Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning: 1.3.5 Interview

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Michael Bitton recently got a chance to sit down with Warhammer Online Producer Carrie Gouskos to discuss WAR’s upcoming 1.3.5 patch that will be making some major changes to the game’s RvR campaign, among other things.

First on the agenda was the centerpiece of 1.3.5: the 100% RvR city sieges. Carrie explained that the whole idea of the city sieges was that they were meant to be an epic conclusion to the game’s RvR campaign, and serve to humiliate the other side for losing. The problem up to this point, however, was that the campaign essentially ended in a giant PvE raid, and the main goal of 1.3.5 was to address this issue.

City sieges are still a three stage process; however the stages are now interrelated, with how well (or poorly) your side does within a particular stage affecting the following stage. Another key benefit to the newly revamped city sieges is that the system now allows for many more people to experience the end game, as previously if one group of players screwed up in one of the many city siege instances it could essentially block all the other players of that side from experiencing the rest of the siege.

So, let’s talk about the stages:

The first stage sees the invaders enter the city and try to capture key strategic points; while the second stage has the defenders attempt to re-capture the points. If your realm only managed to capture one point in the first stage as the invaders, it’d be a pretty easy victory for the defenders in the following stage, especially since the defenders will have their warlords in tow to help them out, so this ties into what Carrie mentioned earlier about the results of one stage affecting the other.

The final stage is particularly interesting, as the Chaos and Empire kings are both fighting each other, and four players (one of each archetype) are randomly selected as their King’s champions and take part in the battle. The champions are then physically enlarged (almost comically, as you can see in the image below) and the real focus becomes basically a 4v4 between the two groups of players.

I asked Carrie how players have been receiving the city changes in the ongoing beta test of 1.3.5, and she explained that most of the feedback revolved around some typical issues, bugs and general confusion mainly, the latter of which highlighted what Carrie admitted as one of Mythic’s general weaknesses when implementing things into the game, and that is improperly explaining features to their players. They’ve worked to address all the aforementioned feedback, but the team’s key realizations so far has been that they had tuned the sieges improperly, discovering from feedback and playtesting that things were skewed way too much towards the defenders. This turned out to be a huge issues, as due to the way rewards are given out in the new system (to both winners and losers) players could simply allow their cities to be sacked in order to sit back and defend. As a result, Mythic has tweaked the sieges to give invaders a bit of an edge, which should encourage players to stay on the offensive and attack their opposing realm’s city.

I also briefly wanted to discuss the new combat highlighting feature with Carrie, as I had a number of concerns regarding color blind gamers. I’m not color blind myself, but the new (optional) feature, which promises to be helpful to many on a sometimes confusing battlefield, aids players by denoting when they (or others) are being healed or hit through the use of colored flashes. The flashes are red (for damage) and green (for healing), and anyone who is familiar with color blindness can see how this could be an issue. I was glad to hear from Carrie that the team has taken this into consideration as they continuously strive to make Warhammer Online friendly to color blind players (they’ve even received the “Most Accessible Mainstream Game of 2008” award from AbleGamers), but she did admit that there are no provisions, at least initially, to make the combat highlighting feature particularly friendly to color blind players. However, it is important to note that Carrie did mention that the feature passed a number of their internal color blind tests, and she believes the particular tint or brightness of the colors should make it obvious to color blind players what is going on.

Moving on, 1.3.5 also brings some important visual and design changes to WAR’s items. On the visual front, many of the game’s RvR items now have their own unique graphics, and the game’s dyes have also seen major improvements. Anyone who has played Dwarf or High Elf characters can probably think of a number of armor pieces they can’t dye, as the result can be absolutely hideous. 1.3.5 should alleviate many of these issues, though Carrie admits it will be an ongoing process and mostly the worst offenders are being addressed in 1.3.5.

Another key change to items in 1.3.5 is the decoupling of class restrictions from many of the game’s armor pieces, with the aim here being to help encourage more of an economy in the game. The changes will make a lot of the game’s gear a bit less exclusive so that players can give away or trade them with others instead of just pawning them off to the vendor since they can’t use it and can’t trade it. I was a bit confused when I initially read the patch notes on this, thinking that I’d be seeing Swordmasters running around in Knight of the Blazing Sun armor, but this is certainly not the case, as Carrie admitted that Games Workshop would “have our heads” for that. Instead, the now tradable armor would basically morph in appearance to fit the class of its wearer.

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WAR Item Design Lead Sean Bosshardt provided us with a specific example of how the new item mechanics will work, which you can view below:

The following is a completely hypothetical situation (but it showcases how item trading now works):

Big Bad PQ

In the purple bag, the following careers get the associated items:
Sorcerer - Robe - Body - Int/Wou
Zealot - Robe - Body - Wou/Tou/Wil

Those two body robe items are now Bind on Equip rather than Bind on Pickup. What does this mean? If the Zealot wanted an offensive DPS piece of armor they could trade/buy it from the Sorcerer (and vice-versa if the Sorcerer wanted a defensive piece of armor).

For those of you out there who haven't played WAR in a while, I asked Carrie about 1.3.5's requisite balance changes, and wondered what, if anything, players who haven't played in awhile might be interested to know has changed in their favorite class. To that end, we received some examples from WAR's Combat and Careers Lead Nate Levy on what's changed for a number of the game's classes in the past few months as well as in 1.3.5:

A big one for 1.3.4 was the introduction of the RvR weapons - they're some of the best weapons in the game, availably entirely through RvR activity, and have options tailored to suit every Mastery build.

Runepriests and Zealots saw bug fixes to their "jumping" heals (Rune of Serenity and Leaping Alteration) in 1.3.4 which made them much more reliable, and those abilities will soon see further balance improvements in 1.3.5 which will greatly increase their healing values. These changes make the Runepriest and Zealot much more flexible when it comes to healing large clumps of players, no matter whether they're within the player's group or outside of it, which will help in large multi-group battles.

Shadow Warriors had a long-standing bug with Enchanted Arrows fixed in 1.3.4, which finally allows Flame Arrow and Festering Arrow to correctly bypass resistances. Additionally, 1.3.5 will be bringing a fix to both the Shadow Warrior's Assault Stance as well as the Squig Herder's Gas Squig - they will now correctly double the players' armor from gear, without having any undesirable effects on debuffs.

White Lions had numerous improvements in 1.3.4, including: Fang And Claw dealing more damage, Lion's Fury dealing more damage, Cleave Limb costing fewer action points, Coordinated Strike becoming more reliable, and of course, Pounce dealing more damage, and costing fewer action points, and no longer doing AE "splash" damage so that it can be used for true battlefield mobility without breaking Staggers unintentionally.

Some players might have also noticed and might be miffed that Mythic is moving many of the game's trainers, crafting trainers, etc to their realms' respective capital cities in 1.3.5 due to something called the "red plague." I just had to ask Carrie about this, wondering if this was merely a change being made for an upcoming event, a design decision, or both. Carrie explained that the decision was made as a bit of both. As far as the red plague goes, all I was able to find out was that the "red plague is coming," and that "people are going missing." Sorry, folks! When asked about the design motivations behind the change, Carrie revealed that the decision stemmed from a desire to both improve the economy and socialization in WAR, and it's Mythic's hope that by consolidating these key NPCs and functions to the capital cities that both these aspects of the game will be improved as the cities will serve as a bit of a "rallying point." Speaking of rallying points, Carrie noted that rally masters have been added to the capital city so that players can get to the city easier in 1.3.5, which should help players adjust to the change.

We closed out the interview with two brief questions unrelated to 1.3.5, as I was curious to know if there were any updates on the armor overhaul that Mythic has been teasing for the last few months. Much to my surprise, Carrie revealed that many players both hated and loved the proposed changes, and that players often get attached to their particular look, and so the issue has been more complicated than simply getting the work done, as they are looking for a solution that allows for both sides of the argument to be happy. Mythic has a plan in mind, which they are aiming to test out in the near future, but unfortunately I couldn't find out exactly what that plan is. However, Carrie assured me that if everything goes to plan players should see the new armor changes in 1.3.6.

Finally, Carrie recently released a new Producer's Letter that looked ahead a bit to patch 1.3.6. One of the big reveals in Carrie's letter was that Mythic would be opening servers to players creating characters on both realms on the same server, and she forgot to mention an added bonus that will be coming with the relaxed server rules: additional character slots! Currently, players can only create 10 characters per server, which doesn't allow for players to create one of each class per server. Carrie assured me that the additional slots will make this possible, and then some, hopefully. You'll definitely have at least 12 slots to play with come 1.3.6, though Mythic is aiming for about 20 slots per server.

Source: mmorpg.com