Warhammer Online Interview Reveals Big Changes

MMORPG.com has published a two-part interview (here and here) with Warhammer Online's Mark Jacobs, in which the general manager surprisingly reveals that four of the game's six capital cities as well as four of the original twenty-four careers have been "shelved." Not only that, but they're changing their name again - from EA Mythic back to Mythic Entertainment. The craziness:
(We are going back to Mythic Entertainment,) said Mark Jacobs, the VP and General Manager of EA Mythic. (I've always been a believer of separate branding,) he continued, going on to cite a number of successful companies like Disney and GE that operate subsidiary companies under separate and distinct brands.

(I think that this is a wonderful example of how things at EA are changing,) he continued, (both John (Riccitiello, CEO of EA) and Frank (Gibeau, EA) have spoken multiple times about city states, more freedom, that sort of thing and I think this is an obvious example.)

...

(A number of months ago,) Jacobs began, (we sat down and looked at where we were with our Capital Cities and we looked at what we were doing with Altdorf and Inevitable, we looked at the Greenskin home, the Dwarf home and we went '˜there's an awful lot to do here and there are some issues'˜.)

There was something missing. It wasn't enough fun, it wasn't interesting enough, it wasn't (alive) enough. From there, the team was faced with a choice. They could either keep going down that path, working on all six cities and trying to get them finished before launch or make the hard decision to shelve four of the cities until post-launch and make sure that Altdorf and Inevitable were as full and rich as their design had intended. Mythic chose the latter.

(we decided to focus our energies on two capital cities; one for Order and one for Destruction, and make them fabulous, said Jacobs. (Not good, not great, but fabulous.)

...

The four careers that are going may surprise players (and even includes one of Marks personal favorites). The list is as follows:

Choppa (Greenskin)
Hammerer (Dwarf)
Blackguard (Dark Elf)
Knight of the Blazing Sun (Empire)

This means the removal of two tanks and two melee DPS classes.

(I wish we didn't have to do it,) Mark said, (I really do. Unlike the capital cities [which provided a silver lining in the end], I can honestly say that I really wish we didn't have to cut them out, but it's better for them to be cut out than to have classes that aren't great and that we would spend more time trying to make them great post-launch than we should have to.)