Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Interview

IGN's Warhammer Online Vault had the chance to quiz Mythic Entertainment's Mark Jacobs about a variety of topics at this year's E3. On the game's recently cut content:
When asked about the reasons for taking out the cities and essentially the content with them, Mark explained to me that the cities which were removed had not even been developed as living cities like The Inevitable or Altdorf. "They were just cities with NPCS, auction houses, banks, that sort of thing. They weren't the focus of RvR in the way they are now", Mark said while describing the state of the removed content. This is a huge misconception that I believe drives most of the confusion for people. Back before the living cities system was thought up the capital cities were going to be nothing more than better looking cities. Mark explains their transition saying, "What we decided to do was, what if we took the cities to the next level. These cities have so much more content than the original cities that multiplying by three doesn't cut it. These cities have somewhere near 100 quests each either leading to them, in them, or leading out of them. We weren't going to have that before. They have rvr, public quests, and dungeons centered around them."

If it isn't clear yet, the cities removed from the game were never going to adopt the living city model. So, in reality, we didn't lose any content. Mark clarifies this exact statement by saying, "People said we were going to cut out content; One guy said we were cutting out 2/3 of our content. But wait a second, this is the end game. All the tiers were in tact 1-4 and the only thing we cut out was a city that was originally going to be there to be sacked. We never talked about doing all these other things with the city". Mark went on to say something that I really feel says it all: "I'll happily cut 2 cities that you can run around in on each side for one massive city with tons of new content, more than we would have had before, where RvR is centered around the city. That is an absolute no brainer."