It's never an easy decision to delay a game in development. It's even worse when a game has already suffered through delays. A little less than one year ago, we spoke with EA Mythic's General Manager Mark Jacob's decision to delay Warhammer Online into 2008. This morning, the monthly Warhammer Online newsletter brought the distressing news that the game had been delayed again, this time from spring to a fall 2008 release. Given the high profile nature of the game itself and the length of time it's spent in development, this must have been agonizing. We were able to get Jacobs back into the hot seat to go over the choice to once again push Warhammer Online back.



GameSpy: Let's start with the obvious question: Warhammer Online has been delayed again -- 'till when, and why?
Mark Jacobs: The when is Fall '08. As to why -- pretty much the same reason as before. When we go into development and go through the various phases of beta, we gather a lot of information, feedback, suggestions. We also see how much of that phase was implemented by the team. What has been happening, and this happened the last time, is that the team is getting everything done, but they're cutting into our polish time. So we had a choice. We could be feature-complete by the end of the second quarter, which was our last release date, and released the game unpolished or we could extend it and do a lot of polishing.

GameSpy: Have you frozen the feature set as of now?
Jacobs: No, oh no! That would be great, right? I could say we would be spending the next however many months it's going to be doing nothing but polish, but that's not the case. In terms of the design, we're mostly feature-complete in the sense that we're not going to take any of this extra time and throw in any major features. We'll do a few things, but they'll be more creative -- expanding what's in there as opposed to putting in anything brand-spanking new.
GameSpy: What kind of feedback were you getting from the beta testers, and was that the primary reason for pushing the release back again?
Jacobs:No. We're getting the kind of feedback we expected. Some (said), "Hey, this is great, fantastic -- we love it." Others (said), "Hey, this needs a little more time." That's what beta is all about, right? The best part is that during this last phase of the beta, we didn't get any feedback that said "Oh, you've got to take out this system" or "You've got to take out this class" or "the RvR has to be redone." We did get a lot of people going, "Guys, you need to polish this up more." We just need that extra time to get in the polish and iteration and balance we had hoped to already have in.

The problem is it's almost never one big thing that causes a problem. It's like death by a thousand cuts. Getting this feature in took two days longer. Getting this class balanced for the current stage took an extra day. And this might have taken three days. And it starts adding up. If you back to [Dark Age of] Camelot days, we certainly did not have the ability to say "Hey, we're going to take an extra X amount of months to get some things right. To make sure all the quests are polished, to make sure all the loot tables were done properly for the high-end monsters." If we had been able to do that, we would have launched with a better game. Because we're now part of EA and because we're in… the most competitive space in PC gaming… we can't afford to release a game like that.