On Call With Warhammer Online

The devs from EA Mythic wax enthusiastic about their new project via conference call.
5/2/2008 3:05 PM | 0 Comments | Page 3 of 5

Crafting will also contribute to the war effort but once again the details are being kept, for the most part, under wraps. Cryptic hints were thrown out like the fact that one of the crafting screens was green and had a plant on it. You may drink things ... and fungus is involved. Oh, and Jeff Hickman's wife loves the crafting system. That's about it. "You can't make sausages -- unless they're poison sausages, I guess. We don't have time for bakers and candlestick makers, but we're OK on butchers," said Barnett.

Guild Wars

One of the more intriguing parts of the call focused on the game's guild system. One of the key things that the team wanted to avoid was using a guild as simply another chat channel or a list of players with whom you are familiar. Like everything else in the game -- there's a bit more to it than that.

Turns out, your guild earns experience in a similar fashion to a regular PC. The team calls it a "living guild" system. Guilds can unlock "banners" and can customize their appearance, which doesn't sound too novel until you learn that you can slam these banners into the ground and use them as an area of effect rallying point during a battle. Guilds can also claim a keep to use as a central HQ. Systems are in place, although no specifics were given, to prevent huge guilds with loads of members from dominating over smaller ones. We'll just have to wait and see how the team handles this.

Senior Designer Josh Drescher went into further detail. "The game is cooperative in that you are playing with other people, and it's competitive in that you are playing against other people. So from a very early stage in the game we try to introduce you to the idea of cooperative social gameplay. Even as you are running through things like the Public Quests, that's a subtle way of teaching you to play well with others, because later on you are going to need to organize more and more to accomplish things in the game.

"Conveniently, the maximum size of an individual group is the minimum size of one of our guilds. So the group that you joined to do a Public Quest may lead you directly into forming a guild. Once you form a guild you can accomplish more and more significant things in the world. Eventually those guilds can get together into larger groups called 'alliances.' We have a lot of structures within the guild system that we'll be touching on the coming months that will make it very easy to do those large group alliance level strategies. We wanted to make sure that it's not going to be a second full-time job participating in a guild -- we want it to make sense, work easily, and get you into the world fighting and killing people instead of scheduling things and doing spreadsheets."

Barnett then yelled, "Put your pants back on!"

It was that kind of conference call.

Odds and Ends

An interesting point was made about the "hardcore" gamer. What is audience is EA Mythic targeting? Is it the mass appeal of the mainstream or the hard-nosed "lifer" gamer?

Hickman took a stab. "We're targeting everybody. It's not about what you can get, it's about how long it takes you to get it. It's about commitment and being skillful at playing the game. The city sieges, for example, are about a lot of people but they are not about big, giant raids. You can literally walk into a city alone because there will be people there to fight alongside. Everything is accessible to everybody."