EA Artist, Soon To Be Laid Off, Burns EA Management, Discusses Failed MMO
I worked on Warhammer Online for nearly two years before it left the offices of Climax Entertainment in Nottingham, England. When I arrived the game was already a couple of years in development, but the focus was on the technology not the game. We had no game, just a test area running on a local server.There was a design department consisting of 10 people, 4 working on environment and level design, 6 working on quests, the magic system, and general game mechanics. There were 10 artists, 4 animators, and 13 programmers.You'd think we would get somewhere with such a large team, but we didn't other than developing the underlying tech. The main reason the game design didn't progress was a second design team led by Paul Barnett was sitting in the office above us coming up with another vision for WHO without any interaction between the 2 departments other than meeting with the lead designer occasionally.When the news came of Climax stopping development of the game it was not surprising to most people working on the title. You could see it coming for months before it happened. It looks as though that continued at Mythic although they did at least manage to ship.I left a few months before the announcement was made and ended up having two exit interviews. The first was a standard set of questions given by the studio's human resources deaprtment. The second was with a representative of Games Workshop looking for answers as to why development was not progressing as they had hoped. They were in the dark about what was happening with their IP and wanted answers.