Last night, GamePlasma participated in a teleconference with developers for EA Mythic's upcoming MMO, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. A lot of topics were covered in the interview including the idea that the developers don’t want to wear pants to these calls, bunnies get killed, and women love to pour boiling oil on men. Jokes aside--there is a lot of information that can be taken from this interview.

The developers have “learned a lot of great stuff from [Dark Age of Camelot], as far as, how to balance out realms, balance out populations, how to balance classes, what’s fun, what’s not and what do players enjoy doing in short and long bursts." When asked further about this relationship to Mythic’s previous title, DAoC, the developers had this to say: 

“A lot of the stuff that we are doing with Warhammer was derived from what we did with Camelot. So some of the stuff is things where we said, ‘Man if only we could do this, when we were making Camelot but we couldn’t’…Warhammer really builds upon that great foundation that Camelot put in place for us, but it differs greatly also. Where Camelot was one frontier, with a set number of keeps and zones that you could fight over, Warhammer really is three different battle fronts with battles raging across the world. Not only are these battles in the open world RvR where you can fight your enemy in kind of unmatched combat never knowing exactly what your getting into fighting over open world battlefield objectives keeps with siege, but also in scenarios which are evenly matched instance combat. [There are] over 30 of these in the game [with] at least 1 in every single zone. so you have all of these different ways of playing the RVR games…Then it  culminates in these great city sieges where you can literally attack the enemies capital city ransacking the city, looting pillaging and burning you know...kind of going through for the ultimate prize, the crown jewel of your enemies capital city.” 

What systems are in place to prevent a winning side from becoming more and more powerful and creating a vicious cycle? 

“One of the things that we are doing is, obviously you get rewards for winning, but the longer that a zone is in control of the winning side. We start doing little things to bring the losers up to par...like expanding the number of guards that they have” 

Everybody knows that RvR will bring players to the game, but what about PvE? 

“Public quests are dynamic...we've got monster on monster combat, we've got conflict public quests, where enemies from different sides butt up against each other in a PvE battle for a struggle tug of war situation [and] we have PvE in close proximity to RvR. You can stand on top of a bridge and see RvR down below.” 

“Everything that you do in the game including all the PvE content contributes to the war effort, it contributes to zone control and it helps you control the geographic territory you are playing in. so that includes quests, public quests, unlocking things in the tome, crafting and obviously RvR. Everything that you are doing is helping the RvR campaign at the highest level…because zone control trickles up through the tiers.” 

Some other tidbits that were taken out of the teleconference were:

- Catapults will have to account for wind and other factors

- Women enjoy pouring boiling oil on men

- Big emphasis is on RvR and teamwork

- No exact release date set (cue robotic voices)

- Developers choose not to wear pants whenever possible

- There will be ships

Currently slated for a Fall 2008 release date, Warhammer seems to be really taking shape. A lot of emphasis has been put on creating a game that tailors to all types of gamers. Hopefully we can see the same humor from the developers in this interview in the final game.