What is your name and official title?
My name is Craig Turner, Development Manager - Player Systems.
What is it you do on a daily basis?
I wear many hats, and thankfully they usually change from one to the other very rapidly, which makes things interesting and fun. I work very closely with my boss, Adam Gershowitz, to handle much of the detail work of leading a team: I handle the schedules, personnel development, team liaison work, dependency tracking, build management, process management,
What is your background? Has it helped you with this job?
The two biggest influences in my past have been my work in technical theatre as well as my IT work. Technical Theatre, and specifically working as a Stage Manager, taught me how varied disciplines all come together in the end, how we all have to work together to produce a product, what 'sense of urgency' really means, as well as how to deal with conflict under stress. There is nothing quite like the stress of an accident on stage during a live performance to teach you how to deal with bad situations in a very rapid fashion.
The work I did in IT helped refine my technical skills as well as cultivated my attention to detail. When your boss yells at you because you forgot to setup a printer on an end-user's machine, "... and if you forgot to do that, what else did you forget to do?!" You quickly learn to pick up that skill so you don't get yelled at anymore!
What other titles have you worked on in the past? In what capacity?
I was a volunteer for Dark Age of Camelot and helped Beta test back in 2001, and I eventually was a part of their Team Lead program (Nightshade!) before eventually getting hired by Mythic in 2003 as a QA tester for Dark Age of Camelot. In 2004, I moved over to Imperator and ended my time there as an Associate Producer focusing on character classes. When I moved to WAR, I took the lessons learned from doing career work on Imperator and brought them here to WAR. I have been working with the Careers in one form or another ever since.
What was your "welcome to the game industry" moment when it hit you that you were really making games for a living?
I think it was probably the first time I went to E3 as an employee in 2005. I had gone to the E3 in 2003 as a Team Lead; yes I was making contacts for the eventual job inquiry - shush. When I was able to return to E3 wearing the Staff badge, giving interviews on Imperator while Sanya and Walt did their shticks in the same room, that was the really the time it hit me.
When WAR was released, I was very proud to see the boxes on the shelves, but it wasn't as a surreal of a moment as that first staff E3 was. (Seeing WAR on the shelves infused me with a rush of pride, mind you!)
What excites you about the Warhammer property? What makes it perfect for an MMO?
Warhammer is such a brutal, no-holds-barred, dark and bleak world where everyone/everything wants to take your lunch, eat it in front of you, and then kill you. For a game that has such a huge focus on Realm vs. Realm combat, you couldn't ask for a better backdrop. The IP has been around for so long that we had so much material to pour through; it was almost always a question of what do we have to leave out of the game!
I know of more than one day we lost to brainstorming amusing ability names for the various career concepts we were tossing around!
Now that WAR has launched, what aspect of the whole experience are you most proud of?
There is a lot to be proud of in this game; but personally speaking, I'm really proud of the careers in WAR. I've been involved with the careers from the very first time they had the ability to do damage on a development server, and continue to be involved with them now. The diversity in their mechanics, the flow of their activation patterns, the character of Warhammer in each one (even the ones we had to take liberties with and invent!), and above all else, how much fun they all are. I don't suffer from alt-itis in normal fantasy MMOs, but it I do in WAR.
If it wasn't for the careers, there wouldn't be nearly as many interesting forum threads on the WAR fan sites!
Do you collect Warhammer figures? What army do you play?
I have two armies; Lizardman and Vampire Counts. As a young kid, I always had a fascination for dinosaurs, so the Lizardman army was my first (and a given!). I enjoyed being one of the very few around the office that had Lizards, although all of the Slann and Salamander hate came my way! The Vampire Counts gave me the complete opposite type of play style from the Lizards and when we were playing one 2,000-point game a week for 16 months, I wanted a bit of a different experience after awhile!
What are your key influences when making the game? Anything besides Warhammer?
For me, Dark Age of Camelot and Imperator were very big influences on me. For DAOC, it taught me about the concepts of RvR, how you could get the challenge of fighting intelligent opponents without being assaulted with their smack talk, and multiple other items. Imperator taught me how to make a game, what things I'd do differently with more time on a new project, and what good ideas we had that were worth bringing with me.
What are your favorite video/computer games of all time? What games are you playing right now? What game should the reader be playing if he's not?
Civilization (all versions) has simply been the video game that has sucked most of my time in the history of me being a gamer. Romancing the Three Kingdoms (various), Final Fantasy (various), EQ1, and DAOC have all been excellent games that I've spent far too much time with in the past. Outside of WAR, the only other MMO subscription I currently have is Eve Online, although I do dabble in most every MMO. I can't speak fondly enough of Eve, but then again they are a competitor so I must remain subdued else the marketing red pen will attack.
What music are you listening to right now?
Trance. DJ Tiesto, Astral Projection, and Ferry Corsten are some of my favorites at the moment.
Is there a recent movie you've seen or book/comic you read that you'd recommend to others?
Since the birth of my boy weeks before launch (what timing, huh?), I haven't gotten out to watch many movies. However, I was reading a Transformers the movie thread the other day where people where talking bad about it, so let me just profess my love for that movie to counter balance the hate!
