Yet another Q&A session from Warhammer Online Return of Reckoning which took place on the 26th of March 2022 and this time it wasn’t just a Q&A, it was meant to be an AMA. Ask me anything they said, however this just didn’t feel like it worked as it was intended.
Players, viewers, people of interests were able to ask anything they wanted, but as the title says, you can ask whatever you want, that does not necessarily mean you are going to get an answer. Having covered the previous Q&A that have happened in the past I was not expecting them to answer all the questions or go in depth, simply because there were too many questions and usually there isn’t enough time to answer them all and they have to break down the questions to the ones that are actually good questions, troll questions, and questions they can answer.
There are always questions that they cannot answer, because they are questions which refer to balance issues which is always a very controversial topic, there are questions which ask about road plans with they are working on and they cannot reveal them because either they are not sure when they are going to deliver or because they want to maintain the excitement and surprise to the player base. Whatever the reason is or was the outcome remains the same, a lot of the questions were not answered.
It feels again as this was a promotional effort from the development team to promote the game and try and get more players to return to the game and new players to start the game. An attempt tp populate the server and try and create a better experience for the current players and the future ones.
No matter what the purpose was the important thing here is that some questions were answered even if it wasn’t from everyone or in-depth as many people might want it. Let me just point out that most of the times a lot of people feel or want or wish that this question and answer sessions will answer questions about balancing whether their class is going to get something out the case this is a more broad-spectrum questions as it should be.
So let’s get into it see what happened during this ask-me-anything session which was also broadcasted live from Return of Reckoning twitch Channel. All answers were given by the lead developer from Return of Reckoning Max Hayman.
**There were a lot of questions answered during the session. I tried to record as many as I could on this particle. For full list of player sked questions please see Reddit**
Opening statement
What Warhammer online was trying to do according to Max was to do what they did in Dark Age of Camelot, trying to have this big PvP fights with castles, the realm versus realm fights, where you can have fights between Guild vs Guild organizing with each and overall a much more organized PvP experience with objectives and conquest, in contrast with other MMORPGs were they drop people into an area and just let them fight it out with no objectives, more like a free-for-all or Team Deathmatch mode.
Now on to the player questions that were submitted on the Reddit, to be specifically asked on this AMA.
Is it possible to add new classes like night-goblins and new zones and or new sieges?
I think that people want to see more of the world represented in this game, because we only really get to experience this small part of the old world, the six races that we have and we would love to, we really would, if we had the tools and the time, we would definitely do that.
Introducing new races is crazy complicated. We would have to create the skeletons to go with them, the rakes and then create the automation, as well as, animation of the abilities. It takes too much time and its hard to do with 3 main coders and we prefer to spend that time to build up the game mechanic and introduce those.
Considering adding more classes or customizations to the existing ones?
We would need to modify a lot of the client and the server and we don’t have that amount of flexibility. We don’t really have the tools to make it really easy, we don’t have a lot of time doing something like this, but yeah maybe over time, to refine the tools that we have, to be able to do something this complex.
It’s a kind of a trade-off between, do you want to work on improving city siege adding new city sieges to new areas, add new dungeons or add new classes? However looking at these classes we already have 24 classes with 72 specializations so there’s already an amazing amount of complexity. Diffidently its summing that we would like to work on and experiment.
Is it possible to improve client performance and move to DX 11-12?
With out the game source code, there is not much we can do, but we are looking to what we can do. You could unofficially, download a proxy and plug it into the client folder and it should work. We might “support” it at some point in the future.
Why does the faction population swings so much and are there ways to make it more balanced?
The swings are really happening in low population hours, so you know, during the middle of the night, a lot of people to team up on one side and they can be quite strong. We have things like AOO when you have a lot of players on the other team and you can get more XP, faction loot and drops. We can tweak the system a lot but, if things get a lot of balance then you get a lot of stalemates in the game. You can get a keep that has a great defense and a great attacking team and it’s very locked in place. A little bit of unbalance needs to exist. We are looking at different effects during different population numbers because it’s not have one number that works in all situations. Balance is important but it fluctuates.
Any plans to fix the dyes?
Open a bug tracker ticket. (some dyes have issue on some gear).
How long are you staying in Alpha stage?
We have the alpha to set the expectation low so we cant disappoint anyone. We preferred to set the bar low and over deliver.
PVE – PVP LotD dungeons?
Mixed feelings from the community about that from people who talk about it. They want to go in and do a dungeon, it can get annoying when u want to do a dungeon and some one comes in the entrance to kill them and takes over and it’s something we have not implemented mechanics in the game yet, so if it’s something you really want to see back in the game we could do it. Up for discussion on he forums.
Will we be able to get the griffin and manticore mounts in the future?
These mountains are given out to people that report game breaking bugs such as duplication of items, thankfully those bugs don’t exist anymore. We don’t give them out as much, however we would like to keep it the way it is right now.
Will we see the rest of the racial cities coming into the game?
Would love to see the elf cities in the game, I mean when we did the dwarf and the Greenskins cities they were half built because they were the first ones to be developed in he original game and a lot of time and detail went into them. Building Interiors, lot of props and things like that and then they did The Empire things and then they moved on to the Elf things. They must have rushed it because we have a lot of less assets to work with when it comes to the elf and the dark elf. We don’t have a lot to work with and we would have to do a lot more from scratch. We don’t have much in term of the design that they had in mind for them, except for like a very vague map layout. If we had the tools we would put it on the agenda. It is not in production at the moment.
Was there a necessity to change the city sieges from trigger to scheduled? Are you planning to change them ?
City sieges happened when the population was low and you can have a stronger side, so a city siege that happened in the middle of the night, you know, when a small amount of the player base was online and it wouldn’t happen as frequently. Cities were happening at 02:30 in the morning and you had to wake up. Its been two years and the people are tired of waking up at 02:00 am in the morning. Now the cities happen on schedule, so it gives time to get better organized, you know, when it’s going to happen and allows you to plan around that as people who have other things to do in their lives. We might have trigger mechanisms for some time zones to accommodate different population. We are keeping our finger onto it.
Will you implement the true open world PvP rule set?
No we are staying with core. But we are looking in expanding the RVR areas.
Will you be “buffing” DPS Rune Priest specs?
No concrete plans, we are looking for more AOE warband plans in the future.
Shaman mechanism will it be revisited?
No need at the moment.
Mercenary system to help with the balance issue?
No need since people play both sides.
Will you release a road map any time soon?
It adds stress to the team, we trying not to push people since they work on their free time with no pay. Plus things we are working on, may not be delivered on time so, announcing them could disappoint some people.
New currency tradable in the same account?
Not something we want to do it at the moment. You put as much as you get out of it. Makes sense if you want to play your character, you play your character, you level them up ,no one can pay to be above you and if someone’s got a really good character and loads of tokens and they can just send them to their alts to level them up really fast its not fair to the new players that can’t level up that quick. We try and make it so everyone who has a top-level character leveled out to know the hard work they put into getting to that level and I think that’s important especially in traditional MMORPG. This is not something we are looking into at the moment.
Land of the dead themed scenarios?
Pyramid of Setra was released. A map taken from Rath of Heroes and we are looking at more scenario maps.
Will the dwarf and Greenskins cities will get better lighting?
When we have the tools we will be able to do that. Once we have it , we can run the data and then we will have it. A limitation due to lack of original tools. Something I feel we can have in the future.
Anymore PVE content soon?
Lost Vale is coming soon …
Plans for Flying mounts?
We don’t have flying mounts for a reason. The insides of the houses are empty and missing parts. The game would be buggy and lagy. The game was designed to be seen from ground level. We don’t have the time or the man power to implement this now . In addition, how will thing work in RVR with sieges and flying over the walls etc.
With the current class balance do you think that any class needs to be buffed / nerfed?
It is better than it was before but we are going to be doing more in the future.
Thinking of implementing long term Twitch Drops?
Yes we are looking into it. We try to explore a range of options there.
Lairs that has not been implemented yet?
There are mechanisms missing like puzzles. We are working on those.
What I took from this?
This is hard to review compared to the previous ones. The previous Q&A feel like they were better prepared than this one. The questions on the reddit were a lot more and a lot were not asked or even grouped up. I have to admit that some were very lengthy to even been considered.
Once again the question on the AMA like the previous Q&A seemed a lot more PVE and promotional orientated than PVP orientated. This strikes me as odd taking in account how many people on my stream talk about PVP. This makes me feel like there are two completely sets of people playing the game.
The AMA was in my opinion was too short to answer all those questions. There will never be enough time to answer all the questions players have. In addition, this AMA also had Twitch Drops for the viewers. Nice addition but if you were even 1 min late you could not get them all. Some people were left with a bitter taste. Its is funny how small things like that can leave that bad taste in the end. It is also funny how many people only go to those events just or the free stuff and not caring for he community they are part of.
As far as what this AMA offers for the future of the game is as follows:
- No new classes – At least not any time soon. (We knew that!)
- Classes customization – No, 72 variations is enough complexity.
- Improving game performance via DX -11 /12 – maybe in the future.
- More racial cities in the game – Not any time soon missing a lot to implement them.
- Improve lighting in the cities – No.. missing the tools. Along with a lot more tools missing such as a terrain tool which make the other point impossible, at least for now.
- Flying mounts – problems with RVR tactics and terrain issues so NO!
- Fixing ex-realming – No its needed and the amount is acceptable
- PVEVP Dungeons – Maybe if there is demand.
- Reverting City siege schedule – No only amend if necessary for low pop time zones
- Full PVP rules – No it could cause aggravation to people
- Buff DPS Rune Priest – Maybe for warband play
- Shaman mechanism changes – No, there is no need
- Mercenary system to incentivize realm switch – No need people can change sides as needed.
- Road Map – No it causes disappointment to players and stress to developers.
- Tradable new currency – No, not fair to new players
- Land of the dead scenarios – yes and more to come
- Better lighting in Dwarf & Greenskins Capitals – No, no tools
- Long terms Twitch Drops – Yes once options are explored
- New lairs – No but new mechanics like puzzles will be activated
Overall most thing that we got answers to are no and negatives. From the 19 questions here we got 15 no 2 maybe 2 positives. Positives are activating puzzles and adding more scenarios. I would love to here if the scenarios would get more pug versions since there are 6-9 scenarios available per week and only one is the pug one. I have to say as a final thought that there is not much to be expecting in the future near or far. No tools, no road map, no mounts flying or otherwise, no new cities, no new lairs, no new gear or weapons.
The best thing to expect is Lost vale and maybe some skins. The rest seems like they are staying the way they are. Hey at least the game got some good PR.
For those that want to see the AMA video can do so on my You Tube channel using the link:
Return of Reckoning AMA March 2022
The War never ends… lets keep fighting and maybe one day we will arise victorious!