-§ News §- Interview Jeff Hickman

Voici un texte en anglais issu de warhammeralliance lors de l'interview avec Jeff Hickman à la LGC (Leipzig Games Convention).

Il reprend beaucoup de choses qui ont déjà été dites mais d'autres pas. Ainsi on obtient quelques informations justeuses, comme celles sur la prise de Capitale, ...

Citation :

Warhammer Online is of based upon Warhammer which is a license that Games workshop has been working on for almost 25 years. So everything you see in the game, whether it's player vs. player combat, players fighting monsters, questing, crafting, everything has to do with overall war, and it's all over the place.

Any of the 3 races from the realm of destruction can fight the any of the 3 races from the realm of order. We have a couple of different transportation methods that allow players to move between the different areas throughout the world. Each zone has PvE areas and a PvP area. So in order to PvP you go to the PvP area.

So there are safe zones and danger zones?

Absolutely, yeah. And this holds true throughout the entirety of the game. Some zones have more, some zones have less but they all have both. So it's up to you as a player, if you choose to go into a PvP, or RvR, throughout the entirety of your career, you absolutely can do that. There's nothing stopping you, you can gain experience, you can gain gold, you can gain items and loot through RvR.

Public quests are generated on an area. So when you walk into a certain area you are automatically given a specific public quest for that area. The public quest has to do with the story line of the area you are in. The way they work is, not only do you automatically get them, everybody who comes into the area gets them, not only that, but they are literally the same quest. So if you and I go into the area, whether we're grouped, it doesn't matter, you get exactly the same quest I get. So if you receive a quest to kill 20 annoying Squiggs and as you do this quest your counter will count, 1, 2... standard stuff. Now if I was there also, and I kill one, your counter will go up. If you kill one, my counter will go up. So we are working together on these quests. The amount of participation you give, is the amount of reward you get.

The beauty of the system is your private quests, the quests that you get, that are yours, send you on different adventures throughout the world. As your wondering through the world, doing these adventures, you'll be wandering from public quest to public quest. So you'll always have something different and new and interesting things to be doing. And especially with the public quests, that are telling this story about the world as you work through.

The compendium of knowledge is an area that holds everything that you've done in the game. So when you start the game, the compendium is empty. There is nothing in it. As you encounter monsters, NPC's, items, as you explore the world, as you go through and do all of these different things, you are unlocking all of this information in the compendium. For example the first time you encounter a giant and kill him, it paints a picture of a giant. You've killed one giant. As I kill more and more, and do more things with them. I unlock more information about them. So lets say I kill 100 giants, I might get a title that says, "Giant Killer" above my head. As I kill 500 giants I might get a new ability that is the Giant Slayers ability that allows me to kill giants better the next time.

So the tome is not just a place to store information, It's a place to unlock new things, it's a place to get new abilities, it's a place to get new titles, and it really truly tracks your entire life.

So lets talk about RvR. There is really 4 levels of RvR. the first level of RvR is what we call "skirmish RvR". Skirmish RvR is really the foundational function of RvR. It's, I go into one of those areas where I can RvR, I see a bad guy, we hit each other with our sticks until one of us dies. That's skirmish RvR, its the foundation, it's the building blocks of RvR. We also have battlefields. Battlefields are areas within the skirmish area where, lets say there's a tower on the hill. The tower is what we call a battlefield, you run up to a battlefield you can take the battlefield for your own, you, lets say you raise your flag over the top of the tower, by capturing that you gain bonuses in the area. The enemy wants those bonuses also, so the enemy comes up and tries to take it from you. These are truly intended to be conflict points in the world. Places where you guys can come together and fight over. "Scenarios" is really the bread and butter of what we're doing with RvR.

Scenarios are instanced, objective based, evenly matched battles, there's hundreds of these in the world. They're located within the skirmish area, They are an area that as move towards them they literally pull you out of the world and put you in a lobby, the lobby is used to match you with players from the good guys side and from the enemy also, it shows you the objectives, gives you a time limit, and sets you lose with an evenly matched group of players vs. you in the world. Generally our time limits are 15 to 30 minutes on our scenarios right now. And they are very diverse.

By using skirmishing, battlefields, and scenarios, you generate as a player, victory points for your realm. These aren't a personal thing, they are for your realm. So as the two sides are fighting in RvR, one side is eventually winning by getting more victory points.

What this plays into, is the fourth type of RvR, which is the campaign game. So the campaign game, takes place in this high level area between the two capital cities. The way that it works is, as we're fighting in a zone and I'm gaining victory points, my realm eventually gains enough victory points over you to capture the zone, at that point the zone suddenly changes to demonstrate my ownership of the zone. I can then move to the next zone, and we can fight over that zone. And if we can win over that zone, we move to your capital city. In the capital city we have scenarios that become active and that I can fight for your capital city.

You don't want to lose your capital city. In each capital city we're making sure there is a safe area, that for example, there may be certain administrative functions that you don't want to take away from a player, we'll put that in a safe area. Or we may want to give you a place for example, your flight path will probably come into the safe area, so that if your capital city gets captures you can fly in to help try and take it back.

The capital city scenarios are things like, capture the gates, and blow a hole in the wall, dig under the gates, and climb over the wall. Take the capital city in whatever way you can. The scenarios at the capital city are instanced. Once you win enough victory points at the capital city to capture it, the instances close down, then the static world, the gates literally, open up and everybody can pour into the capital city to loot and plunder.

En gros il répéte la meme chose que d'abitude.