Warhammer provides a more engaging and diverse experience than either Lord of the Rings Online (unless you’re a serious Tolkien fan) or Age of Conan (unless you really need topless barbarians in your life), the other major online fantasy releases in recent years. I spent more than 70 hours with the game recently, and it is clear that Warhammer is the best new massively multiplayer game since World of Warcraft, which was released in 2004.
That is a high bar, and very few games meet it. Making a top-grade online game means creating an entire universe that an intelligent, motivated player can expect to enjoy spending years exploring (and paying $15 a month for) without getting bored. Of course the average American spends more than 30 hours a week watching television, but he doesn’t spend all 30 hours watching the same show (one hopes). Subscribers who log 30 hours weekly are fairly common, and for people who play any online game at an elite level, it becomes a significant part of their lives, not only in the sheer amount of time spent but also in the bonds formed with other players. In most of them someone who is online for 15 hours a week is considered casual. Such a game is not merely consumed, or even played. My goal was not limited simply reorganizing the appearances so that sets labeled as ‘Tier 1’ were indeed on Tier 1 sets, but to also create a visual guide so that players knew where to find the appearances that appealed to their aesthetic.Designing a successful massively multiplayer online game may be one of the supreme challenges in all entertainment.
This was understandably met with some negativity from the community who found their favorite appearances, which were once on mid-tier gear, locked behind higher end (or even PvE) gear sets.
Working together with Grunbag, we agreed upon a visual progression which we felt was appropriate. My goal was to amend what I saw as a problem introduced by previous developers who gave out high-end armor appearances to mid-tier gear (because at the time the highest armor set that could be obtained was Conqueror), and to instead create a smoother visual progression of the armor sets as players obtained more powerful sets. One of the projects I eagerly took up while on the RoR team was categorizing and reorganizing the armor sets for all the classes.
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