GDC Austin: Mythic admits mistakes with Warhammer Online

During his keynote at GDC Austin, Warhammer Online executive producer Jeff Hickman spoke to attendees about three of the major mistakes Mythic made with the MMO.

These mistakes being challenging play, the lack of economy, and the fact that the game was so easy that social tools were made irrelevant.

"There's a big difference between easy play and ease of use," he said. "One of the lessons that we thought we learned from ourselves and other games, was that it's important to have ease of use, and it's also important to hit the right balance between easy gameplay, challenging gameplay, and too difficult. We thought we hit that, but Warhammer, in PVE, in the beginning, is too easy. It doesn't make you thrilled to do it.

[As for] our economy... we just missed the mark. If you look at the reasoning behind the economy, you'll see things like, 'Hey, we're not going to let gold farmers in our game.' 'We're going to try to make sure we have controlled inflation.' We had all the best reasons in our game, but what it caused us to do was build a game where economy is not important enough.

"Economy brings people together."

There's loads more from his talk over on Gamasutra.