E for All 2007: Warhammer Online RvR Preview

At E for All expo I got another chance to look at Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, EA/Mythic’s upcoming MMORPG based on the Warhammer series of miniatures wargames. I last checked out the title, which has been in closed beta for about a year, at E3 2006.

Playing the demo, I felt the game looks and feels a great deal like World of Warcraft, which at this stage in the evolution of the MMORPG is praise rather than a criticism. But it’s the ways that WOAR differs from WoW, and takes cues from its origins as a tabletop wargame, that interests me.

I sat down with EA’s Josh Drescher to discuss WOAR’s genuinely innovative Realm vs. Realm combat system.

Kuno: The last time I saw a playable demo of Warhammer Online, there were two playable factions, Dwarves and Orcs.

Josh Drescher: Yes, it’s been a while. What we’ve got now is a second pairing, which is The Empire and Chaos. This is an Empire Bright Wizard, he’s sort of a pyromancer.

In the game we have basically two overall factions, Order and Corruption. Within those two groups we have three races. So on the side of Order you’ve got the Dwarves, you’ve got the Humans, and you’ve got the High Elves, who we’re not showing here. On the side of Destruction, you’ve got Greenskins, you’ve got Chaos, and you’ve got the Dark Elves, the other pairing we’re not showing. Each of those is sort of paired off against an opponent; Dwarves with Greenskins, Humans with Chaos, and the High Elves with the Dark Elves. Within your own faction, you’re able to move back and forth between territories, to group up with your allies and things like that, so if I’m a human I can go fight in the Dwarven areas. What you can’t do obviously is group with the bad guys.

The Chosen: “Like an enormous NFL player gone terribly wrong.”	“Here’s a Zealot — sort of a Chaos healer, they’re sort of like voodoo priests and priestesses. Every now and then he’ll pick up the skull and talk to it, drink elixirs out of it an vomit them onto you, scratch his ass with the dagger.”

The world is divided up into three geographical areas based on each of those pairings. There’s an ongoing war within each of those territories for control of the capital city on the other side. You’ve got the good capital city and the bad capital city, and you’re trying to push that battlefront back and forth; trying to push it up to the front line of your enemy city, knock down the gates, go inside, and sack the city.

My understanding is that the individual actions of characters, and how well they do on quests and instances, affects the outcome of the war on that server.

Yes. What will happen is, within the game, you’ll have the standard sort of character progression, quests and things like that, and then within the ongoing battle you’re going to have Realm vs. Realm combat…. This bar will show color in one direction or the other. These hash marks indicate that control of the zone has tipped in one direction or the other. If that zone is controlled, then it opens up access to the next zone, or to the enemy’s capital city. So if you imagine it’s kind of like five bubbles, you fight over the neutral bubble in the middle, then if you take that you attack the next one down, and if you get that you can attack the capital city.

Capital cities are basically centers of commerce, it’s where the guilds are going to be formed up and hang out, it where the auction houses are going to be. … The loss of the capital city is very devastating to your faction. You’ll lose access to certain things that are only available in the capital city. Benefits that help you when the city’s attacked and you’re healthy obviously go away. In addition your leader, your king or emperor, can be taken away out of your city and taken to an enemy city, and then you have to actually go and rescue them.

Are you worried about one faction gaining permanent control of a server?

First of all, it’s going to be effectively impossible to hold a capital city permanently. You break in, you knock down the wall, and it’s like going to Disney World, but it’s evil Disney World. You have a set amount of time while that city is taken. After that point, the city comes alive, the gates will come back up, NPCs will start to spawn; and once that gate is up and you’re killed in the city, you’ll respawn back outside the city. You cannot get back in until you’ve retaken the gates. It will sort of organically push you out over a reasonable amount of time.

The idea is we want you to be in there long enough to do terrible, awesome things, but we don’t want you squatting in there forever and ever. And in terms of preventing a situation where an overpopulated realm is always able to take over a city, we are making some of the success in capturing a city pursuant to success in what we call a “scenario.” A scenario is a balanced instance of combat, where we say “alright, these 36 players against these 36 players have to go ahead and fight,” and success in this particular scenario gives points towards defense or invasion. The idea being, even if you’re under-populated by a fairly substantial margin, you’re still going to have a reasonable chance to defend yourself. That’s the best we can do short of forcing people to play a particular side.

The Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning beta is currently offline, while the team implements changes. If you want to become a beta tester when the beta returns in December, visit the official site.