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Warcry Interview with Jeff & Paul Part 2.
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Member CommonPosts: 578
war.warcry.com/news/view/73360-Exclusive-Interview-with-Jeff-Hickman-and-Paul-Barnett-Part-2
Incase you missed the first interview, you will notice that every time Jeff is speaking I have it "The Hickman". A little story behind that, Paul suggested I always refer to Jeff as "The Hickman". Jeff told Paul that if he ever got anyone to actually do that, he would pay him a buck. Well Jeff, pay up! From this moment on, WarCry will always refer to you as, "The Hickman".
Answers by Jeff Hickman (Senior Producer) and Paul Barnett (Design Manager)
Questions by Matt Lowery
Part 2
mattlow: You have the instanced RvR we have heard a lot about, and we see how cool that is. We have been told that RvR in the open world zones will be just as important with rewards of their own, but we haven't really heard any details about it.
"The Hickman": You want to be bored silly for ten minutes I can give it all to you.
mattlow: umm sure, yes please!
"The Hickman": So, there are a lot of different rewards in RvR. Primarily in RvR you get Renown, if you are familiar with Dark Age of Camelot Renown is very similar to the Realm Point system. Do not compare our Renown system to other games. It's not like other PvP alternate advancement systems, ok, it's like Dark Age of Camelot's. What you earn, you earn, you keep. It's just like earning experience. It is Realm vs. Realm experience. So as you earn Renown it unlocks a lot of different things for you. It unlocks new titles, just like in Dark Age, there are things we lifted straight across from Dark Age that were so successful that it would be stupid for us to change it. So for example, every 10 Renown ranks you get a title. Everybody can see the title, people see you coming, they know how bad ass you are in RvR by your title, and by the way you look.
Atomics: That's one question I had, in the demo you are showing every ones name. In Dark Age you could only see their race and class, is this just for the demo, or will the game show names of enemy races?
"The Hickman": We are still talking about it, but right now we are probably going to show names to everybody. What you saw in Dark Age, you could click on a guy and get his name, and we are thinking, "why hide it?" We aren't hiding anything. Actually I want to know what your name is. I want to know the name of my arch enemy, you know. So we are showing it. So as you get more Renown and as you rank through your Renown ranks, you also unlock other things. There are a lot of, lets not call them Abilities, lets call them Tactics. So there are a lot Tactics you can unlock. What we are trying to do is, keep the Ability bloat, down as much as we can. Your hotbar is a finite thing, for a lot of people more than 12 slots on a hotbar is really tough. We actually plan for more than that, so we plan for any class having somewhere in the range of 15 to 20 actual Abilities that you are firing off of your hotbar at any given time, by the time they reach rank 40. We think above and beyond that it just gets to a point where it becomes confusing for most players. Even 15 to 20 is a lot if you think about it. Its almost 2 full hotbars of Abilities. So Abilities are not something we really play into as far as RvR, as far as earning new ones through Renown. What you do get is, you get Tactics. So at different Renown ranks you earn different Tactics, let me take that back, you earn the ability to go and choose different Tactics, you're not actually give one, your given a pool of Tactics to choose from. So you go, "I want that one because I want to play my guy this way." Tactics is a big variation point for us in the game. You can also earn statistic upgrades for your character, that will change how strong or weak you are. The thing that we don't do, or at least we do it very very rarely with Renown, is something that we did do with Camelot, and I think we learned our lesson, is lots of crazy new Abilities and Passives and Actives, that really changed the career balance is a big dramatic way. Will they have an effect on career balance? Absolutely, don't get me wrong, there is a fine line, and we are staying on this side of it, we are trying to make sure we stay on the good side of it.
Atomics: Are they Interchangeable? Can you swap them out on a whim, or will it be like DAOC where you had to have a special item to change them out?
"The Hickman": There are two answers to that question. Tactics in general are fully changeable, in that you will have a load of Tactics, you will have six Tactic slots, potentially seven, you can earn an extra Tactic slot through RvR, which is a big thing. So you have six Tactic slots, you will probably have 35 to 70 different Tactics for your career that you can earn and buy, and you place them only into these six. So you have to choose which six, but you can change those out almost anytime you want. The reason I say almost anytime is in combat, you can't change them out in combat. We don't want people messing with that stuff in combat, and there is a timer after you get out of combat where you can't change it. It's about 1 to 2 minutes before you can actually move your Tactics around. What we want you doing is, we want you thinking about what you want going into combat, experimenting with it going, "huh, that didn't work out so well, let me change this one out, and let me put this one in here. I need to be a little bit better healer tonight, let me change this around, healing Tactics. "
Paul: Tactics Baby!
"The Hickman": So you earn Tactics in RvR. You open up Renown based item rewards in RvR. Something we didn't do in Camelot that we thought was a good idea, where you could earn equipment rewards in RvR based upon your Renown rank. They are very comparable to the same type of equipment you can get in PvE. Umm... what else, there are some other things you might earn through Renown, we are still talking about, so I'm not going to get into.
Paul: Tome of Knowledge unlocks!
"The Hickman": Ya, Tome of Knowledge unlocks is another thing that, going out and RvRing especially in the open world gives you the possibility of getting lots of Tome of Knowledge unlocks. So the Tome of Knowledge is something that I think a lot of people gloss over. It's an area that we haven't exposed fully in our game yet. So the Tome of Knowledge is a system of collection and scrapbooking, and this is your life. It's truly a way of achieving other things in the game. So the Tome of Knowledge can actually unlock new Abilities, and new Tactics, and new Morale abilities for you. So as you are going through and exploring the world doing stuff, you are actually pushing your character. So it's not, "Hey you found a new "blah"", its, "Hey, you found all of the "blahs" in the entire Dwarven realm, here is a new Tactic for you." The Explorer Tactic, it makes you move 5% faster. So that's character based advancement from RvR. Other types of rewards for going out and playing in RvR, specifically in open world RvR. There are a bunch of different ways you can earn victory points in RvR within a given zone to help capture the zone. This is a big deal. You can earn them through quests, you can earn them through Public Quests, you can earn them in scenarios, you can earn them killing any enemy player. And a BIG way of earning victory points is by going out and capturing objective points, which are only in open world RvR. Scenarios are different things, that generate victory points in a different way. By going out and simply taking control of any given objective, my victory point meter will jump 5 to 10% BAM, right away! There is literally a meter on your screen that you can watch your sides victory points. So it's a very binary way of going out and saying, "you know what, we are 15% away from earning control of this zone, all we need to do is go capture those 4 objectives." You cannot capture a zone by just doing scenarios. You just can't do it. You have to participate in all areas of the game in order to earn victory in the game.
mattlow: Can you give us an example of an objection point? You said there aren't keeps like in DAOC, so what are objections points?
Paul: Burning windmills to the ground! Going into a wizards tower and stealing his library books. Going to a Chaos alter and destroying it! Going to a Way Stone and corrupting it! Stealing Helga.
mattlow: You know how to make everything sound really good!
"The Hickman": Objectives are not the size of keeps. That game, is the scenario game for us. Objectives are fairly simple to capture, literally you have to walk up to one and click on it. Whatever it happens to be.
Paul: Get the lighthouse working on the cliff so the Iron Clads and come in and pound the beach!
You don't actually think thats it, do you? No, this interview goes on forever!... err well actually not quite forever, however this interview does have one more part! So look for Part 3, the final part, in the coming days!
Comments
Just when I think I cant get anymore hyped about this game they come out with another interview. Man this game is going to be fun as hell!
Wow, good read. Very interesting and new information. Good to hear about Open World PvP and the Objectives having a significant weight in capturing a zone.
The more they talk about it, the more it sounds like they're really making a next gen game.
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I live to fight, and fight to live.
I totally agree, the fact that you can unlock traits by doing all sorts of things around the world, not just levelling, is a great feature! They will probably have different racial banes as traits along with a slew of other things!
All that seems very nice and interesting.
Too bad I haven't played DAOC so I don't know much about the stuff from there.
interview part 3!!
You Said M8 I tend to fall behind in the begining because I do to much this are that, In WAR every little thing you do matters. love it.
Tactics baby, lol. You've gotta love Paul Barnett.
You Said M8 I tend to fall behind in the begining because I do to much this are that, In WAR every little thing you do matters. love it.
Ya seriously, Im not sure whats going to be more fun: hacking other players faces off, pq's, or filling up my tome of knowledge. I do know however that exploration and finding out of the way hidden from plain view landscapes and terrain features has always been something I was interested in.