The result of the team's initial focus on staunching critical issues quickly and getting ahead of small leaks before they became big ones seems to have paid off. After only a few months, the 1.1 patch will see the beginning of major structural changes to the game including the launch of two new classes that were cut from the initial release -- the Knights of the Blazing Sun and the Black Guard. "There were a lot of reasons these two classes were cut from the game," said Adam Gershowitz, Combat and Careers Strike Team lead. "While they were farther along than the Choppa and the Hammerer, they were missing huge chunks of artwork and they weren't balanced at all." According to Gershowitz, the two classes were always on the short list for returning to the game, but once they were cut, the game had to balanced without them and regardless of how much the team liked them, they wouldn't be coming back until the team was sure the game could handle them without losing that.

It's Senior Designer Wheeler who segues from discussion of the two new classes to the other major change coming in the patch -- the addition of a new incentive system for Open Realm vs. Realm combat. Of all the problems the most crucial one the game had was one that many players doing other things missed -- there weren't enough people playing in the lower tier open realm RvR. While this had always been an anticipated problem as the player base aged and leveled up, all the data indicated that it was happening faster than it should. It was clearly something that needed to be addressed.


"What we've found is that Scenarios tend to be their own reward," Drescher said. "People who really want to do Open RvR, though, were falling behind PvE and scenario players in terms of gear. We needed to do something to draw people back into the 'RvR lakes.'" To encourage this, the team introduced a new "influence" system similar to the one in place for Public Quests that would reward those fighting in the open fields. "However players decide to play our game, we want to make sure they can all get equal rewards," Drescher said.

Working on the Open RvR system also allowed the team to try and get ahead of another problem -- the aging of the player base. The first element of this is the addition of "chicken content." This is a series of quests that encourage higher tier player to revisit lower-tier zones (where they get turned into a chicken) in exchange for a fun series of Tome unlocks and quests that also provide interesting content for lower level characters as well. Apparently players will get experience for killing high level player-chickens and according to the team, there are as many Tome unlocks involving them as there were for fighting while naked.

The patch has a whole host of other additions as well. They include things like a "player statue" system in which players who get the most renown points for the week are rewarded by having statues of them placed in the capitol cities. They're also including chat hyperlinking and introducing lower difficulty Public Quests that will help players do them even when there are not many others around. "In the end, adding a patch like this is all about giving the players what they want, but in a way that preserves the game they love," Drescher said. For the Warhammer Online team, the proof is in their success so far. "If you had said we'd be where we are just a few months after launch last year, we'd have called you a liar," Drescher concluded. "We're ecstatically happy with where we are, but we're not sitting on our laurels. We're never going to be finished with this game."