PVP:Yes | Distribution:Download,Retail | Retail Price:$39.99 | Pay Type:Subscription
Desktop Client | System Req:
| ESRB:T
Warhammer Online - Capital Cities
In our continuing coverage of EA Mythic's Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, MMORPG.com Managing Editor Jon Wood pens this article on the capital cities in the game.
Warhammer Online is an interesting game. Not just for what they are doing that is unique and innovative, but also for what they are doing that is a constant in MMORPGs. What do I mean? Well, while visiting the studios to get a look at the un-released game, I sat in on a presentation on cities. While virtually every MMORPG has cities, Warhammer seems to take city building to an extreme making large (very large) cities and filling them with content.
While we didn’t get to see every race’s starting city on our trip, we did get to see the two human cities, Altdorf and Inevitable City, giving us a great idea of both how similar and how different the cities can be.
Before we get into talking about the specific cities, we should probably talk a little bit about how the cities work and what is available in them:
As you probably already know, Warhammer Online is a Realm vs. Realm based game and at the heart of this Realm vs. Realm system are the capital cities of each race. As a result, the cities are designed to change hands as defenders lose to outside attackers and then win them back in the eternal struggle that is (or will be) Warhammer Online.
Rather than creating a place that has no purpose other than to be defended, the EA Mythic developers have tried to design cities that are more than just places to run to if you’ve levelled up or need to drop off / buy some gear. While they will obviously still contain vendors, trainers and the like, cities will also be the home to general quests, public quests and other similar content. Each city, we are told, will also be home to three separate six-player instanced dungeons.
;)
City Rating
The amount of content that is available in a city at any given time is dependant on what the WAR devs are calling the “city rating”. There are five different ratings. As a city rating improves, new content that is not available at lower ratings becomes available (quests become available, doors that were locked before are accessible, etc) . In short, the city becomes more valuable. Completing the content (quests, public quests, etc.) in the city will gradually increase the city rating, unlocking even more content for the users. The city’s rating is universal across the server and players will be notified when it changes either up or down.
Improving the city rating is yet another of the hidden mechanics of the game that encourages players to work together toward a common goal. One of the trends in MMORPGs as of late has steered toward solo play, prompting many to wonder if the days of co-operation in these games are behind us. By giving players co-operative goals that can be completed without grouping, EA Mythic is encouraging a group-play atmosphere. Pretty clever, really.
It should be noted that opposing forces can lower a city’s rating by holding and sacking it over a period of time. The longer you’re in there, and the more that you accomplish while there, the lower the city’s rating becomes.
Statues
While cities tend toward being places for realm achievement, there is still plenty to show the virtues of individual achievement. The most obvious example of this comes in the form of ten statues. These statues, which are displayed prominently in each city, represent the top ten players in terms of overall renown and will display a character’s name and some info about them. The top ten players are calculated on a weekly basis.
While it’s great to have in-game recognition for achievers, I think the single best part of the statue system is that they are destructible. When an opposing army is inside your capital, they can attack and destroy your statues.
Altdorf;)
While there is simply too much to say in terms of describing everything that we saw while on our tour, I did want to take a minute or two and talk about he two cities that we saw, beginning with the Empire city of Altdorf.
As I said at the beginning of the article, the cities are simply huge. Players new to the city will begin play in the area known as “The Market”. The developers have done a great job in capturing the feeling of the Warhammer cities. Walking through Altdorf, you really get a good sense of what the Empire is about.
One of the highlights of Altdorf is the Bright Wizard College. As readers may or may not know, Bright Wizards are essentially pyromaniacs and their college reflects that. The main feature in the college is a huge pillar of flame (it should also be noted that the outside of the building has the occasional flame shooting out of it) that shoots up through a round opening in each of the floors.
In the end, Altdorf is an incredibly large and impressive creation. While there, I would suggest taking in the sign at “The Mastiff’s Head Tavern”.
Inevitable City
While we may have seen slightly less of the Chaos capital, it was no less grand than its Empire counterpart. I think the thing that stands out most about this city is that it simply reeks of evil.
In the area that mirrors Altdorf’s Market Square, the forces of Chaos have access to vendors and the like, but in the center is a huge pyramid-like structure with a beam of purplish energy flowing from the top. Your character can watch as bedraggled-looking folk make their way to the top in the hopes of “putrefying” themselves, only to be zapped out of existence. In short, if you like evil and bad things, you might have to check out Inevitable City.
While in the city, we took a look at the dungeons that lurk underneath. While Tzeech is the Chaos God of choice for players in the game, that doesn’t mean that the WAR team is ignoring the others. Two of the dungeons that we took a look at were themed after some of the other gods.
Other Bits and Pieces
- Guild Tavern - Guild Taverns will provide guilds with a private place to gather and to hang out. While the building is the same, each guild will have their own private instance inside this particular tavern.
- Sleek Design - The developers have designed their cities to reduce the number of bottlenecks that arrive in siege situations.
- Content - If the enemy takes a city, content opens up for them inside the city as well.
- Kingdom in Exile - If your city has been taken by the enemy, you will still have access to many of the important game mechanics that you had before. Let’s take auctioneers for example. If the enemy takes your city, auctioneers will be available in a makeshift black market situation.
- Auctioneers - Each city has multiple auctioneers to avoid congestion in their areas.
- Libraries - Each city will have its own library which players can use in order to make additions to their Tomes of Knowledge.
Real reason to level your city other then defence I like the idea
So will the cities revert to level one if the city is conquered or will they slowly degrade? I would also like to thank Mythic for placing multiple Auctioneers throughout the each of the cities. The ones near the transports will probably always be the most crowded but it should at least help somewhat.
I believe in one of the previous news items about capital cities, it was mentioned that the faction attacking the city would be provided with special quests that involve some kind of looting/killing/burning that once completed, would knock the cities level down. Its likely that this would have to be a faction wide undertaking however, only a few people probably couldnt do much damage. But if you got to the point when you are in the enemies city, I'm sure there will be no shortage of manppower on the attackers side.
IIIRC, cities do go down when they get taken over by the enemy.
Statues are great added feel goodies. City of Heroes forums long ago had player request for player statues but Stateman shot that idea down. Guess it is doable!
Has it ever been stated how long a city will remain overtaken?
It would need to be long enough so the the attackers can do some raids in the conquered city's underground content.
Once again i feel EA Mythic proves that they understand that it's really the little things that make the biggest differences.
It's no surprise the game was delayed again having to add and tune all of these little joys, but it's totally worth it. These are the things that give a game "flavor" trust me.
Like in Fable, where you could kick the chickens and it'd record the distance you kicked them. Had nothing to do with the rest of the game, but this little touch brought me soo much joy.
Absolutely agree. It s brilliant and alot of the little things make the big picture even better. I love the statue thing and being able to destroy them is purely amazing, can t wait.
What I'm still wondering is if there will be some stupid lock out time that will prevent another faction from attacking the other faction's cities and/or capitals, even during the night? That's the one thing that really is bothering me for Age of Conan, is that there's a lockout timer that prevents putting a keep up for attack, nor seiging the keep, during the time between midnight and 6a.m. I know a small force of 9-10 people at 1a.m can't do much of anything, but they can still TRY to take over a city or a keep or whatever.......
Something that I read makes me quite leary of this whole city rating BS........
The article says CITY RATINGS ARE UNIVERSAL OVER ALL SERVERS...........
This means each server is NOT unique in their ability to affect the ratings of their own cites and must be at the mercy of all the actions on EVERY server in the game. This is a very poor mechanic if that is the case. Even WoW can break down these events and similar activities over each individual server. Why should a company force its players to rely on what every other server has done, or in the case of some low pop servers, what they don't do.
If this is a mistake and ratings are not universal over all servers, then I think its a great idea. But again, to force people to work for their capital city and then find its all in vain, is in my opinion ludicrous.
I personally would like to see them be attackable during the night hours, if they do manage to capture it then you can prove your worth the next day and take it back.
Sorry, you misunderstood. Theya re universal across the server, meaning that they are the same for everyone (and not some kind of instanced mumbo-jumbo). I'll take the "s" off of that word to make it a little bit more clear.
Honestly, when I wroite the article, I didn't think of the scenario you mentioned. It just woudn't make any sense at all...
Bad you and your grammatical mistakes!!1
Then my note of saying that would be great, will hold true. I was in WOW when they did the events for opening Quiraj and the gathering items, etc was great. Being able to watch your side increase and see that you mattered even a little bit really made it better.
I don't think I will be playing Warhammer when it comes out, but this aspect of Cities should make it really interesting and fun for those who do play it.
Each day I hear more and more good stuff about WAR. They truly are polishing this game.
Sign me up for pre-order.
The city seiges are set to be a massive effort. There is no designated times since there are no controlling guilds, it can happen at any time as long as certain critiria are met (they explained this in an another video and several articles on gamespy & ign.com & ten ton hammer. ) In order for your Realm to be eligible to raid a city you must Completely own the Tier 4 zone. That means both battle keeps and the subsquent land between. Once your realm has that area in control they must siege the outer walls of the city, the defenders of course defend those walls. There's a number of things the entire realm must do in order to take over the city including a whole lot of street fighting, pillaging and burning.
If there are enough people to fight at night then I see no reason why they couldn't take it at night. Just remember though there's alot of NPC's & players you have to go through in order to own the city. They've made sure of this so that a power guild can't just simply run in and do it on their own. It must be a Realm Effort.
I figure by Teir 4 most players have probably adapted somewhat to realm co operation to some exent (there will always be people who do for themselves only) which will make it a major coordinated zerg fest(which is what sieging truely is!).
you missed out a "t" on the word The in the Altdorf paragraph. Aside from that a very good article
P.S. I mean no disrespect to anybody by the donkey I just like that stupid thing!
That made me chuckle. How many chickens did you kick?
Looks fun
shame the graphix suck
Guild Taverns = Win in this news article.
Graphics = how good the game is.
When I read about the guild taverns I was sort of bummed because I hope cities won't seem empty if everyone just gathers in their guild tavern. One thing that I always enjoyed when I was bored was just sitting in a city in a central location and chatting with random people.
The statues idea is awesome. Even if its only for a week I want to get my toon as a statue! Every time I find new info about this game I get more pumped about the small but good features which are going to make this game great.
WAR is getting attractive. DAoC alone would guarantee a copy of WAR on my shelf eventually. With all these attention to details, I am beginning to look forward to playing it. I love a game with minor details alongside a strong main theme. That is where the smiles come in.
The little bits that you will feel warm the first time you run into, and remains as moments of sweet memories long after the game is history to you.
I only hope that the WAR community would be as nice and mature as it was in DAoC or as it now is in LOTRo. AND please control the gold seller spams.
Less of the Chaos city? I want all of the city! Just delay the game more and more til you get it right!
As was stated previously, you will find several other threads speaking to this point. It is certainly understandable for you to think that way if you JUST look at the released beta footage. They are testing in very low resolution to make sure it isn't the COMPUTERS causing issues, only the servers and/or content. The resolution is substantially higher in the actual game according to EA Mythic.
I do hope the graphics live up to my thoughts about how they should be in a next generation game as well. I just bought a 22" monitor for my home office, and I would love to see how it performs on Warhammer
After reading this I think it will be an awesome addition to the game if it is pulled off right.I watched the video on capital cities and they have interesting ideas that I hope they can implement, the question is how long is this going to take them to do it, or have they already started testing it? Anyways this is just another reason why I want to play WAR.
Maybe we can hired statue guards. Money sink!
Yeah, I liked that little bit of news too. From another vid I heard that we can capture oher guild's banners (they become tattered banner trophies) Now then, we know we can hang OUR OWN banners from captured keeps that are claimed by your guild, can we hang and display the tattered captured banners in our instanced tavern?
Just wondering, because it would make our guild tavern just that little bit different from other peoples, and we could take screenshots of all our trophies hanging from the rafters for display on the guild webstire
I love the rvr aspect of this game!!!
Can you say...MOSH PIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I cant wait to play!!!
The delayed the release because they were too short on time. And now they're adding content?
... clever
After reading about it over at WHA, I've come to the conclusion that this is not something they have added recently, its something they are just telling us for the first time. The idea is very similar to what they told us a while ago about guild officers having a sort of champagne room where they could go to make there plans etc