Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Multi-Part Q&A
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Ten Ton Hammer: What have you found most challenging when building your guild system?
Josh Drescher: *laughs* I think challenge is the wrong word for it. I think the most work has always gone into trying to communicate with people that have been out in the field playing with large guilds for a lot of years trying to find out what is missing. We have the benefit of actually having a number of people on the team, and I won't call them out because they need to maintain the safety of anonymity, who have been part of or are still part of relatively large well known guilds in plenty of games. It's an asset to us because we can go to them.
I for example, have never been a particularly social person in or out of game. I hate people. So it's always a little confusing to me what might be missing from this portion or that portion of the finalized design. Being able to go to someone and say "You've actually operated a hundred person guild before. What was missing? What would you have loved to have in game?" helps.
A lot of the utilitarian functions you will find in the design which might not be as flashy, I think is really going to wind up the most popular side of it. Those elements came directly from talking to people who have experienced lots of games over the years and have really been clamoring for things like a calendar. It sounds like a stupidly simple thing to put in the game, but it's just something people have never bothered to implement previously. It was the lightning flash where we went "That was blindly obvious and somehow we missed it for years." You have the idea of building in something like a calendar so that's been a challenge but I wouldn't say it's been daunting or intimidating.
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Ten Ton Hammer: We know Guild Alliances are going to play a large role in the bigger conflicts. What benefits do the Guild Alliances bring players?
Josh: The first thing to remember is there are a couple of driving forces that you'll find throughout the game in terms of categories. Some of them are hard numerical values like "You get a percentage based bonus for doing the following things." Some of them are strategic benefits and while they don't provide you with any visible, noticeable benefit they are actually a core component of how you have to interact with the game.
Due to the RvR campaign and the number of players that are going to be involved with it, even your really organized sort of top level super guilds are going to have a hard time being independently successful in the game. There comes a point when you can only absorb so many players in your guild, you can only control so much of the game by yourself, before you have to reach out to some of the other entities that are out there within your realm.
One of the reasons is that we are trying to create the sense that, on a macro level, the guilds are very cooperative. You may not be members of the same guild, but you have shared objectives as a realm and as a result, the primary benefit of alliances is organizational and strategic. If you are going to go into a capital city and you want to have any chance of pressing your way to the palace and fight the king, you need to have the organization in place necessary to go target all of the sub bosses, all of the lesser targets in the city, to grant access to that final content.
Generally we believe that is going to be an alliance type of thing where you organize as a larger group, agree on responsibilities within the city siege, and then you try and execute on that as effectively as possible.
