Frank: Josh and Paul, thank you for sitting down with me.
Josh: Our pleasure.
Paul: We didn't realise there was so many people on the Curse crew!
Frank: There are!
Paul: There's eight of you behind this camera!
Frank: That's right.
Josh: It's a shell of journalists.
Paul: I believe that.
Frank: I'd like to start off with a few questions, some of them are coming from our community.
Josh: No. We reserve the right to force those men to answer that. *points off-screen to Jeff Skalski and Gabe Amatangelo*
Frank: So let me start by asking ... I'd like to take your temperature with regards to the current state of the game. So looking back at the months since release what have been, in your opinion, your best victories? And what about things that didn't go so well?
Josh: Generally speaking, if you look at the kind of state of the industry at the moment, state of the economy worldwide, we've been very, very ... touched almost is sort of a better word than happy, by the fact that people have been making a sort of commitment to our product and have chosen to spend their money with us for month after month since release. Our subscriptions...we're very happy with the numbers we've got internally. People have been really enthusiastic about the changes we've been making. We learned a great deal - we hope, very quickly - from the point after launch until now, we've been making consistent improvements in areas that we felt down on a little bit. So things like the initial implementation of Open Field RvR. When we were in beta, we were happy with it. Got it out into the wild, we became unhappy. Sort of the curse of live development is that you can test and test and test and test and you get things out into the wild and there are more people playing and lots of unexpected things come up. So we've tried to be very open when we are making changes, why we are making changes. And philosophically, we're going to continue down that path.
I would say the thing that we're not happy with...probably server stability is one of the things we've been continuously looking at, going "it needs to be better". We've made major improvements...some of them are already rolled in, some of them are coming very soon, but that's actually effectively past number 1. We had a meeting yesterday where the heads of our studio stood up and said, literally, "Job 1 is stabilizing the client, stabilizing the servers". We want people to know that that is an absolute commitment. We really are working our engineers nonstop to help address those.
Just as a side comment: the fact that we continue to do additional content has to do with the fact that if you take an artist and tell them to try and work on the server code, bad things will happen because he is no server coder. Now if you take a content developer, who writes quests for a living and tell him to work on the server code, he would make it worse as well because he is not a coder. Our engineers are working on things like server stability, client stability, our artists and other developers are continuing to develop content. It's one of the benefits of having a big, broad studio that has multiple sorts of facets and functions. But I assure of you we're not sort of surreptitiously designing new crazy features and ignoring some of the more glaring, obvious things that need initial addressing.
But overall, we're very, very happy with where the game is, we're very, very happy with the trajectory we're on, looking forward to continuing to develop new content for years and years to come and we're really thankful and happy for everyone that has given us a chance and everybody who keeps playing Warhammer. *turns to Paul* How was that?
Paul: Long.
Josh: Long? Here's the short, peppy version.
Paul: Happy! Happy that Games Workshop liked the fact that we hit the Warhammer world, happy that EA has a MMO out and shown that it practically commits to that, happy that we've been able to share our knowledge and wisdom and learned from all the other EA studios, visited the studios of Dice and Bioware and things like that, we're very, very happy. Happy with the quality of our Collector's Edition, happy with the amount of updates we've got out, with the spirit and commitment for what we have managed to show. Happy with the improvements that we've done based on ingame metrics, telemetry or forums, happy we got our own internal forums set up, people can talk to us. Happy with our communication, happy with the attitude and morale of the internal studio in getting the work done and committing to make the game as good as it could be. Unhappy with how long it has taken us to get into new territories, took us a while to get to Russia. Unhappy with some of our performance issues, but we've dealt with that. Unhappy with the speed it has taken us to get out to Asia as well, Josh and I have been out there and visited -
Josh: Seventy-three separate times.
Paul: And what we've been dealing with there is the truth of the matter, which is you need to make sure your game is right for the market you're taking it to so, we're unhappy with that. Unhappy with the amount of free time we have, that everyone at the studio has, but we really do work very hard, many, many, many hours, whether it's traveling or coding, art design, or coming to show up at Games Day today on the weekend. Unhappy with -
Josh: Gimme a happy!
Paul: --weather! The weather over here is still a bit winter-y. But then you go back into happy again! Happy with Land of the Dead expansion, it's awesome, it's clever, it's game changing, it's new, it's exciting. Happy with digital downloads, happy with our trial version, happy that we've got a smaller client to work on, happy where our studio is focused and where it is going, happy to have Ace of Cakes here at Games Day.
Frank: That's amazing. That cake is awesome.
Paul: Ace of Cakes Chef Duff is here. It's interesting watching the hobby bug, skill, commitment, imagination to make cakes here with people who have the Warhammer hobby bug with collecting, painting miniatures or who will be the hobby bug of playing our MMO. Happy to be part of the industry that brings wonderment and joy, and that isn't actually full of darkness. Happy to work with Josh.
Josh: That was your short answer to my long one.
Frank: Wow. I can't wait for the next question.
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Part 2
Frank: So let's talk about Land of the Dead for a second. It's the first truly new content in WAR because missing careers were supposed to be in release, but were -
Josh: I'm going to cut you off right now and address that misnomer or misrepresentation. There were no missing careers. We removed things from the game that we felt were detrimental to the game. When a filmmaker makes a movie and he looks at the footage that he's recorded and he goes "you know what, that shot just doesn't work" or "it made sense in the screenplay, but when we put it in, it's too long, the flow's off, the movie is too long, this character we don't actually need", people won't go "you've stolen valuable content from my movie!" You know, JJ Abrams I'm sure has a bunch of extra Spock footage that he didn't put in the movie and nobody is banging on his door going "You made me pay ten dollars, I know you've got 15 extra minutes of Spock and I want it now!"
Now, we obviously wanted from number angles, one of them being balance, one of them being sort of aesthetic, to add things back in, but we were never going to put things into the game that we thought weren't great for the game. The Hammerer is a good example for that. We never got to a place where we were happy with the Hammerer. We weren't going to just put the Hammerer in because at one point we put a slide up that said "There will be Hammerers in the game". It's the right thing to do, it's the only way to conduct yourself professionally. You never try to drive in your design according to commitments you have made in passing in marketing presentation.
So the game launched the way we wanted it to be according to the things we had developed. The things that we have expanded since that time, 4 careers that we've added to the game, they are additions. They're not things that we removed or were taken away or missing from the game. They are additions to the game that fit with a much larger understanding of where we want to go and it will always be that way. Any content that we add or don't add to the game, it will always be because it's the right choice in our mind for the kind of product we're trying to build. You may now ask the second question.
Frank: *laughs* You've been reading our forums.
Paul: Back to that. There's a rabid desire to take information from us. And to say "what're you doing, what're you doing" and when you're starting out, the ideas were sketchy, they were loose, they were done with a lot of affection and thought, they were done with a lot of good intentions. But we have to base with the reality of how these games get built, there are release dates you've set, there are performances tech. What you can do as far as making it fun and interesting...our entire career system was revamped dramatically from 256 careers to 24. We don't hear people going "where are the other two hundred and gnh careers?" only because no one bothers to pay attention to it. They grab on to things that we said with a good heart, with with the best of intentions, and as we came to the reality of making the game, we have to make practical considerations. I always looked at it like making good on our promises not so much as we wanted to bulk out our careers the way we wanted to, they way we had always imagined it. And we've achieved it. We've achieved it by swapping out some of the careers. Like the Slayer is in, but the Slayer was in really early on, then removed. And then he was brought back in rather than the Hammerer.
Josh: You can actually follow one of our posters.
Paul: The poster changes!
Josh: We had a poster that was Slayer and Choppa. And then it was Hammerer and Choppa. And now we've got the Slayer and the Choppa posters back. And that's just the right thing to do, aesthetically it's the right thing to do, creatively, you don't just put in something because it was on a poster.
Paul: What we have done though, is produce the stuff as fast as we could, balanced as best as we could at no cost other than the subscriptions that currently exist. And for people who have yet to subscribe, they just go in and get the careers anyway. So we made a lot of good content. Tons of it. Land of the Dead is just the next slice of significant, game-changing improving content.
Frank: That's actually the question I was going to ask eventually. With Land of the Dead having all this unique, innovating sort of things, where do you see it in terms of your plan going forward, like here you built on the RvR system and built on the dungeon system by adding these environmental cues and all that other stuff with the purging system going back to DAoC with the Darkness Falls stuff. Where do you see this right now in terms of where you're going a few months down the line in terms of how you've been evolved.
Josh: There's two things - a few months down the line is probably the wrong scope to be looking toward. As we look at the life cycle of the product, this sort of represents two directions. One, we're going back to our previous experience and taking things that we know work and bringing them into this generation of MMOs. And we're also looking at other parts of the Tomb Kings content as sort of the avant-garde of where we want to go in terms of how players are going to interact with our game in the future. So a lot of the stuff you'll see...it's almost like platform-style gaming, you know. Instead of the game playing on rails, where you can literally kind of play it with one finger and navigate that way, actually you're gonna need to be interacting with the world a lot more aggressively. Jumping through different things. And it's not sort of jumping and grabbing like it would be a Prince of Persia Online, but adding in the sense of actually "I'm moving in this world" in a way that feels more natural to me. In a way that actually feels like these things have weight and significance, blades are flying back and forth, they're not just static. You can walk directly under the big, crazy spinning Orc blade in the Orc starting areas and it doesn't chop your head off. In this area, we actually think that having blades chop you in half when you run in front of them is probably the right way to go. On the one hand, it's bringing things out of the past, lessons that we've learned, from products that we've made in the past, games that we've loved from elsewhere, and then it's trying to push MMOs into a direction that we think would be exciting and engaging. And I think that we're trying to incorporate an almost console-y feel into some of the content. It's something you'll definitely see or hear from us in the future.