War, Interrupted Interview

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Eurogamer: Speaking of relationships, how is your relationship with Games Workshop? What's their exact involvement with the game?

Mark Jacobs: Our relationship with Games Workshop couldn't be better. I've known these guys for about five years as friends, as well as, now, as licensor and licensee. During the development of Climax' Warhammer game, they visited our studio a couple of times and we showed them the stuff we were doing so that they could use it as a yardstick to figure out what they wanted to put in their game.

We showed them our customer service tools, we showed them other things we do here - and we built the friendship from that. Then back at the start of 2005 it became quite professional as well. We have, without a doubt, the best relationship with a licensor that I've ever had - and I've been making games for 20 years, and had some wonderful relationships with partners and licensors over the years.

The Games Workshop guys are both our partners and our friends. They come over here, they stay at my house - I go over there... It's a really great relationship. As far as the development goes, they're very involved. We keep them appraised of everything we're doing - they throw ideas at us, we throw ideas at them.

Sometimes we go to them and go, hey, we need a solution to this within the IP - what can you do? Do you have any ideas for us? They're happy to oblige. We also send them things that we're doing here, which they're going to use in the Warhammer hobby, as opposed to the Warhammer computer game. I think you'd be really hard pressed to find a relationship between a licensor and licensee that's better than the one we have with games workshop.

Eurogamer: Will there be a direct correlation between the characters in the tabletop game and those in the online game?

Mark Jacobs: That really ties in with our whole relationship with Games Workshop. When we were talking about this deal two years ago, one of the things that I needed to make sure of was that GW wanted us to create the best MMO version of Warhammer we could. Not necessarily the best implementation of the tabletop game - they had to know the difference.

They not only knew the difference from the beginning, they were really supportive of it. We have an awful lot of freedom; I mean, we're creating a whole new age, the Age of Reckoning, which does not exist in their IP! They've given us the freedom to do with the IP, what we need to do to make a great game.

Now, there are times when they say to us, sorry, this is too big of a departure for our IP - we can't do it. On the other hand, those times have been so few and far between that I can even count them on one hand.

Will what you see in the game be exactly the same as the characters' rendition in the tabletop game? Absolutely not. It can't be - because if you look at the tabletop game, it is not designed to be an MMO. What we've done is, we've taken characters from the Warhammer tabletop game, tried to take everything that makes them unique to that world, tried to take the abilities and the things that make them special within the world, and then fit them into our world.

Eurogamer: Are you going to provide post-launch content for free, or will you do expansion packs?

Mark Jacobs: We're going to do what we did with Camelot, which is both. Back in the day, back in 2001, we started with a two-pronged approach.

Prong number one was free, or subscription-based, updates to the players - so as long as you're a subscriber, you get new things that we put into the game for you. We put in new areas, we put in new items, we put in all sorts of fun stuff. Then we also have a big expansion every year.

We intend to follow the same model; give the players lots of new things during their subscription, and at the same time, prep big expansion packs.

Eurogamer: Finally, there's been some reporting in the media recently of lay-offs from EA Mythic; is that related to the announcement of the delay, or is the timing simply coincidental?

Mark Jacobs: It's absolutely unrelated. This is a question that's asked all the time, and I understand why - but in any course of development, there are going to be times when you let some people go. That's just what happens. The timing was unfortunate. We had some changes to make both within the UO team and the Warhammer team, at the same time that EA was also preparing layoffs.

It came out as a much bigger deal than it is in terms of numbers. EA Mythic, don't forget, includes our development team on Warhammer, development team on Camelot, development of UO, customer service, IT, everything... So even when you look at the lay-offs across the entire studio, the numbers were really small. It had no effect on the Warhammer schedule. Those lay-offs had been talked about for quite a while within the studio, and really it just came up at the same time that EA was doing its lay-offs.

Something that I haven't talked about much, but maybe it'll help to clear things up a little bit, is that this is the first time that Mythic has ever had a team this large on one game. The Warhammer team is huge for us; when we did Camelot, we started with 13, and launched with some number in the twenties! Even when we were doing Warhammer ourselves, last year, we weren't as big as we are today.

As we went along in the development of Warhammer, we found that you can't always add people and expect to have great results. We looked at that and went, okay, we need to make some changes - that's all.