MMO Gamer has a great interview up with Josh Drescher, Senior Game Designer on Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, or WAR, as I like to call it. The two got to chat at E for All (the same place where our own Barb D. got to play the game), and Drescher gives a pretty good inside look at what it's like to be the team in charge of making the game that everyone but EA suspects might try to "kick WoW's arse."First up: the delay. Drescher doesn't go as far as Marc Jacobs in saying the delay was planned all along, but he does say that it was time to cool their jets and focus on what they had already, rather than bringing new stuff into the game. Drescher also touches on the "Realm vs. Realm" aspect of the PvP, and says he's excited to have a game where war is ongoing and front lines matter.
Unfortunately, there are a few MMO conventions that even WAR can't get away from-- the starter quests are still FedEx and rat killing, and you can't actually go run and PvP right away. As Drescher so wittily puts it, "There's a Scrabble game in 1/3 of all American homes and yet new copies of it still ship with instructions." He also says that they are aiming for a fairly traditional PvP balance-- "not quite the paper-rock-scissors thing... [but] we're not going to give someone who can do a ton of damage heavy armor also." There is still some innovation, however-- high level players in lowbie areas will apparently get turned into chickens. Sounds good to me! Definitely check out the interview if you're at all interested in how WAR is turning out so far.
