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Warhammer Online Producer Discusses Game Features
BigDownload.com has a great interview with Jeff Hickman, Senior Producer for Warhammer online, that offers a great preview of many of the game's features. The interview spends quite a bit of time discussing the "RvR" (Realm vs. Realm) style of gameplay and what that will mean for players. "We generally start everything in our game with a thought toward PvP. PvP isn't the first thing we think of, but it's one of the first things. We think of Warhammer Online as a PvP game that also has monster and PvE content. So, when we balance our careers, we balance the content around player verses player, not fighting monsters. We balance the classes against each other. Then, instead of balancing those classes against the monsters, we balance the monsters against the classes. Our philosophy is to make the best PvP game in the world and build the PvE content around it. We know how much damage each class can do and take, plus all the utility each class can provide. So, instead of balancing each ability, we just need to modify the overall damage output and absorption of each career."
More like World of Warhammer. Online. Craft...
So... what happens when the people who are there for lore and whacking monsters run out of content and start to complain or quit? Don't think that it isn't going to happen, or that they're going to be a tiny contingent-- just look at how Guild Wars has changed since Prophecies launched.
Penny Arcade
PLEASE PLEASE, make a single Realm where each players only have one life. And when he dies he dies. (The user can the ofcause then create a new player).
My arguments for this:
It will make it posible for users that don't play so much time to get player charactors that are within the 10% best, because a characters power will be the amount of time played since he last died, not the total amount of time played.
It will make the player levels a bell curve, meaning that there are only a few really powerfull players. There is nothing fun about reaching $MAX level if >25% of all the other players are also max level.
This does mean that one team may have a player that can beat any player on the opposite time, but he still can't beat any team of other players.
It will also make guilds much more usefull. Just imagine that the guild leader is the person with the highest level, and the other members of the guild funciton as kind of "support troops" for the leader. This will be extra cool if the instances insted of limiting the number of players within a group, limit the total number of levels within a group. So if a instance is rated to level 100, you can bring either 2 level 50 players, or a single level 50 player, and 5 support players each at level 10.
The motivation for beeing a "support troop" in a guild is that a: It might be safer then beeing the front fighter, and b: At a time the front fighter and leader will die, and then the highest level support troop, will be the new leader. (This will be extra cool, if high level players get the ability to give bonuses to a limited number of players within their group).
(And yes, this system might mean that the xp that users get for killing monsters and players might need to be raised, so that there are top level players at all).
Giving each player one life, also have the effect that you don't have to limit the number of levels/classes/extras that each player can have.
Just imagine a d&d mmorpg where a player can be dual class. So imagine he is both a fighter and a mage. The existing mmorpg games can't allow this because when that player reach $MAX level, he will have all the powers of both the mage and the fighter, thus owerpowering any single class player. But with unlimited levels and only one life that will not be a problem, because the player will newer really reach a max level where he can't be better, so for any amount of XP, a dual class fighter/mage might have both classes at level 35, while a single class mage with the same amount of xp, might be at level 50, thus preserving the game balance while allowing interesting combinations. (Dual class players advance slower, because they split their xp between their classes).
Martin