In a new interview over on Gamasutra, Mythic Entertainment's executive producer Jeff Hickman speaks openly about some of the mistakes that the company has made, and in particular, about mistakes pertaining to 2008's Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning.

These apparently boiled down to three major areas: The game is too easy in terms of PVE gameplay early on, the in-game economy is based on a poor model, and finally, the game doesn't give players enough incentive to be socially interactive.
And one of the lessons that we thought we learned from ourselves and other games, was that it's important to have ease of use, and it's also important to hit the right balance between easy gameplay, challenging gameplay, and too difficult. We thought we hit that, but Warhammer, in PVE, in the beginning, is too easy. It doesn't make you thrilled to do it."

What effect has this had? Says Hickman, "The game has suffered immensely for it."
Of course, there are aspects of WAR that Hickman considers to be a great success -- most notably the game's public quest system and open grouping feature.

Everyone likes a big green Choppa.



Bryn says: I'd have to agree with all the points made here. The game was incredibly easy for the first 20 or so levels, if all you were interested in was PVE content. But I loved the public quest system and the open grouping -- these two features really brought something new to the MMORPG genre.

I'm tempted to boot WAR back up and see what's happening with the new in-game events. I think I might need to re-roll though, and try out some Destruction action.