Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Interviews
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Q: You have implemented two distinct features in your combat system called Player Tactics and Morale Points. What exactly are they, and how do they contribute to battle?
A: The combat system is a 3 layered system. Tactics are like buffs - they can be stat increases, they can modify things, they can enable other abilities that you normally don't have. It's meant to be like a prep layer. So I set up the tactics the way I want them before I go into a fight. Let's say I'm an orc, and I know I am going to fight a bunch of dwarves. I'm going for numbers and I want to be able to deal with as many guys at once as I can, so I might set up a certain tactic a certain way. If I am fighting one solitary giant with a bunch of other guys, I might set up my tactics a different way. Then you have your bread and butter abilities that define what your career is, or make sense for the job that I have - certain slashes and hacks and all that kind of stuff, or be able to go berserk. Those are your basic abilities. Then on top of that layer is morale, which is this little extra bit on top of it all where you gain morale abilities. As you fight and have success in battle, the morale bar goes up. If you leave combat, that will decay, but what we want you to do is go from fight to fight to fight as quickly as you can and fill that up. The higher that gets, the more effective, cool and grand the effects are. So it's a game of how can I stay alive long enough to get the uber heal, or the mass area of effect destruction around me that will save my group, or do I nickel and dime the lower level morale abilities instead.
And an excerpt from The MMO Gamer's interview:
Q: I was reading on the site that there is 25 years of Warhammer. Where does this game start in relation to the history Warhammer? Does it start in the middle, the beginning, or do you pick it up at the end?
A: We're actually lucky in that regard because Games Workshop has basically set aside anything in the Warhammer fantasy universe that we want to pull from. It's kind of a time out of time. The Age of Reckoning is a special time where everything is available to us. They have a timeline, but they are not so definitive that it pigeonholes anything in particular. All the cool names that all the Warhammer fans know and love will be available to us. And we can kill them.
