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Nate Levy, Combat & Career Designer

What is it you do on a daily basis? The largest part of my job is helping to take a career from the initial concept stages through design and layout, and put it in the game. Beyond that, I work on bug fixes and balance changes once the careers are playable. What is your background? College? Degree? Has it helped with the job? I attended Rochester Institute of Technology for the information technology program, but then promptly decided that working in IT wasn’t what I wanted to do. However, I got started on text MUDs at college (hi Overdrive!), which led me into MMOGs, which led me into Camelot, which led me into Mythic; so it worked out anyway! How long have you been with Mythic? I started at Mythic in October 2003, one week before Trials of Atlantis launched. What other titles have you worked on in the past? In what capacity? I’ve worked on technical support for DAoC Trials of Atlantis through Catacombs, QA for Catacombs through Darkness Rising, QA for Imperator, and then QA for WAR before moving into design. What was your “welcome to the game industry” moment when it hit you that you were really making games for a living? Right off the bat when I started here, really; everyone was so enthusiastic about what we do that you can’t help but realize it. Moving over to QA for Catacombs really did it for me, though – I mean, testing a game expansion and calling it a job? Excellent! What are your hopes/goals for the game? My hope is that even my friends who haven’t liked other PvP games so far will love WAR’s RvR! What are your key influences when making the game? Anything besides Warhammer? Aside from the huge stack of army books behind me, I’m first and foremost influenced by my experiences in playing just about every MMO on the market, and learning from what frustrated me in all of ‘em. What is the biggest problem with current MMO’s you hope to fix with WAR? The thing that bugs me the most about most MMOs is that either the PvE content or the PvP content is inevitably an afterthought, and it doesn’t get the love and attention that the other side gets. I don’t want to change from one game to another just because I feel like playing PvE one night! Camelot did a great job of smoothing out the line between the two, and I’m hoping that we can take that even further with WAR! What are your favorite video/computer games of all time? In terms of sheer hours-spent-playing? Probably Final Fantasy Tactics, Master of Magic, EQ1, Chrono Trigger, and GalCiv2. What games are you playing right now? What game should the reader be playing if he’s not? Mass Effect and Culdcept, at the moment. Culdcept is so absurdly addictive! Oh, and Peekaboo with my infant daughter – clearly the best game ever. What music are you listening to right now? XM Led, a temporary station that’s all Led Zeppelin, all the time. Too bad it goes away in May. Who ever heard of a temporary station, anyway? Ah well. Once it goes away, I’ll go back to hopping between most every channel on XM between 43 and 54. Is there a recent movie you’ve seen or book/comic you read that you’d recommend to others? I’m quickly working my way through Jim Butcher’s “Dresden Files” on a friend’s recommendation, and quite enjoying ‘em. In general, you should stop whatever you’re doing until you’ve read absolutely everything by Bester, Brust, Heinlein, Pratchett, and Zelazny, Anything else you want to add? Matthew Woodring Stover said it best: "You are...incapable...of doing anything...the easy way!"

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