Warhammer Online Q&A

Games Workshop, the team behind the popular Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 (40K) tabletop games, has been in the business of developing fantasy worlds for more than 20 years--worlds where players face off head-to-head as commanders of their own squads of hand-painted soldiers. And during this time, the company has introduced other games, including the small-scale skirmishes of Mordheim and Necromunda, as well as the larger regiment battles of Warmaster and the space-opera warfare of Space Hulk.

Warhammer is headed for the next frontier: online games.

In the early '80s, Games Workshop introduced Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play, its miniature-free role-playing game system, which lets players create original characters to explore the depths of the Warhammer fantasy world. Much of the inspiration, character, and feel of the Warhammer world emerged from the ideas and writings of Rick Priestley and the nightmarish visions of artist John Blanche. In this dark, gritty, gothic-medieval setting, brutish orcs, high-fantasy elves, and Arthurian-derived Bretonnian knights meet face-to-face with more distinctly proprietary characters and races, such as the race of ratmen known as the skaven and the deranged witch-hunters.

While tabletop wargaming may still be perceived as something of a niche market, Games Workshop has also recently delved into the creation of a game with more mass-market appeal--specifically, a wargame based on New Line Cinema's recent Lord of the Rings franchise. The success of this game has spurred Games Workshop to approach the more widespread audience that its games now command with its next endeavor--Warhammer Online.

Games Workshop-licensed games have been the source material for PC and console games for years, such as Space Hulk, Warhammer: Shadow of the Horned Rat, and Warhammer: Dark Omen. What's different about Warhammer Online is that rather than being a licensed product, it will be developed directed by Games Workshop.

We had the chance to chat with Robin Dews of Games Workshop's Warhammer Online Ltd. division and Matt Sansam, executive producer of Climax Nottingham, to discuss the background behind the Warhammer Online project, where it is now, and where it will be going.

GameSpot: First off, can you give us some background on Warhammer Online? How did the project begin, and was it always an online role-playing game, a real-time strategy game, or something else?

Create a character and get ready to go online.

Robin Dews: 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. However, we realized 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.

What was the question again? Oh yes, RTS or RPG! Sort of both, sort of neither. We started out thinking we could do a "massively multiplayer online battles game" and actually came up with a design that would work pretty well. However, the problems in delivering a persistent world battle game are 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 giving your new gamers a degree of protection from your hard-core, tooled-up long-termers. Although we came up with a cool idea for the game, we began to focus our attention more and more on a player-vs.-environment game that would shift in approach from an online battles game to an online adventure game, enabling us to really explore some aspects of the background that we'd only just touched on before.