Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning - Progress Report Part 1

City Invasion

This guy just doesn't like smiling for the cameras.

Knock, knock...

The hot topic for this game is RvR, obviously. But how will players be able to coordinate the invasion of a city and how many do you expect to be involved in a battle of this size? The response was:

"Through alliances, obviously. The easiest way you're gonna do that. The game is really focused on two things from the very beginning. It's cooperative (you're playing with other people) and it's competitive (you're playing against other people). So from the very early stage of the game we try to introduce you to the idea of cooperative, social gameplay. Even as you're running through things like the public quest; that's a subtle way of teaching you how to play with others, because later on you're gonna need to begin to organize more and more to accomplish things in the game. So, conveniently, the maximum size of an individual group is the minimum size of one of our guilds. The group that you've joined, because you've gone into a public quest, will lead you directly into forming a guild. And once you've formed a guild, you can start to accomplish more and more significant things in the world. Eventually those guilds can get into large groups, called Alliances. We have a lot of structure in the guild system we're gonna be touching on in the coming months and that will really make it easy and intuitive to handle those sort of alliance-group large-level strategies and plans. We wanted to make sure it's not going to be like a second full-time job participating in the guild or participating in an Alliance. We want it to make sense, work easily and get you into the world fighting and killing people, instead of scheduling things and doing spread sheets. And a lot of it is little things, like messaging in the game. So you know where the battle's at, you know when a city comes under attack, you know how you're side is doing and where they're pushing the battlefront to. Just keeping players informed both inside and outside of the game allows players to participate in everything that's going on in the game."

"You have all of these different ways of playing the RvR game and then it culminates in these great city sieges where you literarily can attack your enemy's capital city, ransacking the city, looting, pillaging, burning, kind of going through the ultimate prize, the crown jewel of your enemy's capital city."

Siege Equipment

Players are in for a treat with sieges that can be built within keeps or "outside of keeps." The developers also plan "special types of siege around war camps, in front of capital cities." They continue: "there are four types of 'war machines' in our game. There's the ram, which you can build and knock down doors with." Gamers can also use "boiling oil" which is used on players that are using the ram. "There's a variety of both indirect and direct fire siege equipment. The indirect fire types are catapults and mortars, generally used to target large groups of enemies and blow them up at a great distance. Then there's the direct type like Hell Cannons, Ballistas, Dark Elf Reapers, etc." So how it works is that you "build your siege when you're attacking a keep and the people inside the keep build their siege to defend to keep and you're targeting each other's siege equipment with your direct fire weapons, while you're targeting personnel with your indirect fire weapons."

Also, every piece of siege equipment works in a unique way so, "you're not just gonna be able to take your Hell Cannon, point it at the wall and go 'well that'll just keep shooting things' - you have to take into account things like wind, how powerful an individual blast is." You have to decide where to fire specifically. Most of it is completely player-controlled.

"We wanted to make sure it's not going to be like a second full-time job participating in the guild or participating in an Alliance. We want it to make sense, work easily and get you into the world fighting and killing people, instead of scheduling things and doing spread sheets."

The Balance between Winning and Losing

Next up, Adam took the opportunity to explain how they plan to balance things out should a winning side get progressively stronger than the losing side.

"The longer that a zone is under control of the winning side, we start doing little things to sort of bring the losers up to par. Things like slowly taking the winning side's advantage away slower and slower as time progresses." Josh continues: "Offering things like buffs to the underpowered Realm, trying to give them the opportunity to get back on their feet. What we're not trying to do is punish you for being successful, but what we are trying to do is give you a sense that the competition is always lively, interesting, and there are a number of organic things that we are doing to try and encourage population balance, class balance - which is what Adam spends his entire life trying to do and so if it doesn't work, it's all Adam's fault..."