Hybrid seeds.  Might we see new ways of obtaining them in the next patch?

We’ll be doing a dev discussion on crafting soon (this week if I get the time) that will basically go over what people feel is lacking or missing in the current scheme of things.  The goal is to make sure that the things we look at for crafting love should be stuff that we can make better or different enough that people will care.  That being said, the crafting discussion is more of a long term issue so it won’t be in the next patch.

5)  A new Live Event called Sigmar Tide will be making its debut this summer.  Can we expect new content, for example a Scenario, PvE, Titles, Rewards and so on with it?

Yes, there will be new content.  The screenshot in the post by Kai has a hint to the setting of some of that content.

6)  Realm WAR has been offline for a while now.  Any updates on when we might see it online again?

Honestly, there is no clear ETA on this.  Given internal priorities, this is likely not going to happen in the near future.