WarhammerAlliance.com Asks About "Missing Careers" In Land of The Dead

Have you ever found yourself wondering what WAR and Star Trek have in common? Not sure? Wondering why I would ask? Well, Josh Drescher and Paul Barnett recently sat down with Warhammer Alliance at Games Day Baltimore for an interview. Things got very interesting though when Frank “PhoenixRed” Sanchez characterized the Land of the Dead as “the first truly new content in WAR” and mentioned “missing careers”.

Here's the interview and an explanation from Josh Drescher about the "missing careers":

Paul goes on to talk about how the problem really is that fans want information and we're holding them to ideas that were "loose" or "sketchy." He even mentions that at one point they considered a career system with 256 careers, but no one is asking where all those missing careers went. You can see the full interview here.

When I hear Josh and Paul justifying the cuts again it makes my skin crawl, much like it did when Mythic first announced the cuts. Frankly, it's spin and marketing doublespeak. But why does it matter how Mythic views the cuts? What happened, happened. The four careers were cut from release and now Mythic has made good on their promise to get them back into the game. Why do I care whether or not Josh considers them "missing careers" or "new content"?

I’ve been going over the issue trying to figure this out and it comes back to the value of the design and the importance of the Archetypes. Mythic created an elegant design to deal with a lot of issues with making an MMO based upon Warhammer. The Warhammer IP has dozens of Armies with hundreds if not thousands of potential Careers. It is very easy to imagine well over 200 Careers based upon the Warhammer IP, but it would have been a balance and labor nightmare for Mythic. Trying to capture all the Armies and Units from Warhammer for the MMO would have been an impossible task. Games Workshop themselves only tackle a few Army revisions every year. They simply couldn't do it all at once. It's too much work. Mythic needed a strong design to translate Warhammer into WAR.

Mythic looked at the Warhammer IP and wisely chose to focus. They created a design that called for two broad factions: Order and Destruction. Then they looked through the dozens of Warhammer Armies and decided to focus on the three oppositions they felt were most central to the world of Warhammer, settling upon the Empire vs Chaos, Dwarfs vs Greenskins and High Elves vs Dark Elves. Now, with the focus on just six Armies, they had to decide how to best transfer the many different types of units in Warhammer into Careers for WAR. The design they came up with was to define four essential Archetypes: Melee Tank, Melee DPS, Ranged DPS, and Support. From all the options available in each Army List, Mythic would create four Careers based upon these essential Archetypes.

But this means that having 24 Careers wasn't some accident. It wasn't just a random number plucked out of the air. 24 Careers were the result of deliberate design decisions made by Mythic. That number is a direct result of basing the game around the four critical Archetypes and needing for each of the six available Armies to have access to those Archetypes. Had Mythic changed the number of Races available, the design would require the number of Careers to change. Had they changed the fundamental Archetypes and removed or added an Archetype, again the design would require a new number of Careers.

My problem is that Mythic wants to have it both ways. They want credit for the design of the game but don't want to take responsibility for blowing the implementation at release. Josh uses making a film as a metaphor for the process of designing WAR. In Josh's metaphor, the careers were cut from WAR to preserve the integrity of the "film". He wants us to believe that cutting the careers preserved the essential goodness of the game. It's like trimming a few minutes of Spock's footage to make a tighter and more compelling film.

The film metaphor has a lot of value, but I absolutely disagree with the parallels Josh draws. Looking at JJ Abrahm's Star Trek, I am certain that along the way decisions were made in bringing Star Trek back to the screen about which characters were necessary and which plot elements were necessary. Klingons get talked about in the dialog but never appear. Spock gets used, but none of the rest of the original cast. The process of designing the film requires thousands of decisions to be made about budget, cast, location, plot, effects, etc.

But once the decisions start getting locked down and the plot put in place, once the "design" of the film gets hammered out, certain things become necessary. Had Abrahm's been approaching release and looked at the film they had shot and suddenly decided Spock wasn't good enough, or that the Romulans weren't "working", it would have set the film back months. They would have been forced to reshoot, rescript, redesign. It would have cost the studio millions and millions of dollars and months and months of time. The design process is long an involved. Almost all the major design decisions for a film are settled before a single frame of film is shot.

In my mind, the Archetype system in WAR is part of the core design of the game. It's the foundational material of WAR's "screenplay". It's the stuff that should be hammered out long before a single frame is captured in film. Sure at one point Mythic may have talked about over 200 different Careers making it into WAR, but then they sat down for serious scripting, casting and budgeting and figured out 200+ Careers would be a mess and never work. So they came up with a tight screenplay that called for 24 Careers.

I think the design for WAR was rock solid. I think the planned interaction between the Armies and Archetypes was a clever solution to the problems presented. However, Mythic simply started running out of time. They couldn't get all the content planned for the game finished by the date they had apparently decided upon with EA. There was nothing wrong with the design. They needed more time to get the final four careers right. This may have meant changing from the Hammerer to the Slayer, but the core design of four Archetypes for each of the six Armies was in no way flawed.

Here is where Mythic and most good films took a different approach though. Rather than taking the time they needed and getting the four Careers right, Mythic made changes to the core design of WAR. They made deep cuts by removing four Careers, but then tried to act like they never really played an essential role in the production. Mythic pushed out WAR knowing that it wasn't "working" as they had designed it to function. Knowing that they didn't get around to 4/24 of the intended Careers and that four of the Armies were missing essential Archetypes. They created the game around the interaction of these Archetypes and when they removed access to these Archetypes it hurt how the game was experienced and played.

Can you imagine JJ Abrahms cutting the Spock entirely from Star Trek and then promising that we would see him in the DVD version of the film? No, because the film as designed doesn't work without Spock. He was placed into a central position of importance and the film wouldn't work without major, major reshoots if Spock wasn't working.

The Archetype system is at the core of how WAR is designed. But the spin and marketing doublespeak make me wonder if Mythic actually gets it. I cringe every time I read the statements they made at the time they announced the cuts or when Josh talks about how they didn't cut content and how it's the same of trimming a few minutes of footage from a film in editing. Josh is right that decisions must be made, shots chosen, dialog trimmed, sometimes even a character or subplot cut from a film. But when film starts cutting into the core structure, ideas, and major characters, it's a sign that the film is in trouble. Editing is not removing four Careers that the design called for anymore than Editing would have allowed for JJ Abrahms to remove Spock or the Romulans entirely from his Star Trek.

The Archetype system is at the very core of WAR. It shouldn't have been sacrificed to save time and resources at release and it should play a central role in how the game progresses and develops. Mythic needs to get back to the design that they created and stop making excuses for failing to properly implement it. As we see Patch 1.3 being tested on the PTS, I still see Mythic not fully grasping their own Archetype system and making sure they balance the game around the four roles they themselves defined. That's why it still gets to me when I hear Josh and Paul defending the cuts as good for the game. I worry that they actually believe that. I worry that the don't really get how important their intended design is to making WAR a great game.

WAR was fundamentally harmed in the early months of release by abandoning their design. People that played as a member of the Greenskin, Dwarf, Dark Elf or Empire Armies had a worse experience than they should of had if the design has been properly implemented. Kudos to Mythic for following through and getting this content into the game, but don't try to tell us that it wasn't designed into the game. Don't try and tell us that delaying these four Careers didn't have a detrimental impact upon WAR. It was your design and you should be proud of it. But not following your design caused WAR to be a lesser game on release than it should have been.