Warhammer Online Interview with Josh Drescher
As an Associate Producer with EA Mythic, Josh Drescher is hard at work on EA Mythic's upcoming next-gen MMORPG- Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, based on Games Workshops' tabletop fantasy war game, and one of the most-anticipated PC games of 2008.
Now we have an opportunity to interview with Josh Drescher. He tells us more information about the game. Also he brings us his picture.
MMOsite: First, congratulations, you've got over 500,000 players signed up for Warhammer Online. Till now, how do players perform on the battlefield? Does it require NPCs to involve in the battle in order to keep balance?
Josh Drescher: Thanks! We've VERY excited about how the fans have responded and we can't wait to get the game into their hands so they can experience what we've been building.
Warhammer Online is all about huge armies of players fighting against one another forever and ever. Our goal has always been to make that the focus of RvR whenever and wherever possible. With that being said, we have found that adding NPCs to RvR areas is useful in some places.
For example, in the persistent (non-instanced) game world, we noticed in early beta testing that players had a hard time defending battlefield objectives effectively. This was mostly because, unless people stood next to those objectives 24 hour a day, people would just wait until no one was around and then take over the unguarded objectives. To address that problem, we've added NPC guards that will defend any battlefield objective that has been claimed by either side. They're not super-powerful, but they will guarantee that you have to work to take over an objective, no matter how many players are around.
