Speaking of increased fan communication, Warhammer has responded to some fan questions on Slashdot, talking about their game and where it’s heading. In response to ‘what makes WAR special’:

That grand, enormous capital city you’re running around in today could be a ruined tomb tomorrow if you and your fellows do not defend it tooth and nail. To do so, you’ll be given the chance to push deeper and deeper into enemy territory until you finally reach THEIR capital, at which point you’ll lay siege to it and – if successful – do things that… well, Slashdot is a FAMILY FRIENDLY place, so let’s just say that you’ll do terrible, terrible things to the huddled, whimpering survivors of the siege.

I note that Warhammer is being published by EA, so ‘terrible, terrible things’ is more likely to be whacking unarmed NPCs rather than dark, creepy things best left to the seedy side of Second Life and/or Jack Thompson’s imagination.

That being said, the question I’m most interested in is how a side that has been utterly decimated to the point that the capital is in ruins can hope to come back to turn the tide. While I genuinely love city conquest scenarios (I feel they capture the ‘massive’ part of what MMOs are supposed to be), most territorial control games are progressive – a game design term meaning that the winners tend to keep winning, as they gain more and more spoils of war, and more and more players on the losing side feel the desire to join up and/or play. This problem was a very tough issue for both Shadowbane and Dark Age of Camelot to deal with.

Perhaps the most ballsy response to the issue was that of World War II Online, who inserted into the game a ‘reset button’ – meaning occasionally, they declare that the Germans won, and start the whole thing over. You would think that players would be disappointed at ‘losing their hard work’, but the developers who described this at my PvP roundtables at GDC suggests the opposite is true – everyone’s happy. The losers are happy that the risk board has been reset. The winners are happy that they’ve been crowned the victors, and even happier that they again have opposition (since the losers start logging in to fight). Plus, there’s something oddly reinvigorating about a clean Risk board.

Original comments thread is here.