Warhammer Online: WAR Dev Diary: Creativity and Numbers

Lead Systems Designer, Steve Marvin brings us an insightful view into the complexities of Warhammer Online's under the hood systems designs. Mr. Marvin describes the systems as a set of baselines that have been built upon, almost like layers of a cake.

Numbers alone, however, aren't exciting or cool. If your game feels like battling spreadsheets your customer base is going to be very, very small. Players want to call down the wrath of the heavens, turn into wondrous beasts (or turn their opponents into not-so-wondrous beasts), and generally perform fifteen impossible actions before breakfast. How do you turn something expressed in purely creative terms into a set of numbers that can be balanced against all of the other appropriate numbers?

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