Warhammer: Mark of Chaos Designer Diary #7 - Final Thoughts
The developers of this epic real-time strategy game share their final thoughts on the project.
Real-time strategy games have come a long way since the early days of simply gathering resources, building up a base, and then commissioning an army as quickly as possible to flatten your enemies. For starters, tabletop game heavyweight Games Workshop has gotten its Warhammer properties involved--such as with the new strategy game Mark of Chaos, which lets you fight massive battles in the Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play setting. The development team shares its final thoughts on the game's development.
Mark of Finality
By Warhammer: Mark of Chaos Development Team
We've come a long way since we first conceived of a Warhammer real-time strategy game a little more than two years ago. The team is really happy with the way the game turned out, and we at Namco Bandai are too. Working with a new team on the other side of the world was undoubtedly a challenge, but the excitement we all felt in watching the game unfold over the last two years made it go by quickly.
When we first approached the folks at Black Hole in 2004, we asked them to make us a quick test map to get a feel for how the units would look running around the environment. Our original model, a goblin, was quickly put into a squadron and some basic running and walking animations were put into place. It was less than a month before the Black Hole team put together a pretty cool environment with hills and grass and our little goblins scampering around. We showed this early concept off to some press back at the Electronic Entertainment Expo in 2005 and received a very positive response to the look and feel of the game.
From this, we had begun to draw up how we imagined the final game would behave and set out to scope the design for the campaign and for the multiplayer aspects of the experience. Our design for the game had a lot of different genres in mind. We liked the idea of adding some role-playing and adventure aspects to the game, but we all agreed it was to be an RTS at its core. The campaign took form when we met with Games Workshop to discuss the title. By sitting down with those designers and writers, we crafted a story that focused on the Empire and Chaos and quickly decided that two campaigns were needed to tell two different sides of the story. On the forums, we started to see people splitting into camps of either Chaos or Empire supporters--some of this happened on the dev team, too. This division stretched out to the point that we decided to make two boxes for the game, one for Empire and one for Chaos.
So, we all dusted off our Warhammer armies and even made some new ones to refamiliarize ourselves with the aspects that made the tabletop game so great. We knew that we didn't want to re-create the tabletop game outright, but we wanted to bring over the look and feel of the universe, as well as some of the balancing and nuances that make the universe so appealing.
On the multiplayer side, we had a lot of voices contributing. At Namco Bandai, and at Black Hole, we have many RTS veterans, and we had a lot of ideas about how to best use the game we had in mind to create a great multiplayer community. From this, we created the hosting options, clan support, and ladder rankings that you see today. Balancing the multiplayer by using the points system from Games Workshop gave us unprecedented freedom to allow for customization of armies and units in a multiplayer environment. We added resource maps and capture-and-hold siege maps to appeal to those players who want more than just battling. We pretty much let players set up their battles any way they want to, and we think they'll really indulge themselves with our custom map editor.
The single-player campaign changed direction a lot over the course of development. Early on, we tinkered with the notion of a cooperative campaign but decided that the map editor would allow players to craft some of this themselves--and that we'd rather focus on making a good single-player experience for both Empire and Chaos. We weren't sure if a wide-open campaign was going to work early on, and we had a few prototypes to try this out. We found that the story fell apart when we let players wander all over the map, so we compromised on a mostly linear campaign with optional missions in each chapter to allow for some variety. We added the "taint" feature to the map toward the end, since it just looks cool to see the map get corrupted as Chaos progresses (and cleaned up as the Empire dominates).
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- GameSpot Score7.2good
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- Namco Bandai Games America
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- Real-Time Strategy
- Release: Nov 14, 2006 »
- ESRB: Mature
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