Australian MMO fans will no doubt be pleased to hear that the upcoming Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning will not only debut down under at the same time as the US and Europe, but that local servers will be set up to ensure a better playing experience. We chatted to EA Mythic associate producer Josh Drescher about the decision to set up an Aussie server, what's next for the game's closed beta, and more.

　　GameSpot AU: You've decided to set up an Australian server for Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, is that right?

　　Josh Drescher: This is something that we've wanted to do basically from the beginning of the project. We wanted to make sure that in terms of localisation and offering support for players around the world, that we try and give as many people as possible home turf servers to use. And the Australian fans were actually extremely vocal early on in the process. It's been something we've wanted to do for quite some time, and when we were bought by EA it became something that was a lot more viable for us, so we're very excited to get some dedicated servers over there.

　　GS AU: So it will locally hosted?

　　JD: I don't know the exact location, but we'll be hosting the server somewhere in East Asia, so it will be in the correct time zone. At the moment we are targeting it squarely at Australia and New Zealand. Once you get outside of those two territories you run into linguistic problems, which will need independent servers elsewhere.

　　GS AU: Why did you decide to do this when other MMOs haven't?

　　JD: From the very beginning the Australian fans were very vocal. One of the first strange packages that we got in the mail a couple of years ago was from an Australian fan who sent us a bunch of drop bear stuffed animals, and he attached fangs to them and there was blood all over their faces face--and was basically threatening [producer] Jeff Hickman and letting him know that if there weren't Oceanic servers, that he would send a drop bear invasion to attack the developers physically.

　　Australians have just been a group of fans that have been very vocal in our communities, in fan sites, and in terms of beta applications and so forth. It's clear to us that it's a completely viable new market that hasn't got the attention it deserves. So we're really excited to be out in the front of the market there saying "Yes, they deserve their own server equipment and so forth".

　　GS AU: Did you keep the drop bears?

　　JD: Actually yes. Jeff Hickman has it on his desk, along with the letter the guy wrote.

　　GS AU: WAR has had a long gestation. After all the delays, are you convinced now that you've got enough to please the hardcore Warhammer fans?

　　JD: Pleasing the hardcore fans was something we've actually been pretty confident about all along. When we first started the project, one of the directives that Mark Jacobs--the GM of the studio--gave us was that we had to keep the Warhammer faithful happy and feel like we've respected their hobby. One of the first things we did as soon as the game was playable--and this was about two years ago--we just started taking a version of the game to games day festivals all over the world, and just putting it in front of the true faithful and getting a sense form them about what they thought of what we were doing, whether or not they were happy with direction we were taking the game. And they were overwhelmingly positive.

　　GS AU: What about those not so familiar with the Warhammer universe?

　　JD: That's another thing you have to be careful about when you're working with any IP. While you want to respect the people that have been fans of it in the past, you want to make sure you're developing something accessible for the more standard player.

　　So our game has all the things that your typical MMO has--it has the quests, it has exciting adventure in perilous locations, and things of that sort. But we're really hanging our hats on what's making us different from other games, and primarily that's our realm vs realm (RvR) system. It offers a dynamic large-scale competition that you can't get in any other game, where you're working with thousands of other allied players, fighting against thousands of enemy players for true control of the world. That's a message that's really appealing to people on a core, human level, it appeals to that competitive focus that people have.

　　GS AU: Only a few months to go now before release. What's the focus now?

　　JD: At this point we're deep in the throes of closed beta, and so we're focusing on finding bugs, finding systems that need additional polish. The vast majority of design and content development is in the past at this point. We're really focusing on spending a lot of time making sure that things are polished, stable, all the systems play correctly, that the major functions of the game are there, and that they make sense. We're doing a lot of overhauling right now of things like the UI, trying to make sure that the interface players have looks really great but also makes sense, is intuitive, and has everything a player needs.

　　This is very interactive with our beta community. We regard them as part of the development process--they're not just their for stress testing and to look for bugs. We look to them for critical feedback. We need the testers to be offering us more than just praise and more than just bug testing--we need that constructive criticism to make sure we're headed in the right direction.

　　GS AU: Will there be an open beta?

　　JD: We will not be having an open beta in the sense that anyone who wants to can join the beta. Because we regard beta testing as part of the production process--it's not intended to be some sort of free trial experience--we will be letting on a lot more people late in the stages of beta prior to the point where we launch the game. So that will be orders of magnitude more players, but we will never have a point where we just let in everybody who wants to join willy nilly.

　　When we say open beta, what we're generally referring to there is that the non-disclosure agreement is lifted, and players who are in the beta test at that point are free to discuss it with the outside world and share their experience publicly.

　　GS AU: Do you have a date for the expansion of the closed beta?

　　JD: Unfortunately we're not publicly announcing that yet.

　　GS AU: Realm versus realm looks to have capacity to be overwhelming for some players. How do you introduce players to it?

　　JD: This is not our first game of trying to implement RvR in the MMO space. With Dark Age of Camelot--which was seven years ago at this point--we really introduced RvR for the first time. One of the lessons we learned with the implementation of Camelot is that in order for that system to make sense, you have to make sure that it is an integrated part of the world and that it serves a purpose all throughout a player's lifespan as a character.

　　So the first major distinguishing feature of what Warhammer offers from, for example, what Camelot offers, is that the RvR territory exists everywhere in the world. So from the very beginning, the very first zone that you are in as a brand new character, there's a section of that zone that is currently contested. You can go in and compete control for that area against enemy players that are of a comparable level. So the first thing you do is offer people a fair fight right from the beginning. You offer them a challenge, something they can do right from the early stages of the game that gives them a sense of that competitive purpose without forcing them into a cut-throat world without where they're facing off against players who are dramatically more powerful than themselves.

　　The second thing we do is offer a simplified version of the overall RvR experience and gradually make it more complicated over time. So the first thing you're going to be doing in RvR won't be as complex as a full city siege. That's something players will take part in after they've progressed through most of the content in the game. They'll have at that stage mastered their characters, they'll understand all of the siege mechanisms, they'll understand all of the strategic components of the world.

　　GS AU: How big will these RvR battles get?

　　JD: RvRs can be very small. If you're passing through the persistent world, and you're just moving through an RvR flagged area, and you run across a single enemy player, that's what we call a skirmish. It's a very small, incidental fight that takes place--it's not planned, it's not strategically oriented, it just revolves around see the enemy, kill the enemy.

　　Then there are battlefield objectives. There are strategic control points which exist persistently in the open world--those are going to take larger groups of players to accomplish. To successfully attack a battleground objective, you might need six, 10, 12 players to do some of the early ones. To actually take over an entire keep, you'll need several groups of players, so you're looking at that point 20, 30, or 40 players. Obviously that will scale up if there's a significant amount of defenders at the time. By the time you get up to city siege, the various types of RvR interactions there can have hundreds of players on both sides interacting simultaneously in an effort to take control or defend the city.

　　GS AU: How have closed beta testers responded to the very big sieges?

　　JD: We've actually just started testing that section of the game with them over the past couple of weeks. The feedback has been very energetic because it's obviously a new thing they haven't had access to previously. At the moment we're treating it in a very controlled way, we're sending them in under very strict circumstances, We automatically leveled their characters up so everybody is evenly matched, we put them in the cities simultaneously and then just say "and fight" to see how it's all working. At the moment we're still at that honeymoon phase we're everybody's excited about everything. We're hoping that some of that more critical feedback will roll in over the next week or so.

　　GS AU: Tell us more about public quests.

　　JD: They are cinematic, story-driven events that take place in the world. So as you're moving through the world in a typical way, you're going on a normal quest, you're traveling between locations, you're going to run across these events that are taking place in the open world regardless of what's taking place elsewhere. As soon as you enter this geographic area that this event is taking place in, you'll get a little widget that says "there's a public quest here, here's what the current stage involves--you're attempting to repel a chaos invasion of this empire village". And you can choose to stop what you're doing and take part in that quest. If there are other players in the area that are engaged in it, you are automatically cooperating with them towards that larger-scale common goal.

　　As you move through the quests, the stages become bigger and more difficult, until they culminate in a major boss encounter--some sort of monster that's truly epic in size appears--something like a chaos giant comes storming out of the woods, for example.

　　The idea here is a little bit sneaky. One of the things we're worried about is the tendency amongst a lot of MMO players to play it as a solitary, solo experience. While there is a lot to do solo in the game, for something like RvR, it really is all about large-scale assaults on huge numbers of enemy players. At the end of the day the game is all about working with other people. So we tried to introduce systems in the game that would convince people to cooperate without them realising that's what happened. You walk into a public quest, and the next thing you know you're actually participating with these other players, you're probably talking back and forth with them, you're coming up with strategic plans. Before you realise it you're actually a social game player as opposed to a solo player. And because we have hundreds of public quests throughout the world, it's going to nearly impossible to avoid cooperatively playing with other people.

　　GS AU: We've talked a lot about PvP. How much PvE content will there in the game?

　　JD: There's a huge amount. What we really wanted to do was create a fully-realised PvE experience, in addition to the really exciting and dynamic content that comes from the RvR side of the things. If you really are a PvE-oriented player and that's the only stuff you're interested in, you're going to find that the game has a tone to offer you. Our hope is that people will experience a combination of gameplay.

　　At the end of the day, as a PvE player, the highest level content in the game is actually targeted at you. By the time you use the RvR campaign to push into an enemy's capital city, break down the gates, burn down the buildings, fight your way to the king, break inside his palace, go in and fight him, that's actually a massive PvE boss encounter. The highest level raid in the game is part of that RvR campaign. We really wanted there to be a sense that the RvR campaign and the PvE experience was really intertwined. To achieve the greatest levels of success in either, you actually need to accomplish both.

　　GS AU: Finally, you're only a few months away from shipping. Any nerves?

　　JD: Obviously everybody is really excited about wrapping the project up and getting it to the public. But of course there's always that sense of anticipation, a little bit of nerves associated with it. We want to make sure the public gets to see our product and it gets to as many people as possible, and that they really get a chance to enjoy what we've been working on for years now. We're not nervous about its quality, we're nervous about sending it out on the world. It's like sending your kid to school for the first time.

　　GS AU: Josh Drescher, thanks for your time.