Gamespy Interview Warhammer: Age of Reckoning: The Empire

[Arthur_Parker]

Linky

Mythic's Paul Barnett offers us an exclusive glimpse into the embattled world of the Empire.

It would be difficult to find someone who will speak on the topic of Warhammer with more impassioned fervor than Mythic's Paul Barnett. The man seems to channel the spirits of the orcs, dwarves, and Chaos Marauders that populate the brutal world that he's helping to bring to life. As such, we could not think of anyone better to talk with us about the latest in-game faction for Warhammer: Age of Reckoning that Mythic has decided to unveil: the Empire. As you'd expect from the Warhammer universe, this human nation, to paraphrase Mr. Barnett, is teetering on the edge of annihilation at the hands of a multitude of assailants, not the least of which is humanity's own tendency to take the violent measures necessary for survival to wild extremes.

The Empire is part of the Alliance of Order, which Emperor Karl Franz formed with the neighboring dwarves and high elves. To call this Alliance the "good guys" of WAR would be a bit of a stretch -- rather, consider them the less ostensibly monstrous of the two factions. Two of the Empire's classes have been revealed thus far: the maniacal Bright Wizards, and the stalwart, fanatical Warrior-Priests. Both fill the roles you would probably imagine them to for their factions, though in all honesty, such flaccid descriptions pale against the vivid pictures that Mr. Barnett paints. What follows are his descriptions of the more pertinent elements of the Empire faction, accompanied by exclusive illustrations being shown publicly for the first time. He's also asked that we dedicate this article to both his mother and father.

Barnett on Bright Wizards:

First thing you have to remember is that The Empire is full of extremes.They represent, on an intellectual basis, that humans are capable of almost anything. And then on a sort of philosophical basis, that when humans are allowed to do anything, they take it to extremes. Whereas your elves cast magic, and it's impressive, I can tell you, the humans can only cast particular types of magic, because they can't be trusted with everything. They're sort of like five-year olds. Bright Wizards are humans that have been trusted with fire magic, and typically like humans, they've taken it to extremes.

In the main city of Altdorf, there is the Bright College of Magic, this enormous school where all the Bright Wizards go and learn their magic. It's so incredibly dangerous because Bright Wizards are all about fire. In the city, the Bright Magic tower stands on its own, and everywhere around it has been burned to the ground! And that's cause it keeps exploding, cause they won't leave it alone! Bright Wizards are wizards that are into fire, and they go around blowing things up.

Some people said to me, "That's interesting. What sort of magic do they cast?" The answer is: fire magic! What sort of things do they do? They burn things! How much magic can they cast? A lot of it! Think of them as nuclear weapons. They're buckets of instant sunshine. A Bright Wizard is all about taking the strands of magic, and using them in such a way that the magic doesn't make them explode, it makes their enemies explode. Throwing fireballs, lighting strikes, burning everything that -- it's napalm. Napalm, bombs, explosion, fire, flame throwers, matches, they smoke heavily, probably chew tobacco, all their hair is always singed, all their clothing looks like it's probably been on fire, they carry matches everywhere, tinderboxes, they like gasoline, they drink whiskey, they always got pipes stuck in their gobs. They're basically pyromaniacs.

That's what Bright Wizards are all about. They don't do a lot of buffing. They do a lot of burning.

The Warrior-Priests, again, like typical humans, they took the idea of religion, and then went mad with it. It's all about that "crusader" style of priest. "Bless you my son, we're tolerant of everyone, we're open-minded, as long as you only believe what we believe, and if you don't believe it, then we'll crush you and kill you. We'll welcome anybody, as long as they utterly follow what we say." It's a form of medieval mind control. Their mind control system is a great, big hammer. Some people only understand one good thing.

One thing about these priests is that they're heavily armored. They're priests that sing the praises of their god while they're wading into combat crushing people on their heads. Almost everything that they do is a blessing around fighting and violence. And that's because Warrior Priests are a metaphor for modern day religion -- all about violence, with heavily-armored weaponry behind you.

We're not allowed to paint [The Empire] as some sort of mad, religious controlled empire. There are many religions, not just Sigmar [the god that the Warrior-Priests worship]. The one we picked is Sigmar because it's iconic, and easy to understand. Their churches are everywhere, and they're enormous. They've got great big hammers (lots of hammers), and they do everything for Sigmar. But you don't have to follow the religion -- it's just what you would do!

If you look at the Priest, you'll note the basics of how we do game design. He doesn't really have any armor around his legs, so you can see him from a distance and see that he's a Warrior Priest. They don't have much armor their elbows either, and their heads are generally exposed. This is so Sigmar can talk directly through their skull. People who follow Sigmar are the same sort of people who, in the modern day, would believe in the Easter Bunny. Or Father Christmas. Some metaphysical thing that talks to them.

The Warrior-Priest is expected to be at the front, smashing things to pieces, and then when he's finished doing that, or if it's reasonable for him to, he can go back and bless others so they can go forward and fight people, and smash things to pieces. He's all about fighting things, and helping other people (through blessings) to fight things.

On the war-torn state of the Empire in WAR:

It's all an excuse for all of us to fight, perpetually, forever. It's built around the IP, and it uses the tenets of what the IP is there for. It's fully approved and endorsed by Games Workshop. But bear in the mind that every year, for the last 25 years, Games Workshop has run a worldwide campaign explaining why everybody in the world is fighting absolutely everybody. The world is teetering on the edge, and every empire -- including the Empire empire -- is on the brink of losing completely. They're all doing that. That's what gives it its tension. There is only endless, perpetual struggle. There are only two ways of being in the army -- you can be fighting in the army, or you can be dying in the army. And if you're not in the army, you're just dying.

The Priests are going around, doom-laden, because it is the end of times. The comet is going to be in the sky, the world is probably going to end, there isn't going to be another tomorrow. There is endless fighting, and even if, by some miracle, the Empire ends up winning, whatever world was reborn from that probably wouldn't want you in it. You're fighting for a perpetuation; you're fighting to keep your fingers on the edge of the cliff.

No one's ever going to say, "Let's talk peace. Why don't we sit down and sing a song? Why don't we have a barbecue?" Not unless we're barbecuing heretics!

On the bandit:

She emphasizes one of the elements of the Empire, which is black powder. Rifles, pistols, actually shooting things. They're riddled with it. Again, it's one of those humans going to extremes. Whereas the dwarves understand canons and they know how to shoot cannonballs, the humans have gone completely insane. They've steam tanks, they've got organ guns, they've got weapons that overpower and blow themselves up.

Not been following this one as closely recently, it's due for closed beta early next year I believe.

[tazelbain]

No one has to convince us that the IP is good. It is.  People have been stealing from it for years.  Wake me up when they are ready to talk about converting it into gameplay.  At E3 they talked about some like a hierarchy of battlegrounds ending in an assult on the capital. That's what I want to hear about.

[Falconeer]

Warhammer will be for WoW what DAoC was for EverQuest.

Will it surpass WoW? Maybe not. Will it make WoW tremble? I think so.

[Arthur_Parker]

October Newsletter is out, linky to a fan site hosting it.

[Margalis]

I do like all the flavor the game has. You can tell these guys enjoy the IP.

"Wuz betta den one choppa? Two choppas! Two choppas is one more… is one times da… is lots more fun! Waaagh!"

However how about some stuff about the actual gameplay? Concept art, story stuff, race stuff, etc is all nice for a certain demographic but for another demographic all that stuff tends to run together after a while. There is some evil force and some green-skinned baddies and such - fine fine, now tell me about PVP or something.

[Soln]

if they rehash DAoC, especially the grindy prejudice of DAoC, it will go nowhere.   

[Arthur_Parker]

Level 40 cap, 4 character classes for each of 6 races, allied into two sides, three battle fronts, zones that can be captured leading eventually to the capture of the opposing races capital & leader which you can hold for a while.  Every zone has a mixture of RVR & PVE to appeal to both styles, the option to level and gear up purely through RVR.

Race details are out, some class details are out, there's videos of alpha gameplay, a book thingy I forget the name of that fills in when you do stuff, zone wide quests that you automatically join and get rewards for when entering a zone.  Rewards for exploring out of the way areas, all classes combat related to more closely match the ip (no pure healers), siege engines, naval combat plus dogs of war (combat bots) to even the population numbers for RVR.  Characters get bigger and can hang skulls etc off their armour as they level up, game might have collision detection.

That's from memory.

A lot of the design details were released months ago, not sure theres much benefit to them in releasing more core design ideas at the minute, especially with so many other games in development looking for any angle to compete with WoW.

Yes, all this recent stuff is just fluff, I like the fluff though.  I don't have any shares in EA so I'm not trying to sell it to anyone.  I'll maybe knock up a summary with links to core design intentions next time if I'm first to post the newsletter next month and can be bothered.

[garthilk]

Good stuff, that's a pretty good synopsis.

A bit more on RvR.  In RvR you will earn Victory points, as you earn victory points in an area eventually the team whom first meets the VP requirement for that zone will win that zone and push the front lines closer to the foes home city.  Once the battlefront reaches the home city there will be several instanced scenarios that must be beaten and yet another amount of VP's reached to breech the wall. Then back into the uninstanced world of their home city where battle on the streets may take place and additional instanced scenarios may open up.

Course a lot of this functionality is still in design.

[HRose]

A bit more on RvR.  In RvR you will earn Victory points, as you earn victory points in an area eventually the team whom first meets the VP requirement for that zone will win that zone and push the front lines closer to the foes home city.  Once the battlefront reaches the home city there will be several instanced scenarios that must be beaten and yet another amount of VP's reached to breech the wall. Then back into the uninstanced world of their home city where battle on the streets may take place and additional instanced scenarios may open up.

Course a lot of this functionality is still in design.

Actually there shouldn't be a mobile battlefront, but just switching maps. If you played Dark Messiah MP you have an idea of how it works. Basically you start from a neutral map and if you meet certain requirements the action can move to another map that is closer to the enemy land. Till you finish to fight on a map that represents a capital city.

[eldaec]

It's built around the IP

Bah, no it isn't.

[grumble]2 is the wrong number of realms[grumble]orcs != chaos[/grumble]

Will it surpass WoW? Maybe not. Will it make WoW tremble? I think so.

I'm not sure where people are getting this from.

The pvp focus scares people who aren't either regular players or European. The games workshop thing is IP only relevant to the somewhat hardcore. And we still don't have any information about how this will play out other than 'yes, it still has the pvp components DAoC had', and 'yes, they are going for the same european hosting fiasco as daoc'.

A decent rework of daoc (only with insufficient realms) is a reasonable expectation, with a similar subscriber base to match.

[stray]

It will surpass WoW (game-wise). It won't make WoW tremble (money hat wise). It will still be another pile of "meh".

[Simond]

It will be Mythic's "EQ2" - they'll try to 'fix' all the problems with their previous game and end up with an overdesigned, underplayable mediocre game.

[Wolf]

I got linked to a fairly interesting forum post by a daoc player that got to play some Warhammer. I am taking this with a grain of solt, but... COLLISION DETECTION. Here's the quote:

Collision Detection is one of the the major new features here - if you run into another player you stop. I only really saw this in action once, where I was trying to get past an enemy and was prevented from doing so for a good 8-10 seconds. Player fears that it'd just be like sliding along a zone line and therefore would not impact anything appear unfounded; I didn't get a close enough look to say what the exact mechanism is, but it was pretty clear that even one guy really trying could keep you from moving past if he really focused on it.

There's a bunch of other interesting things about how combat works, some info on skills, etc.

[WindupAtheist]

Man, I was really hoping someone would someday release a game where you could pick a race like elf or dwarf, and then pick a class like priest or mage, and then level up a bunch and fight other people in faction-based PVP.  Finally my dream has come true.

[Falconeer]

I'm not sure where people are getting this from.

Guts.
We'll see.

I'll be here to take the laughter when my guts will be proven wrong.

[eldaec]

November newsletter

November Grab Bag

Neither is that exciting. Contains information about Dwarfs. New screenshots are reminiscent of Daoc.

Picture of a Dwarf holding a spanner.

The game still has the wrong number of realms, the wrong European hosting solution, and is still owned by EA. Bah.

[Nonentity]

Picture of a Dwarf holding a spanner.

Correction - that is a dwarf CHICK holding a spanner. I didn't level a dwarf chick warrior to 60 in WoW to merely be brushed aside and lumped in with the males!