Strategy Informer: Can you give a brief overview as to what improvements you’ve made over the first game? What are its selling points?
Jörgen Björklund: We’ve added the new game mode which we talked about during the announcement, which has more of a ‘campaign’ feel to it. A lot of players were asking for ‘single-player’ gameplay, and this is a bit of a twist on that. It’s called ‘Exiled’, and you have to fight your way through different smaller worlds, or shards. You start on a much smaller world than the original, and you have to work your way through a network of nodes back to the shards of Ardania where you fight a huge boss. We’ll also be working a lot on the AI, which was a complaint from the first game, and we’ve added more stuff – more spells, new races, more monsters, and more world types. We’ve looked at the interface, and tried to make that better too.
We got good feedback from experienced players in Warlock 1, but it was incredibly unforgiving to new players, so we hope we've fixed that.
Strategy Informer: Another unique point was the spell system, which was akin to technology research – how have you improved on that mechanic since the first game?
Jörgen Björklund: We now have a better way of researching spells. In the first game you have these five or six research ‘slots’, and when you researched something in one slot, it randomly generated a new spell for you, so it was very hard to plan your spell research. We now have three different research trees, so you can plan in a totally different way. We’re also working on a system... how you use the spells, that’s basically the same. You still have the casting time, the mana to keep track of, but we’re working on a system where you can tag on gems to spells that either makes them more dangerous, but slower to cast, or quicker to cast, more mana etc... so you can still play around with the spells after they’re researched. You can micro-manage your spell usage more than you could in the first game. It makes me use spells a lot more.
Strategy Informer: Can you tell us a bit more about the ‘Exiled’ game mode? Reminds me a bit of what Eador: Masters of the Broken world did in their game. Did you draw inspiration from them or was this a coincidence?
Jörgen Björklund: It’s a coincidence – I mean we’ve looked at it a little bit over here, and I think we’re very different, as a game. Our broken worlds are basically an evolution of the extra worlds from Warlock 1, where you could go through portals to other worlds. This is to force exploration and to have a couple of distinct smaller worlds where you can explore and fight in another way.
The basic set-up is that, depending on what universe size you have, every great mage starts on a smaller level 1 world, with some low-level monsters, some resources, but you’re pretty safe in your world. There’s also a limit on how much you can do there, so you NEED to expand, and you need to expand into other worlds, where you will fight with the other Great Mages for the resources, and further and further on through the network of worlds, to the final world. So it’ll be harder in this game world to eliminate the other mages because they will be very heavily fortified in their starting worlds.
Strategy Informer: How does a typical game setup work then in the Exiled mode? I’m having trouble visualising it.
Jörgen Björklund: Let’s see if I can make this make sense... you start a game as you did in Warlock 1. The average game-length in terms of time is pretty much the same, but instead of having one huge map, you will spawn a couple of - I have to draw this for myself – worlds in a semi-big universe, for example, you’ll want three computer opponents, and a middle universe. Each of the mages would have one world each, and every one of those would have a portal to a level 2 world each, and then in turn those worlds are connected to a couple of level 3 worlds, etc... One playthrough will be one playthrough, as in Warlock 1, just the set-up is different.
, now that is a word the 
portion of the hivemind needs to adopt.
