A Warhammer Online Q&A
by Robin Dews and Matt Sansam

How did Warhammer Online originate?

Robin: The idea behind Warhammer Online started out as a random conversation between Karl Jeffery - the CEO of Climax - and Jon Gillard - Games Workshop's Business Development Manager - at E3 a couple of years back. From the initial "We should do something together, you know…" came the idea that we could create some kind of persistent online game based on the Warhammer world.

This idea kind of trundled along in the background while we got on with more pressing stuff, but then in late 2000 we looked again and decided that it would be fun to create an online game that would offer its players an experience of life in the Warhammer world.

We realised at the outset that operating such a game would involve a detailed array of design, development, management and business skills and so Warhammer Online Ltd was set up as a joint venture company to bring together the best skills of Climax and Games Workshop in a single entity.

Prior to setting up the company, I'd been White Dwarf editor for four years and then GW Studio Manager from 1995. Those experiences meant that I had good knowledge of both serving a community and tight product development and so when I was offered the job I jumped at it.

My partner in crime is Rick Priestley - Games Workshop's Director of Product Development. Rick co-wrote the original editions of Warhammer Fantasy Battle (1982), Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (1985) and Warhammer 40,000 (1987) and has spent the intervening years refining and developing the background, texture and content of these gaming environments.

In Rick's words: "Warhammer was always a cheerful mélange of the serious and absurd. Our inspiration came from the obvious candidates of Tolkien, Robert E Howard (et al), and Michael Moorcock - solid fantasy fare for the time. Less obviously perhaps, Shakespeare, Milton and William Blake - truly no source is sacred! If the ingredients seem overly credible then the secret must be in the blending - the radio show I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again, TV's Monty Python - and the Python films - the Carry On movies, and (as if I should forget) Clint Eastwood's spaghetti westerns were also inspirations."

And so with Rick and myself on board from Games Workshop, Matt Sansam from Climax as Executive Producer and Paul Carruthers, head of the newly-formed Climax - Nottingham Studio, all in place, the project was up and running by June 2001.

Was it always an MMORPG or did it start life as an RTS?

Robin: Well, sort of both, sort of neither. We started out thinking we could do a massively multiplayer online battles game (MMOBG) and actually came up with a design that would work pretty well. However, as I've said elsewhere, online gaming communities are precisely that. They are real communities with rules, laws, codes of behaviour, etc., and we quickly realised that the problems we would encounter in delivering a persistent world battle game would be all about social engineering and not software engineering.

The trick lies in how you create an experience that is challenging, edgy and fun for the players, whilst at the same time giving your new gamers a degree of protection from your hard-core, tooled-up long-termers. And all of this matters a great deal in a battles game, where the main arena for player-player interaction is conflict.

Although we came up with a game design that worked, it involved bending the background in ways we were not quite comfortable with, and so we began to focus our attention more and more on a player vs. environment game that would encourage our players to behave in a more coherent (co-operative) way in order to stay alive. This shift in approach from an online battles game to an online adventure game would also enable us to really explore some aspects of the background that we'd only just touched on before in print and on the tabletop

What sort of influence does the experience you have with the successful tabletop games bring to Warhammer Online's development?

Robin: Goodness - how long have you got?

Jervis Johnson one of GW's leading designers once wrote a very erudite essay on the history of wargaming and the essential differences between the twin schools of 'simulated history' and 'games with toy soldiers'. Games Workshop has never made any bones about the fact that we are grown-ups who love to fight battles with model soldiers and long may it be so! The fact that we do fantasy rather than WW2 or English Civil War etc. (even though we play these) makes it a bit easier, but at the end of the day it's a game of toy soldiers.

As a result, we understand perfectly well that a game of Warhammer is as much a social activity as a gaming activity. How can it be anything else, when you get together with a group of mates on a Friday night or a Saturday morning and spend the time rolling dice, arguing about rules, cheering, jeering and generally having a good time in a party-like atmosphere.

Although the game is clearly the focus of all this activity (and a crucial one), the time spent before the game - painting models, creating scenery etc. (and afterwards boasting in the pub) is equally important. It's this social aspect to the gameplay that first intrigued us and drew us towards the online space. Although as gamers, we all love computer and console games, they are in essence simply Rubik's Cubes of elaborate complexity. They are products that you buy, use up and then move on.

That disposable product-based approach is simply alien to Games Workshop. We build living breathing hobbies owned by the players and not by the company. There are thousands and thousands of them around the world who collect, paint and game with Citadel miniatures. Games Workshop simply provides some of the tools they use to support this activity and we're fortunate enough to be able to make our living doing something we love. Warhammer Online has grown out of this love of 'social gaming'. It's a game we want the player to genuinely own.

"That disposable product-based approach is simply alien to Games Workshop. We build living breathing hobbies owned by the players and not by the company. Warhammer Online has grown out of this love of 'social gaming'. It's a game we want to player the to genuinely own." -Robin Dews-

What can you tell us about the setting for Warhammer Online - the area and the time period, for example? Is it generic fantasy, like Tolkien/Everquest, or the dark, gothic fantasy of the Warhammer world?

Robin: The pre-production design and development of Warhammer Online has really been an extended conversation (argubate!) between the GW staff - "Goblin's really do look like this you know!" and the Climax staff - "but we can only support XXX polygons in the game", with sometimes complete incomprehension on both sides!

I think that it's also true to say that having gone through this process we've now got a team that has a fantastic insight into the potential and possibilities of an online game set in the Warhammer world. Strange as it might sound, before we started out on this project none of the GW staff had ever played a persistent world online game such as EQ or DAOC. We've since made up for it but, at the outset, I think it was a real asset as we were not bound by the conventional 'wisdoms' of what will and will not work.

We then started out by taking a look at the whole of the Warhammer world as a potential arena for the game. Through a series of iterations, we then refined it down to the area of the Reikland that has become the focus for this game. For readers who are not familiar with Warhammer, the world is a kind of distorted version of the 'real world', currently centered on Western Europe, but also including areas of Canada and North America (Dark Elves), South America (Lustria - home of the Lizardmen), Central Europe (Chaos Dwarfs) and North Africa (Undead). Holding that picture in mind, imagine the Reikland as on the border of France and Germany and you won't be far wrong!

As you might understand, this is a vast area and far too big to realise in a computer game. All current games make an abstraction of time and/or space in order to deliver the illusion of a real world. Everquest currently does this be creating a series of small regular shaped parks linked by corridors. It's a good solution that works well for them, but with a 'real' whole world to play with we had to get a little more focused.

Hence our game-world stretches from Marienburg in the NW along the edge of the River Reik down past the City of Nuln in the SE. It takes in the current Imperial Capital of Altdorf at the center of the map and extends out to the Grey Mountains that border the area along the SW (If you're not a Warhammer fan, sorry about the detail.)

What all this gives us is a big area, bounded by a river to the NE (think a super-Rhine - a mile wide and impassable) mountains to the SW (upland adventuring areas - yes, but ultimately impassable), marsh and sea to the NW and a tributary of the River Sol just to the south of Nuln.

The time period will be contemporary with the current Warhammer timeline. This is the same one we use in our Black Library fiction and comics as well as for the tabletop battle game. It means that Karl Franz is the Emperor on the Throne in Altdorf and the hordes of Chaos are currently at bay. The only time we've made use of a different time period for a game was when we did Mordheim - the Warhammer Skirmish game. We then had to obliterate a city with a giant warpstone meteorite and so we set it 500 years in the past just to keep the present a bit cleaner.

Most fantasy games draw their inspiration and setting from Tolkein (obviously) but also from the same sources that he used as the inspiration for Middle Earth - Anglo-Saxon and Norse mythology and poetry, etc. In practice, this means that they largely have what I'd call a 'Dark age' feel and of course Dark Ages of Camelot makes no bones about their inspiration.

Warhammer has always been rather different and it's why it has very distinctive character and feel in this landscape of rather 'generic' fantasy games. We call Warhammer a 'renaissance' rather than a 'dark age' world.

On a superficial level, this means that it has guns, swords and magic as its technological base rather than the traditional 'sword and sorcery' fantasy settings. The European Renaissance was an incredible burst of creative and intellectual energy that completely outstripped the ability of the society to support it. Thus while most of the populace were living in disease and squalor, Leonardo was creating ideas for flying machines, computers and tanks and the Inquisition were ready to burn Galileo for suggesting that the Earth revolved around the sun! We kind of like this period as it allows us great scope to play games of 'what if?'

It's this combination of fantastical technologies, with magic as a heretical and perilous sorcery and the merciless poverty of everyday life, that gives the Warhammer world much of its character - and makes it such a cool place to set games in.

John Blanche, Games Workshop's Art Director and general image guru, has said that "there is nothing in fantasy that you can't see in history" and he's completely right. If you take a look at the images of Hieronimus Bosche, Durer, Albrecht Altdorfer and Dore, you'll see first hand the source images for the Warhammer world - oh and don't forget Terry Gilliam's Jaberwocky and Monty Python and the Holy Grail.