Beware the Warhammer Battle Squigs!

Just read an interview on MMOG Nation with Paul Barnett, Creative Director of the highly anticipated Warhammer Online MMO for EA Mythic.

It’s a long interview, but I highly recommend reading through it because Barnett’s opinions are both informative and extremely entertaining. In fact, the real reason that I’m blogging this is because it made me laugh out loud.

First, a little background… “Pets” have become a standard feature in MMO’s. Basically a pet is an animal or non-player character (NPC) who accompanies you on your adventures and often fights alongside you. Unfortunately, some pets are much cooler than others.

Well, as Barnett explains, the developers are having fun with their implementation of pets in Warhammer…

The fact that we’ve got pet classes, right? Pet classes, just not crap. Here’s the problem with pet classes right? They’re rubbish, they’re all rubbish. Who wants to have a little widget that wanders off and fights for you? How bloody crap is that? It’s sort of like … I don’t know what it is. It’s like being in school, and threatening people only because you’ve got a big mate next to you. He’s a cretinous coward. So! What we did with pet classes is we have these Squig herders, little tiny goblins with big ears who are basically on speed. They’re great. They wander around, and they summon these Squigs. And one of the Squigs they summon is this battle-armored Squig; enormous, great big armored Squig with a ring through it’s nose! And the Squig turns around and he eats the Squig Herder. And he’s sort of in the stomach of the Battle Squig, and he grabs ahold of all the intestines and he pulls on the intestines to make the Squig bounce around the land and fight things. And the Battle Squig sort of chews people up. And then when it gets wounded it sort of staggers around and coughs, and spits the Squig Herder out of his gob, and he sort of flies through the air doing this: “Waaaaaaaaaaaaauuuuuughh”. That, to me, is what our game is all about: because it’s Pet classes, just not crap. It’s fun.

Can’t wait to see that in the middle of a battle!