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WAR: How You Look - The Trophy System and More
While in Virginia, Jon Wood had the opportunity to see a presentation by Item Designer Justin Webb where he told us a little bit about the game's trophy system and some other customization tidbits.
Items play a vital role in any MMORPG. They are one of the carrots that is dangled in front of players as they move around from mission to mission. They are the outward manifestations of our characters, they serve as trophies that decorate our characters (and our vault spaces). They show where our characters have been and what they have accomplished.
While in Virginia at the EA Mythic studio, I had the opportunity to sit down and talk to Justin Webb, the Item Strike Force Lead (the WAR dev team is divided into smaller strike teams who focus on specific elements of the game). It was Justin’s job to tell the gathered reporters about the game’s trophy system where the items don’t just decorate our characters in terms of armor, helmets and pants, but instead literally decorate our characters with the spoils of war.
Trophy System
Justin told us that the team wanted to break up the look of the different classes so that everyone in the world doesn’t look like a bizarre carbon copy of everyone else and instead of just offering a bunch of different costume choices, they’ve taken it one step further by allowing players to wear more of what they own. They also want to give players a chance to look and feel “bad-ass”. Justin likened it to seeing veterans marching in a parade. They’re all wearing a few medals on their chests that tell us that they did something great or brave, but then one guy walks past and his chest is literally a big block of medals. When you see that guy, you immediately know that he’s a bad-ass.
In order to highlight this feature, Justin showed us a Witch Hunter character. Looking dapper in his funky tall hat and gothic -inspired garb, this toon was also decked out with visible holy water, stakes (damned vampires), daggers and more. These decorations are moveable and can be placed in any one of the character’s trophy nodes (pre-determined places on the character that can hold a trophy).
While there are fifteen different slots that can accommodate trophies, players will be limited in the number that they can wear at any one time. The higher in level a character gets, the more trophy slots he / she has available until it maxes out at five at level forty.
Knowing how the system works is one thing. Knowing how to gather the most interesting trophies is another. While we have only seen mundane items so far (items like stakes, reliquaries and the like), we are told that there will be a myriad of ways to get new trophies. They will drop normally, they will be a part of Public Quest loot, they will drop with specific kills and we are told that there will be crafting trophies as well.
Before we leave the subject of the trophy system, it is important to point out that while trophies look cool (they actually do add something unique to the character), they have no statistical value whatsoever. This was a conscious choice by the EA Mythic team, as they want to encourage as much visual diversity as possible. Adding stats to the items would defeat that purpose as players would inevitably choose the same trophies to display: the ones with the highest stats.
Other Visual Stuff
We’ve already talked a little bit about how items can change the look of your character in terms of the trophy system, but what about more mundane ways of making your character stand out from the rest?
Warhammer has always been a franchise that relied heavily upon characters looking different from one another. So much so that in the table top game, miniatures are purchased blank and without color. It is up to the individual player to decide on the colors. While Warhammer Online doesn’t go quite that far, players will have the ability to dye their armor and clothes and will have easy access to the dyes that will let them customize their look.
Most dye colors will be easily available from vendors, but the “cooler colors” will have to be crafted. Dyeable items will have two distinct tint masks (meaning that you can use two different colors), giving a large number of possible color combinations.
While we didn’t get to play with this feature ourselves, Justin did play us a video of armor being dyed. I was surprised at how different a single piece of armor could look with a change to the colors.
In the end, it seems as though EA Mythic has put a great deal of thought into the way that the characters in their game are going to look. Their primary goal is to have silhouettes that allow players to immediately identify the career of any given character. This means that if you strip everything away: the detail, the color, etc. and leave only a shadow, I will know that the Witch Hunter is a Witch Hunter, the Sorceress is a Sorceress and so on. When you put all of that detail back in though, the team hopes to be able to provide an experience where each of those identical silhouettes becomes a different and distinct character and from what I’ve seen so far, it looks like they’re succeeding.
you mis-spelled game in your 1st sentence.
Was still a good read, glad they are starting to make information more public rather than just letting beta testers know whats up!
nice to finally have something cool and fun that doesn't require hours upon hours of dungen grinding to acquire.
Perfect. I like being different from everyone else if possible and this does this. Not having stats on it is great no need to have everyone picking the same things as the article read. Love it!
This will be a very cool feature. And we know WOW for example will not be able to do this cause their crapix engine can't handle it. And ... then they actually had to make new armors instead of just repainting them....
Big feature of MMOs so good luck with this Mythic.
Cool feature, but primarily I hope apon launch that they will have a good amount of the basic. Which is hairstyles and face styles.
It's little things like this that show me Mythic is trying. Do they have to do it? No, it's not essential to the game. But it's a very nice ambient feature, something you notice at first but then you quickly take it for granted. That's one of the reasons why I'm looking forward to WAR, besides the major stuff of course.
They will, its just that they aren't putting them into beta so everyone has a stable client.
That sounds amazing!
I really hate my characters looking the same as someone elses. When you walk around the corner and there are people walking past looking like your long lost twin it just screams"Its a GAME - it's all FAKE!" which may be true, but not something i like to be reminded off when i just spent 10 hours straight playing it :P
I enjoyed reading about this. It sounds very fun. I hope there will be numerous trophies for each class but hope that some will be usable by more than one class. The dyeing sounds like it will be able to add to the characters without being horrible task that some games make it.
The WAR dye system looks to build upon the system DAoC used, but they're going about it slightly differently. DAoC just flood dyed. WAR looks to use 2 colors and even have masked out areas to retain class specific color hints. So, every piece of armor and equipment has the potential to have 2-3 different colors on it. That's gonna help nicely with variation.
As far as character customization, heck even the CE buyers are getting 12 custom new heads. The only reason why we probably do not see any variation right now is that is not what they are testing right now. There'll be plenty of head, hair and other variations at launch. Their concentration is game mechanics atm, not who looks the most individual. That comes later on.
I'm just itching to get some epic mob trophies to put on like a kings head. :)
Nice feature. Always cool to add individuality to MMOs
Their primary goal is to have silhouettes that allow players to immediately identify the career of any given character. This means that if you strip everything away: the detail, the color, etc. and leave only a shadow, I will know that the Witch Hunter is a Witch Hunter, the Sorceress is a Sorceress and so on. ...
Why... how could this possibly be a good thing? What they are really trying to do here is "spin" their standardized template wire frame models as a good thing.
Reading the posts and the article makes anticipate the game even more!!
MYTHIC YOU ROCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Sounds like fun, it'll be nice to have a bit of customization instead of everyone farming for the same gear. I look forward to appearing a bit different from everyone else.
I have a related question that maybe someone in beta can answer. The CE comes with 'heads' does that mean that at character creation you pick a head or do you pick the hair/face/etc. separately?
I am glad to hear more news about the trophy system since this hasn't popped up in a while although I wish there were some example screenshots.
I agree completely. The trophy system is something wonderful that in lots of games would get cut initially in order to make the release date. I also really love the fact that they aren't putting stats on the trophies. Numerous times in games I have loved the look of a certain piece of gear, or gotten some really rare low level item, but then when I level up and get something better I always have to replace it. While I would keep a lot of these items around in my bank, I would only get to bust them out every once in a while. I also really just love collecting the novelty items in games like pets and like my Magical Crawdad and Tiny Spore Bat pets in WoW. I can't wait to collect all kinds of these trophhies, even the low level ones just for fun. While I refuse to ever preorder games so I dont have something happen to me like what happened to all the people in Vanguard, this REALLY makes me want to preorder a CE right now.
I'm guessing the character customization will be along the lines of DAOC, being as this game is built upon an improved DAOC engine.
With that said..by the time I quit playing DAOC there was a good bit of customization with the characters at creation.
The two tone armor thing is a bit different.
I'm a bit curious as to what the 12 heads for the CE has to do with customization myself.
Like the above poster said...does that mean you just pick a whole head for a character now? Or do you pick a basic head, then adjust eye colors, nose, cheeks, lips etc. like you could in DAOC?
Will be interesting to see.
Also..I hope they implement something like in DAOC, where you didn't have to have a big arse helm if you didn't want to...you had those circlets that functioned the same, but allowed you to show your characters face.
That and the /hood thing for cloaks. That was cool.
Perfect, just what we needed. So its just not only a level based grind fest, but now its "gear" based grind fest as well. GG!
Wow, nice. You do realize that the trophies don't have stats right? That they're just there to "look cool." I mean it's funny when people put their foot in their mouth but wow, I don't even think you read the article at all.
Either a troll/WAR hater or someone whose attention span is so short he cannot read through an entire article.
With a title like "How you Look..." don't you think some media is warrented to accompany the article? Show me.
http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/29401
http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/29396
I can tell you right now you won't get an answer on that unless the developers answer that question. As beta testers, they can't even hint at anything outside what is released into the public. That can only be answered through an article writeup, a developer post or a media released video. Any other source is a sure fire way to get dropped from beta.
I think they are doing a GREAT work, nice to know that we can customize at that level.
Keep up the good work WAR Devs Team