Robin Dews & Matt Sansam Q&A

TVG has sat down with Robin Dews and Matt Sansam of Games Workshop to talk about their upcoming MMORPG, Warhammer Online. An excerpt below:

Q: What can you tell us about the game’s visual style? Some of the imagery seems fairly graphic. Are any of the artists with experience with the tabletop games working on the project?

A: There is a visual style that pervades everything Games Workshop does. If you look at our rulebooks and supplements you’ll see that there is a kind of gritty realism to the images we produce that is born out of the inspiration of the artists I mentioned a few moments ago. You can often see a synergy between the visual style of many computer games and that of contemporary comic books and graphic novels. To me they appear to be drawing from a common visual lexicon, and it’s not a bad way to go as there is a dynamic to comic book art that translates well to the slightly cartoony look of most computer game graphics.

However, as you might expect, it’s not where we wanted to be. The instruction to the art team was to render the Warhammer world in as ‘˜real’ a fashion as their technology would allow – complete with mud, blood, filth and decay!