WarHammer Online's Paul Barnett Sits Down With AbleGamers - Part 2

{sidebar id=3}{sidebar id=1}Well it is that time again, time for part 2 of the interview AbleGamers did @ GDC with Paul Barnett, Creative Director of WarHammer Online, over at Mythic. Today's question is all about why World of Warcraft tool off in such a big way. Please stay tuned AbleGamers, because part 3 is when we get into this thoughts around disabled gamers. For those that missed the first part of this interview, you can click here. As before, the transcript of the interview is below for those who would rather read it, or need close captioning.

Transcript of the Interview...

MR. BARLET:  When you look at the first generation, which was like the original EQ, which was incredibly complicated.  You could get drunk and the more you drank the more the screen blurred and there were all these slash commands that let you do so many interesting thing.

And World of Warcraft came out and a lot of that complexity was completely removed and I have a theory that that is one of the reasons why it grew so well in popularity, because it simplified what I thought was a really heavy learning-curve.  But, I think by simplifying that learning-curve the end-game, the immersion lost something.  What are you thought around that?

MR. BARNETT:  I think you could look at the arcade game Defender and then you can look at Atari (sp).  Defender, for people who don't know, came out in the late-1970's or early-1980's.  It's a side-scrolling spaceship shooting game and it's high on concept and it's high on game-play, but it was definitively built by someone who was obsessive about what they wanted to do.  It has a lot of buttons and it's quite hard to control and it's twitchy.  He tells this great story of when he built it and he burnt the data onto the chips to take it to the experts to try to get it picked up.  He only had one copy.  They tried really hard.  The chips didn't work.  There was an error.  They managed to get about get it working, and then it stood there and went into "tract mode" and all it did all day was have people come up, put a quarter in and last about 7-seconds and then their money was gone.  They just walked away baffled, not knowing what to do about it.  But, there was something compelling about that complexity.  There was something engaging about that early-ness, that actually made people go and play it again, not only because it fitted the financial mode.  I burned quarters really quickly.  It made you put more money into it.

And so, Defender goes on to be immensely popular and makes a ton of money and it's a seminal game of its time.  However, if he'd have carried on making Defenders, you just wouldn't have gotten anywhere because that sort of high-burn synapse fast-reaction gaming . . . it appeals to that first earlier doctor hardcore gamer.

But then, if you compare it to something like Atari (sp) which came out 10-years later, which is this sort of multicolored spaceship.  It's 2-D.  It moves around.  It shoots at big alien bodies.  It had a coin drop mechanism where a timer would tick down.  You'd put more money in and continued.  You'd go, oh, okay.  That's changed.  That simplified it, but it's also widened its market and hit a new market in new ways, to the point now that if you actually went to an arcade designer and you said . . We're going to make Defender.  We're going to use very simplistic straightforward graphics with lots of buttons and it's just going to be rock-hard . . . people would say, you're insane!  That won't sell!  It'll sell to the nostalgia-brigade who will buy it to try and recover their childhood, but it's not going to sell to the modern era.

So, I think it's sort of like that, that you're always going to lament for what you see as the simplification, the opening to the masses of what you're doing.  I'm sure the people who are doing mobile phones, when they were first building them were very upset to find out that school children can now have them, that they're easy to do.  All these things that they struggled with that people don't appreciate how lucky they are because now they've got address books and web browsers.  We never had any of that technology!  We had to make due with terrible little screen back in the day when the world was made of coal!  And so, I think it's sort of like that.  We always lament for the perceived nostalgia rose-tinted glasses.

And when people say things like . . . It's much too easy . . . . I was looking at cars recently and I thought about buying an old car and I wandered off and had a look at this 1940's car the sort of car that (inaudible) hot-rod.  And I thought, very interesting!  I went and had a look at this, this guy was building it into a hot-rod.  He'd lowered the roof and he was putting a big engine.  He got in the car and you have to adjust 20 things to get it started!  You have to pump fuel through it.  You have to change a choke thing.  You pull a lever.  Then, when you get it going  . . . chicaboom, chicaboom, chicaboom . . . and at any moment any of these things can go wrong and the car will just stop working.  He said to me, I don't like modern cars.  He said . . . I was in a car recently and it just had one button that you pressed and it just switched on every time.  I like these cars where any moment the whole thing could just explode and these cars take skill!  These cars take ability!  Modern cars should be built like this!  I remember when they brought out a car and it had key in it.  Completely simplified it!  I don't know why they bothered.

So I think it's sort of like that.  The "march of technology", the "march of people's time" requires us to make things simpler.  I'm drinking a can of Guinness draft.  Years ago you got that by going to a pub.  There was a barrel.  There was a (inaudible).  There was a big iron pump.  You had to wait for it to settle.  It took 7-minutes of being in a pub to get your drink.  Now, you have a can with a widget with some nitrogen.  You can drink it straight away!  Well, things are better now!  I don't want to do it the other way!  So I think it's like that.