Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning - Progress Report Part 2

Well, people, we carry on with our report on the development progress of EA Mythic's MMORPG, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning (read the first part of the report..

In this segment the developers continue to talk about PvE, Classes, Careers, PQs, Guilds, Scenarios, Solo-playing and more.

Are you gonna fire that pistol or what?

Careful, don't damage your nice and bushy beard.

Hints about Crafting

No details on this one, save for a few hints given by Jeff and Paul.

"It's in beta right now." There's "plants, stuff to drink, caves and fungus... You can do anything as long as it helps with the act of war. We don't have time for bakers and candle-stick makers, but we're okay on Butchers."

Reaching the Highest Rank

For a short while the developers talked about how long it takes to get to the max Renown Rank.

"A lot! While our leveling is fairly quick, actually, our Renown Leveling is much slower. That's where we want people to spend the time and earn the most. Killing other people. Not that hard to learn, not that hard to get competent, difficult to get brilliant at. Easy to learn, hard to master."

"Careers are about fun, they're not about doing something crazy and unique and something out of the ordinary and complicated. They're about ease of accessibility, understanding quickly..."

Classes and Careers

The developers made a complete departure from Camelot, albeit the most recent iterations of the classes and the warfare appear to be very similar to Camelot. Jeff said:

"In very early iterations of our game, we experimented with a lot of infanity about classes and careers - things we'd really like to do. Every developer goes through this, especially in pre-production and early development. We decided that really wasn't the right way to go. We departed from that design and experimented with 5 or 6 design systems for careers. And the thing to remember is that we innovate in our game, things we chose to focus a lot of our attention on - RvR, Public Quests, The Tomb of Knowledge, our living city system, etc. Careers; well, we chose to be as iconic as we could be, as interesting as we could be. Careers are about fun, they're not about doing something crazy and unique and something out of the ordinary and complicated. They're about ease of accessibility, understanding quickly, even though they may be difficult to master. That's what we've got. We've got careers that make sense within the Warhammer world. We've got careers that are awesome to play and are very iconic. It was just a natural evolution of the design process, as far as careers go.

As far as the warfare system and RvR [in comparison to Camelot], we had a very, very sound design on RvR when we started making Warhammer. We drove for probably 2 years with that design and as we put it into beta, the players really, really liked it, but they wanted more. They were basically looking back at DAOC and they were saying, 'hey where are our keeps' and 'where's our siege.' At this stage of the game we had battlefield open world objectives, scenarios or instanced combat. We had this great campaign game with the capital cities. But we didn't have keeps and keep sieges and when the players went in, they just demanded it. And we listened to them..."

PvE

Sure RvR is the meat of Warhammer Online, but an inquiry was also made on PvE. Here's what they said on the matter:

"Every system of the game is intertwined. The RvR experience and the PvE experience. You can experience them independently, but at some point you're going to realize that you rely on the players that are focusing on the other side of it in order to accomplish the goals that are important to you. A good example is the Campaign level of the game. Everything you do in the game, this includes PvE, helps you in the war effort. Quests, PQs, Tome Unlocks, Crafting. Everything you do helps the overall upper level RvR. It all trickles up through the Tiers. As a result, in that Fourth Tier you need people to be questing, to be successful at the lower Tiers in PvE and PvP, so the higher Tier RvR players benefit from the PvE players all through the game. Everything that's going on in the game impacts whether you have this, that or the other thing. Everything you do contributes to the war effort."