Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Progress Reports

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Written by BuckGB on May 5th, 2008

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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.

Alongside the standard quests that MMO veterans are used to the content of the game is also fleshed out with over 300 public quests in which players that happen to be in the same area can all contribute to a common goal without necessarily being in the same group. These quests range wildly in their storylines from kidnapping princesses to boarding ships and manning their siege weapons, and also serve as a way for players to possibly group up with others. If a player finds themselves fighting alongside someone in a public quest that seems to really hold their own, there's nothing stopping them from starting a group and going from there.

For fans of the team's last MMO offering Dark Age of Camelot a question was brought up regarding what lessons have been learned and modes adapted from DAoC to Warhammer Online. "We learned a lot of great stuff from Dark Age of Camelot," said Jeff, "as far as how to balance out realms, how to balance out population, how to balance classes, what's fun, what's not, what do they enjoy doing in short bursts, and what do they enjoy doing in long bursts. A lot of the stuff we are doing with Warhammer was derived from Camelot. Some of these are the 'if only we could do this' when we were making Camelot, but we couldn't. Warhammer builds on the great foundation that Camelot put in place for us, but it also differs greatly. Where Camelot was one frontier with a set number of keeps and zones that you could fight over, Warhammer is three different battle fronts, with battles raging across the world; open world RVR, unmatched combat, open world battlefield objectives, keeps with siege and also in scenarios which are evenly matched instanced combat. There are over 30 of these in the game at this point, with at least one in every zone. So, you have all these options and choices for the RVR game and all of that culminates into city sieges. Ransack your enemy's capital city, burning, looting and pillaging, going for the ultimate prize the crown jewels of your enemy's capital city."

Question: Regarding end-game content accessibility, are you targeting the top 10%, or the average gamer?

Jeff Hickman: We're targeting everyone. It's not what you can get, it's about how long it takes you to get it. If you persevere as a player in our game, it's about commitment, it's about being skillful at playing the game, but everybody has access to the end-game content. Everybody has access to the items. City sieges are about a lot of people, but they're not about big, giant raids. You can literally walk into a city alone, because there will be other people there for you to fight alongside.

Paul Barnett: There is an obsession with designers to build for the top 10%, because they're very loud, and they're very successful. That actually leads you to doom and destruction.

When you build something like a golf course, you can build a golf course so that only Tiger Woods can get par, but that would be madness. What you do is you build a good golf course, and if Tiger Woods wants to shoot on it you know what? He's going to score huge. Everyone else is going to have a damn good game, and is going to understand it and have things to aim for. It's the same sort of logic, we build our end-game so that it is fun and compelling and attractive and a great hobby.

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