Interview With Another BioWare Mythic Franchise Producer

A few days ago, GamerZines posted an interview with Carrie Gouskous, the Warhammer Franchise Producer at BioWare Mythic, similar to Jeff Skalski’s position as Ultima Franchise Producer.

While the interview was ostensibly about Warhammer: Wrath of Heroes, a free-to-play spinoff of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, there were interesting comments made in general about BioWare Mythic and free-to-play models. Nothing too serious, mind you, so don’t read to far into it, but I get the feeling that it applies to UO as well. The decision not to take Warhammer Online free to play mirrors things said last fall by the BioWare Mythic VP, that they aren’t interested in taking the BioWare Mythic MMORPGs into free-to-play. I’ve filled up articles in the past why I think free-to-play isn’t really free, but anyways, some of you may find this interesting.

This comment was interesting, just because it touches on a topic raised by some Warhammer: Age of Reckoning players – instead of sinking a lot of money and dozens of team members into the Wrath of Heroes spin off, why didn’t they just take Age of Reckoning into a free-to-play model:

Carrie Gouskous: We spent a lot of time looking at Warhammer Online and saying, “Should we take this game free-to-play?” And there were so many things that weren’t quite right for free-to-play, like the fact it’s such an RvR focused game – the things that we’d have to sell lead us to question whether it would be the right move. So we decided to turn that question on its head; we’ve seen a lot of full blown MMOs go free-to-play and that’s certainly a tactic – and don’t get me wrong that doesn’t rule out that Warhammer Online going that way – but instead we said, “Let’s find out what is the core of this experience that people like and bring it to the forefront.”

This was interesting, in bringing up Mythic moving on beyond what they already do:

GamerZines: Is Wrath of Heroes an example of Mythic moving on? Does it mean you’re moving into new design avenues, genres etc?

Carrie Gouskos: We’re sort of discovering for ourselves, as a part of BioWare, is this kind of gameplay. There’s definitely cool stuff we want to do in this space. Honestly Star Wars is such a tremendous thing, I look at that team and go okay it’s Star Wars, I get it! We find ourselves in a space where we’re looking to bring two different kinds of experiences and meld them together.

GamerZines: You’ve talked about how free-to-play games have changed the market and the pressures of subscription-only MMOs. Do you think if you’re going to develop a traditional MMORPG nowadays it has to have free-to-play in mind?

Carrie Gouskos: That’s a great question. I don’t think every MMO necessarily has to be free-to-play, there’s certainly a confluence of certain licenses and IPs, and they exist within and outside of EA, that will pull subscribers to them. However I do think you need to think about them carefully as the market is changing. Depending on what you’ve got, you need to think how compelling can I make this? While still holding people to a very rigorous kind of money component.

The interview is worth a read, if only to understand that they aren’t in a rush to go “free to play” anytime soon. Earlier this year, Warhammer Online went through around of server mergers, another sign of a declining population.

I believe that if they [Warhammer Online] were doing better, we would not see Wrath of Heroes, but Wrath of Heroes shows they aren’t quite in a rush to shut down MMORPGs or games like they would have in the past.