Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Interview

PC Zone/CVG has kicked up a short Q&A with EA Mythic’s Paul Barnett about the Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning beta test.

What’s the reception to the beta been like?

Paul Barnett: Well, our beta comes in three stages. Firstly, internal – that’s when one of our clever guys says “Hey, I’ve made it so you can run into the cities and blow them up,” and we all pile into a local server and it explodes and it doesn’t work so we put a new chip in and we change the code until it does.

Stage two is closed beta, the stage we’re in now. This is the bit where you invite a select group of people in to do targeted testing, so we can say “Hmm, we’ve had 400 people beating the crap out of this dungeon, let’s put 4,000 people in and see what it does.”

And that’s when you flush out all the craziness and go, “Oh that explodes, we need a bigger dungeon, the monsters are too hard, they’re too fat, they’re too thin, we need more elephants.”

The final stage is the open beta, which is like when they say a movie is launching on Friday, but you can come and see it on Tuesday.

As for how it’s gone? We’ve found a load of stupid stuff, we’ve proved a load of game ideas, we’ve disproved a load of game ideas. We’ve thrown away some of our most darling ideas because they turned out to be crap…