GamersCircle

Generally speaking, it’s safe to say that developers play their competitors’ games. The same goes for competitors’ betas, too, although at times they’ll be prevented from doing so by an NDA. Back in August, EA Mythic GM Mark Jacobs discussed the topic of Blizzard employees being in the Warhammer Online beta with MTV Multiplayer. He claimed, "They’ve been paying attention, and I know they’re in our beta even though they don’t like to tell us they’re in our beta." Bold words, but they were harmless enough.

During BlizzCon, Multiplayer asked World of Warcraft lead designer Jeff Kaplan if Blizzard staff had tried sneaking into the WAR beta. Kaplan says that he tried getting in, but there was nothing sneaky about it; after becoming friends with some of the guys from Mythic, Kaplan offered Wrath of the Lich King beta keys to the guys at Mythic. And, when the time came along, he asked if he could get a key to the WAR beta. But, according to Mythic creative director Paul Barnett, Mark Jacobs didn’t want Kaplan in the beta.

Now, with Warhammer Online available to all, Kaplan claims he has spent some time playing the game. He offered up a few criticisms of the game, such as the long waits in the battleground queue. As for WAR’s familiar UI, Kaplan said:

"I think game developers just want to evolve systems, and people take a lot of inspiration from other games that have existed. The WoW interface did a lot of things, and I think people would be silly not to learn lessons from it. Any savvy game developer is going to play a lot of other games and pick from the best. It definitely looks very familiar."

While there didn’t seem to be any malicious intent on Kaplan’s part, Jacobs has fired back, defending the various problems that Kaplan pointed out. Jacobs claims that WoW had long battleground queues when it first launched and that WoW wasn’t the first one with its trademark interface — Blizzard only polished it. Perhaps Jacobs wasn’t trying to make a big fuss, but his comments regarding innovation could easily be taken as inflammatory, to say the least:

"If you look at Warhammer, there were so many points [where] we consciously made the decision not to be like WoW and to try to push the envelope. I think you’ll find that if you’re actually going to compare the two products, I would say WoW is certainly a more polished game now than Warhammer is — of course they’ve had four years and billions of dollars — but if you look at the innovations in Warhammer, you’d be hard-pressed to find as many in WoW."

You can check out the full comments for yourself and form your own opinion as to what Jacobs’ intentions were. But it looks to me like we’ve got ourselves some good old fashioned mudslinging.

Source

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