Warning, this is all about Warhammer Online so skip if your not into the game.

Today I had to have a long think about the Bloodthirster. Not the first time I have had to think about it, but today was an important day. After all the Bloodthirster is a big monster, the biggest. And we need it to be right. I mean after you have been to the bastion stair, fought your way in and risked life, limb and hours of guild hunting time we need you to have a few BLOODY HELL moments.

So it's a big lad, I mean big. Think real big then think about 15% bigger. I needed to get the animators to think big. I mean this bad boy is so big that he currently clips out when you look up at him. (That's computer talk that means you can't actually see all of the figure when you look at him because it reaches to high into the air. This will be fixed before launch obviously.)

I needed them to think in 3 dimensions, I mean he can't really swing that axe, well not at waist height it would have looked dumb. Players struggle to come up to his hoof. So you need his attacks to make sense, sort of like when a person is trying to hit hamsters with a hammer. I took a load of video on my phone so hopefully marketing will allow them to be in the video blogs soon.

So I grabbed some background material and started making notes. The first big problem you run up against with almost all the Warhammer stuff is that people are drawn to the miniatures. And who wouldn't be? I mean they are beautiful and evocative. Problem is the miniatures are made to the specifications that miniatures need, if a miniature is metal then it can't be too big or it will cost a fortune. If a model is plastic then it needs to fit onto a sprue (that's the name for the plastic frame that the model parts come attached to). On top of this the models basically have to at the scale needed for the wargame table. What this all means is that the representation of the Bloodthirster that most people have seen is the version of the idea of a Bloodthirster realized through a war gamer miniature. This miniature suffers from the same thing we all do, compromise.

Now, when your making a game as big and powerful as Warhammer Age of Reckoning, well you need to jump high and that means not getting drawn into just realizing the miniatures on a computer screen. What we need to do is take the churning, powerful and evocative background of Warhammer and fit it to our purpose.

So job one was to make sure that the Bloodthirster lived up to billing. The variant of the Bloodthirster that caught my eye appears in the book Tome of Corruption, it's a one page description written by a guy called Rob Schwalb. And bloody good it is too. I like a lot of the Warhammer Fantasy role playing material, it's a different flavour to the wargame and strong on imagination. So pouring over the tome of corruption description we started to sketch out how to make the Thirster everything he could be.

One of the early choices was to scale him up, I mean lets make him large, this bad boy is a core baddie, the biggest and nastiest one in the game world at launch. The second issue was not getting dragged into symmetrical design. Just because we are using a Bloodthirster in the bastion stair it does not mean we need to use them elsewhere or try to bulk up other monsters to match him in other dungeons.

Players are fine with asymmetrical design, heck I think that players respond to it, it makes the game feel more alive and less like design by numbers.

Next up the tricky question of fighting the Bloodthirster, I mean really, how can you fight something that is basically a demi-god? This lead to some guidelines and rules for the combat styles we would need, new combat systems we would have to code up and challenges to the AI systems. Nothing couldn't handle, well that's what I kept telling people.

After that we had the problem of what happens when a Bloodthirster dies, I mean he can't really die, he just gets banished from the mortal world. And that leaves a problem; if he can't die and leave a body what do you loot? Challenges, challenges. And before you get clever and start saying how we just code up a change realise that asking for a code change for one monster is setting us on a course for madness. Each and every day we have these sort of challenges, each and every day they can be solved by just requesting another bit of art, one more coding change, a few hours of re design, a new fixture for the game world. Our job, heck my job, is to make sure that we don't just request more stuff. Our schedule is packed, our resources allocated our idea bag is full. So this issue with the banishing of the Bloodthirster was systematic of the challenges of getting a big licensed MMO to market.

Anyway, we then needed to look at the lair of the thirster, where he was going to live, how he would arrive. I mean it's not good enough to just have him pop in. And what exactly would a Bloodthirster do when it is idling (that's the word we give to the animation a monster will do when left alone with no player to keep them occupied, guards will often salute, shuffle, more their weapon around and so forth.) How will the Bloodthirster make its presence known? What will be his attack styles of choice? Just how many people can it kill? And how fast? The list of questions is almost endless.

So with nothing more than a white board you get on with it, the needs of design, game play, resources, fun, excitement, suspense, capacity and a whole lot of other masters come calling. The people on the team are drawn in and asked for views and ideas as we develop our thinking and all the time I keep looking at the amount of time we have to deliver this area and shiver.

But we have cracked it and it's on it's way. What's crazy is that we have pages of this stuff still to do, lots more monsters, area, abilities, items, locations and other things to think about. It's daunting, much like designing a Bloodthirster.