21-Feb-2007 A return to Chaos We were quick to award Mark Of Chaos a recommended award in issue 176, but it certainly wasn't without its faults. However, one accusation you couldn't lay at its door was a lack of respect for its tabletop origins - of all the games so far, Mark Of Chaos seems to tip most hats towards the universe's hobbyist core. From 'painting' your troops, to the game novelisation and colour-your-own-standard that comes with the Collector's edition, Mark Of Chaos takes the Warhammer universe very seriously. We spoke to Black Hole Entertainment's creative director Istvan Zsuffa and senior project manager Gabor Illes about the process that took them from having a scant acquaintance with the Warhammer universe to becoming fully immersed in the bloody heart of it all...
HUNGARY FOR BLOOD Illes: Warhammer isn't that popular in Hungary, so only a few of us had played the Warhammer tabletop game before starting work on Mark Of Chaos. However, most of us knew about the Warhammer universe in another way. The Fighting Fantasy series of books, created by the founder of Games Workshop, were really popular in Hungary back in the 1980s. After that, we started to learn more about the Warhammer universe and our artists spent a lot of time with Warhammer art and played with the miniatures too.
WARLOCK OF TABLETOP MOUNTAIN Illes: The guys at Games Workshop told us they didn't want to make a computer version of the tabletop game, because they just wanted us to make a good computer game with their world. But we wanted to use as much of the origin of the Warhammer game as we could. Painting the miniatures and making the different armies is a lot of fun and what the tabletop game is all about. Reproducing that fun was our goal.
Zsuffa: Games Workshop really feel their universe is real, and that they're just dealing with one possible interpretation of that universe. They just said that we had to come up with another possible interpretation of that universe. So we didn't have to use the values they have in their manuals, we just had to make sure the characters and historical stuff was true to their world.
LICENCE TO KILL EVERYTHING Illes: Namco bought the licence from Games Workshop, so we weren't involved in that part of getting the licence. But Games Workshop came to Hungary when Namco told them that Black Hole Entertainment were making the game. The producers came to make sure we had the experience and the knowledge of the Warhammer universe to make the game. As I said, we had some experience of the Warhammer world, but by the time Games Workshop came to visit us we knew almost everything about it.
GAMES WORKSHOP HQ Zsuffa: The company is very different to any other we've ever seen. As we said before, the world is completely real to the people at Games Workshop. They talk about the history like it's real, they know every single aspect of it - it's a great place. We saw the museum (where every Warhammer fi gure is professionally painted in glass cases) and we met some great guys. We also visited Bugman's bar, the dwarven bar in the Nottingham offices. It was a really interesting experience - it sounds like I'm just being polite, but I'm not. The only thing we had problems with was the huge amount of beer they could drink. Well, it wasn't a problem, but we were amazed that there are people in the world who can drink that much...
TIME LIMIT Zsuffa: It was very easy to make a game in this world, because Games Workshop are very open. We could create our own characters and stories, we could even change the world; the core world of the Warhammer universe - especially the old fantasy universe - is very fl exible with its facts. We could even change the world maps - not to make serious changes, but in their world slight changes are OK. Warhammer maps are notoriously subjective to the person making the map. The only bottleneck was the time involved. We only had 18 months to make the game, which is really short for a game of this type.
Illes: When we say they were open, we mean they were open to discussion. We had to get approval for every single aspect still, and there was a complex approval process - each character had to be approved by Games Workshop.
REGRETS Illes: If we had more time and could start development again, we'd pay much more attention to the tactical aspect of the game, the connection between the different battle maps. You can't move freely or conquer cities and develop your castles. You can move between locations and enter cities to build up your armies and buy stuff, but if we had more time we'd make it far more complicated, making it a far more old-school tactical map with an open story, with every single aspect paying more attention to the player.
EXPANSIONS Zsuffa: We know there's an expansion pack planned, but we don't know yet if we'll be working on it. Of course, we'd hope to be able to work on the pack. For example, four armies is enough for a normal PC game, but the Warhammer universe has many more. We'd definitely want to add two or three more armies, as a minimum.
We also wanted to make the game more bloody. We wanted to implement decapitations and put real gore on the battlefield. We wanted a lot of blood, with body parts falling away. However, because of the short development time, we didn't have a chance to do this. Because it's a mature game, we'd be able to do everything we wanted to do with more time.
DAWN OF WAR Illes: We wanted to make a totally different game to Relic. Dawn Of War was a base-building game, and all the old Warhammer fans we talked with told us that they wouldn't want to see another base-building game. Fantasy Warhammer is totally different, it isn't about that. It's about huge armies fighting on an open battlefield, so that's why we decided to make it this way. It wasn't an easy decision for us, because Armies Of Exigo was a base-building game and that's where our experience is. We had to write a lot of new code and a lot of new AI, but I think it was all worth it.
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