Mythic’s Mark Jacobs talks about the path to getting the Warhammer IP (Part 2)
By Michael Lafferty

“Mythic has never done normal development cycles”

When you are looking to build on an already-stellar reputation as a developer of MMOs, and you are Mythic Entertainment, what do you do?

Well, you go to a franchise that is stellar in its own right, and Mythic, because of its association with Games Workshop, picked up the Warhammer title for the upcoming MMO Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. It was a bold move, in many ways, simply because of the built-in fanbase and the volume of Warhammer material that pretty much details just what the game has to have.

But undaunted, Mythic took up the challenge and when a group of media was invited to the Virginia studios in March, the early alpha build was superb.

But then Mythic has risen to numerous challenges, beginning back when it launched Dark Age of Camelot almost five years ago. Not many publishers gave the title, or the MMO genre much of a chance. Mark Jacobs, president and CEO of Mythic, did believe. He believed so strongly that part of the company was sold to allow Mythic to self-publish the title. The rest is MMO/video-game history.

Now it is on to newer ground and that includes Warhammer.

Jacobs is aware that there will be comparisons made to the Warcraft MMO, but one has only to realize that Warcraft borrowed a lot of elements from the Warhammer universe, which dates back to the later part of the 1970s.

(Part one of the interview)

“You got a book called World of Warhammer,” Jacobs said, showing off a book that was published well before the Blizzard MMO was being created, “you have dwarves using gyrocopters – GW (Games Workshop); you have dwarves using steampunk technology – GW …”

Question: So how will Mythic get people away from the Warcraft mindset, particularly since Blizzard has done such a remarkable job with the Warcraft MMO?

Jacobs: “They have done an amazing job.

“In the end it doesn’t matter that GW came out with Warhammer 25 years ago, and that it predates Warcraft by 15 years. It doesn’t matter that Tolkien came out with his dwarves and orcs and elves before either of them. It doesn’t matter that he borrowed his lore from Scandinavian mythology. Users want a great game. Blizzard did a fantastic job. WoW is the more important MMO, not only of the decade but it is clearly the most important MMO of its age (as in the various ages of the MMO genre). Will users look at this game and go ‘it’s Warcraft, so I won’t play it?’ God, I hope not. Will they look at it and say ‘it has orcs and elves and stuff so I want to play it?’ I hope so.

“But EverQuest, Warcraft, Middle-earth – they all have a lot of the same races, they all have a lot of similarities. It didn’t stop WoW from being a huge success, that a lot of other games used a lot of their material, and they used other game’s material. It’s not going to stop Middle-earth if it’s a great game from being a success. And it won’t stop us. The key is making a great game, in the end.

“Even if they don’t know about Warhammer and they think it is just a copy of Warcraft, and they like the game, and they play our game, then they will find out ‘oh my God, GW did this first.’

“We have to focus on the IP (intellectual property), on the strength of the IP, and make the best game we can.”

Q: Having been in this business for a while, what do you think are the key ingredients to making an MMO that people are going to want to play?

Jacobs: “There are different stages. There is the beginning, the middle and the end, and at each stage you have to give the player what they want. For us, the endgame is all important. That’s the difference between Camelot and EverQuest, and Camelot and WoW. Mythic’s endgame is the strongest endgame of any endgame out there. You look at our RvR (realm versus realm) system, it is the most interesting, it is the most exciting, it’s the one that has held its ground for four or five years, even against a juggernaut like WoW.

“For us, with Warhammer, it is the endgame as well. We have to have a solution that’s better than Camelot, better than WoW, better than anything else out there. And if we do that, then the players will stick. And that is why we are putting so much time into the RvR system. (In Warhammer) It will be for RvR what WoW was for PvE (player versus environment). Blizzard crushed the PvE experience; they nailed it 100%. We want to do that for RvR.”

Q: When you look at the scope of the Warhammer universe, and the little tiny corner that was shown at this event, what determines how you boil down the essence of the world to just that tiny, first taste?

Jacobs: “The top pairings (guided the process), what we thought were the absolute key pairings from day one – orcs, greenskins and dwarves, what a natural. Human and Chaos – natural. And high elves and dark elves. You look at all the matchups in the game, and those are absolute naturals for the gaming community and for the Warhammer IP. In our mind, those are the core.”

Q: You announced and signed this game last year at E3, and most, or a lot of, games take approximately three years to make. You are talking about this coming out in 2007, which is two years (not to mention that the alpha build was playable eight months after you signed the deal for the game). Have you been fast-tracking this game, or has the energy and synergy been going so well that the game has been blossoming ahead of what people would consider to be a normal development cycle?

Jacobs: “Mythic has never done normal development cycles. We have always done things faster, and that’s not hubris, that is a matter of fact. Camelot we did in 18 months, with a small team. We launched Camelot, we had 25 people in the development team. We have spent over a decade developing our code base, learning how to work with each other. If you look at the founders of Mythic, they are all still here. If you look at the second tier of guys that came to work at Mythic, they are all still here. If you look at the 25 that launched Camelot, I think 20 are still around. So, we know each other, we know how to work with each other, we know the code.

“The only reason we were able to survive (back when Mythic first got going) was because we were able to work very quickly, work cheaply and keep a piece of the backhand revenues for ourselves. And that was the deal we always struck. …

“So now, in 2005, last year, we had the Camelot code, we have the code that was involved in Imperator, so when you say fast-track, you are absolutely correct. We are fast-tracking but not because we are putting 200 people on it and going ‘work faster.’ We are able to fast-track because we have the technology already. We have our library, we have our client’s library, we have everything we need to make an MMO other than the IP.”

Q: But the state of the code, what we have seen downstairs, that code, the pre-alpha build was a lot more stable, and a lot bigger than many games that are in first beta and even some that are in final beta. To think you are going to beta late this summer is amazing.

Jacobs: “Thank you, but that’s just Mythic. That’s how we operate. A lot of companies believe in the reinvent the wheel. Every time they come up with a new game, new engine. Being an ex-programmer, my natural inclination would be ‘yeah, let’s do something new.’ But the Mythic way is to take what we have and make it better – only chuck out bits of the code or sections of the code when we absolutely have to. The benefits outweigh the costs. So we are able to take an IP like Warhammer, do a 180-degree spin on not only Camelot but on Imperator and now, seven months later, have a running game. That’s Mythic.”

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