WAR Beta Update - Part 5
Greetings!
Today we bring your part five of our Beta Update series. The re-opening of beta is swiftly approaching and the furnaces are burning full steam ahead here at EA Mythic. All of the teams have been working like mad men to make magic happen throughout the entire game. This weeks witchcraft brings you even more information about the inevitable city, character creation, and questions directly from the beta testers about Keeps and Career Mastery. Enjoy!
Waaagh! And well met!
After the last few updates from the Cities Team, we decided
that it was time to show off some concepts of the Inevitable City. This bastion is the physical manifestation of
the power of Tzeentch and a visual representation of the madness that is Chaos.
Hail from the Cities
Team!
This week has been a
bit Chaotic. Literally! We’ve been delving into the twisted and
disturbing halls of the Inevitable
City. One of the items we’ve been forging out of
cold warpstone is the “Feast Hall” interior.
Here players can find or offload the latest plunder taken from the
enemy, brag about new mutations, or just simply relax with a few lashings. Take a look at the concept:
And one more chilling image for you from the shadowy
corners of the Inevitable
City, the Bank! A
twisted counter-part to the Altdorf Bank, power of Chaos flows through the very
walls… Take a look:
I hope that whets your
appetite for our Capital Cities – they’re going to be like no other city you’ve
ever experienced before!
-Capital Cities Team
I have to wonder about the sanity of our artists when I
start to see the various “urban” elements that they are creating for the Inevitable City.
I think we may have to call in some Witch Hunters to check them out…after
they finish all their work, of course.
Another issue that has been raised on the Beta forums concerns
our plans for character creation. Before
the Beta shut down you have no real choices when making a character as this
system had not yet been implemented.
As always, we have a plan and here is the UI Team to talk
about it:
One of the focuses of
the UI Team for the past few months has been to get Character Creation up and
running. In Beta up until this point, players have only been allowed to select
their career and gender before they jump into game and start playing. Of
course, the biggest problem with that was that every single player who made a
male Dwarf Engineer looked like every other player who had made a male Dwarf
Engineer.
Obviously that is not
our intent.
It has been our plan since
the beginning to allow you to have characters that look unique. We do that
through so many other systems in the game (trophies and armor dying to name
two), that it seems only natural to do it from the moment of character
creation. And not only that, but we want players to be introduced to the
characters and careers of Warhammer Online in a way that is both informative
and interesting. Truly, character creation is the first place in the game that
we get to show you what the game is all about.
So one of our first
decisions was how to make the process as interactive as possible. We want
players to see their choices before they start eliminating their options. In
DAoC, the very first choice in the game was to choose Hibernia, Midgard, or Albion before you even had a good sense of what that even
meant. So the first thing you should see when you log into the game (other than
the EULA) is all of the available race choices, right up front. They're
standing in front of you, staring you down, and daring you to pick them.
Now, clearly we have
more choices than you can see in a quick glance, so we had to make some
decisions about what to show and when. Hopefully you'll find it easy to make
decisions, and you'll feel not only informed about the decisions you have to
make, but excited to make them.
So while Beta has been
down, we've gotten character creation in and running, and the first batch of
options for you to choose from. As we continue to iterate on it, we will have
more and more options, and more sophisticated methods for you to select them;
but for now, when you make a male Dwarf Engineer, it's not going to look like
everyone else's male Dwarf Engineer. And that, of course, is the whole point.
-UI Team
Even in its early phases, it’s a much more engrossing
process to create your character now.
It’s visually engaging without forcing you to be bogged down in some
sort of elaborate process.
Last week the RvR Team dropped the bomb that we were not
only going to be adding Keeps as part of our Open World RvR, but that siege
would play a part of it. They took some
of the initial questions that the Beta Community asked about Keeps and answered
them so that everyone could have access to the information. This is a very basic overview of Keeps as
we’re not quite ready to talk about them in any greater detail. That’s for a later Update.
For this week's
update, we are going to answer a few of the recurring questions regarding keeps
and siege. The details will still be on
the light side as many of the features won't be fully implemented when Beta
re-opens. We don't want to tease you too
much with juicy bits of goodness that won't be available right away when you
log in.
Before I dive into
that, there is one other change to RvR.
We have changed the Renown splitting from its old contribution based
system. Renown for killing players is now awarded to each member of a group if
one or more members participated in the kill.
The amount of renown given to the group is a percentage based on
participation in the kill.
Now we move on to the Keep questions -
Will the keeps be attackable without siege? Yes, players will be able to
break open the keep doors, battle the guards, fight their way to the keep lord,
and try to capture the keep.
Will Keeps change in appearance based upon which race controls them? In
future patches (pre-launch), the appearance of the keep will change to reflect
that the enemy realm has captured it. At
this time, we are not planning to entirely replace the keep with a new
structure with different geometry. So,
an Empire keep captured by Destruction will still look like an Empire keep, but
it will change to look like it's been under siege and show some signs of its
new owners.
Will there be NPC guards and a captain to kill rather than a "run
up and click the flag" we see in other games? There will definitely be more
to capturing the keep than just interacting with an object or entering an
area. There will be guards and a
"lord", with the numbers of guards present based on factors players
from both realms can affect. More
details will be released closer to Beta re-opening.
Will there be non-typical types of keeps? (i.e. ships, trains, mountains)
At this point, we aren't planning on using anything that deviates too
far from a "keep" style structure.
Will keeps have multiple levels and if so, will they use ladders or
stairs? The keeps will have several floors of combat
space. Both the keeps and the outer
walls will use stairs or ramps, with no ladders to be found.
Will Battlefield Objectives play a part in the keep system? Yes,
there will be connections between the BOs and the keeps. Sorry folks, this is another one that we have
to say "more details to follow later".
-RvR Team
I can see the follow-up questions already being written on
the Beta forums now. Remember, we’re
only talking about a small part of the pie at this time. As we get closer to re-opening Beta (when the
Beta Community will actually be interacting with the keeps), we’ll be going
into much greater detail.
When last we left our combat & Careers team they too
opened up a can of worms by revealing the information behind our Career Mastery
system. This generated a significant
amount of feedback as well as many questions...many…questions.
We decided to rip questions straight from the Beta Forums
and have the Combat & Careers team answer them directly. These were some very interesting questions to
answer. So without further adieu… On to
the questions and answers!
“I'm hoping we'll get more than two options for
mastery per class (i.e. a chosen that can master being more defensive, being
more offensive, or being more debuffer.., or... duel vs shield, or...”
- Each career will have 3
Mastery paths available to them, and the specific differences between the paths
will be based on the individual careers. In general, careers that share
archetypes will often share similar themes on Mastery, but it is not 100% the
same.
“But one thing I was expecting to see at least
mentioned, but wasn't, was an ability to respec our characters?”
- There will definitely be a
mechanism in place to re-specialize your Mastery. Initially for Beta it
will be easy to access and free, however there will be some cost to it in
release.
“Hrmm, i probably missed it, but how do you earn
mastery points? Is it just from when you level up?”
- Yup! You gain Mastery
points as your rank increases. You'll begin gaining Mastery points at
around 25% of the way through your career, so that you have some time to become
accustomed to the career's core playstyles before you have to make any
specialization decisions.
“Is it a good assumption on our part to guess that
you are taking a look at spells and attacks as a whole as well as adding
specs?”
- Absolutely. Remember
that we're releasing all of these different aspects of the careers iteratively,
so the next pass over the careers that adds Masteries will also be a general
pass over the careers as a whole.
“I would like to know if you can give us any
information on the UI for the Career Mastery. You mention that at certain
levels you get to "unlock" skills, will these skills be visible
before they are unlocked or only at the point when they become available?”
- The UI for the Mastery system
isn't quite ready for discussion yet, but we can assure you that all of the
abilities within a path will be visible right from the start. We're not
going to keep the benefits of a Mastery a secret; you'll be able to see right
from the beginning what you'll gain from each Mastery path.
“I am interested in how this will work for the
front load casters, IE Magus, and BW... hmmmmm ... Guess will be like DD
mastery, CC mastery, and DOT mastery type?”
- The C&C team is actually
making strong efforts to avoid "CC Mastery". Crowd control is a
powerful, necessary, and key part of gameplay, but it's also very delicate - if
you're unable to control your character for an entire fight, that's horribly
frustrating and simply not fun. Bright Wizards, for example, might have
one Mastery for direct effects, one for longer-duration effects, and one for
area effects - any crowd control abilities that they might have would be
scattered through the trees as appropriate.
“For some people, the meta-game of speccing and
respeccing is the most fun”
- Don't forget about things like
Tactics! Not only will you have made decisions about Masteries, which are
longer-term and more fundamental decisions about the direction you want to take
your character, but you'll also be making fight-by-fight decisions on which
Tactics to use. Let us diverge a moment away from Masteries, and briefly
mention another change that you'll be seeing when the Beta reopens: When
it comes to Tactics and Morale, you'll have to make fewer choices about what to
-purchase-, and more choices about what to -use-. The Mastery paths will
have some Tactics and Morale that you'll have to purchase, and those will be
very specifically focused on that path - but outside of those, your career's
normal Tactics and Morale will -all- be granted to you.
“I'm not entirely certain I understand a certain
facet of the system. Is it true I could get full mastery in all three mastery
paths, but not get all the skills associated with that tree?”
- Let's throw out some
"most-extreme-case" scenarios here for you:
-
If you ignore every supplemental ability in every Mastery, and only invest your
points into Masteries, then you'd be able to either take all three paths up to
75% of their maximum level, or two paths up to 100% and the third at 0%.
-
If you take one Mastery up to its maximum level and purchase every single
supplemental ability in that path, you'll end up with around 25% of your points
left to distribute into the other paths.
-
If you try to distribute your points as evenly as possible, both increasing
Mastery levels and purchasing supplemental abilities in all three paths, then
you'll end up with each Mastery at about 45% of its maximum level, and about
45% of the supplemental abilities available to each line.
“Not sure if this has been asked yet or not...but I
had a quick question. Will masteries effect stats or anything else
besides skills in any way?”
- Stats are not affected by
Mastery directly - there may be some Mastery Tactics or Actions that give you
access to improved stat buffs, but the core allotment of stats stays the same.
Gaining additional stats is predominately done via equipment. That being said,
there may be different sets of gear that are more or less attractive to different
mastery paths.
“I guess I'm just confused how not speccing into
something makes your base spells for that tree equivalent to level 20-25, but
it's still only a 30-35% difference if you spec 100% into it. That seems like
conflicting numbers to me.Unless there's only a 30% difference between a level
20 and 40, but that brings up a whole other set of issues.”
- To keep it short: the 30
– 35% is the general number you see after you factor in the fact that a rank 40
Character will have rank 40 stat bonuses & gear, which will make an ability
stronger then the same one cast as a rank 25 player with rank 25 gear and
stats. Don't confuse -player- levels with -ability- levels! That 30
- 35% number is when you compare two rank 40 players of different specs -
comparing a rank 40 player to a rank 25 player, even if they're both using rank
25 abilities, would be a MUCH larger gap because of stats, gear, etc.
“I think the worry comes about the system comes
from the number of actions to choose from within a line. If most of our choices
are tactics/morale then this does little. On the other hand, if within
each path is a large number of good actions to pick from then I think this
system has a good chance.”
- Some numbers to
hopefully put your fears to rest:
-
25% of each careers Base abilities are Core, the other 75% tie in to Mastery
Paths (25% each)
-
If you’re really fond of purchasing Actions/Abilities you can get 10 – 25% More
actions via mastery purchase. That being said, we’re not releasing final
numbers at this time but every career will have 20+ actions no matter how they
spec.
“I sincerely hope each specialization is viable in
both pve and pvp. Its more about the style in which you are most comfortable
with to achieve your goal.”
- We absolutely
agree. The Mastery paths are designed to emphasize different facets of
the careers, -REGARDLESS- of whether you're playing in PvE or RvR. From a
design point of view, we make a strong and intentional effort to have all of
your abilities be useful in both realms of play - for example, look at our
Taunts. The differences should be in personal choice and playstyle (a
tank who's focused entirely on defense will be the person blocking off a bridge
at a strategic chokepoint, whereas a tank who's focused entirely on offense
will be the person leading the charge when the battle line advances - won't it
be interesting to see what happens when the two collide?).
-Combat & Careers Team
Well Lads and Lasses this Update should certainly keep you
busy until the next update. If not, fret
not… We shall work on keeping you entertained and enthralled as we have since
the beginning. For what is a Beta
without its Beta Community? For me
personally, it's a lot less interesting to be sure.
See you next week!
- The Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Team
