It Don't Mean A Thing If You Ain't Got That Bling, pt.2

Talking Loot with Adam Gershowitz and Mike Donatelli

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Any MMOG player who's played longer than five minutes will tell you they've heard the term "phat lewts" before. Loot is one of the driving forces in any game, not just MMOG's. From gear, to crafting, to just plain old wealth, getting rewarded for your efforts is something all gamers expect from their game of choice. We sat down with Mike Donatelli (Content Design Lead) and Adam Gershowitz (Career Strike Team Lead) and asked them a few questions about the gear and loot that we're seeing or might see in the future of Warhammer Online: age of Reckoning.

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Ten Ton Hammer: Will looted armors have vastly different looks to them in the lower levels or are the characters going to rely on armor dyes for that “distinct” look?

Mike Donatelli: The first go we had a lot and just… we’re talking it’s still not all in yet. We probably have about 600 variation pieces still going in and you saw a lot more in Beta 4.2, and obviously at launch you’ll see the rest, but we do have a lot more coming in.

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Gear appearance will have more variety in higher tiers

Adam Gershowitz: So at kind of a high level so you guys can understand where we’re coming from, you are right on a lot of levels that the Tier 1 game has a lot less visual distinction in it, primarily because the players move so quickly through it. They’re changing out piece of armor so rapidly that we didn’t want to invest a massive amount of art time into that first couple of chapters specifically because as you start getting into Tiers 2, 3 and 4 (especially 4), where players are spending hours on hours, days on days, weeks on weeks, we wanted to make sure the diversity would kick in there. Like Mike was saying, not all of the armors are in. What you’re still pretty much seeing at this point is a decent mix. We started out with 5 core looks for all the careers, a Tier 1, 2, 3, 4, and a high level one. Since that, over the past 6-8 months or so, we’ve been filling them in with more visuals. Of course each one of those is completely dyeable. I’m not sure what the total number is for unique armor looks we have, but I think it’s somewhere around 9-10 easy per career?

Mike Donatelli: Oh, probably more than that.

Adam Gershowitz: And then of course we have an assortment of individual pieces that are completely different.

Mike Donatelli: Plus we also tried to put a cadence together of tints, so that when you receive an item it’s not just the same lime green pair of boots you always get. We try to put a cadence in of where you get dye and what sort of colors would look good with that dye. We put a lot of thought, a lot of effort, into trying to keep you from looking like a clown.

Adam Gershowitz: Yeah, you can get the odd colors if the dye goes haywire, but it’s not intentionally. It’s all Games Workshops colors all the way.

 

Ten Ton Hammer: How do you figure out how to scale loot to the tier (money drops, armor stats, etc.) so that it won’t be overbalanced?

Mike: What we did…well… let’s start at the beginning. *laughs*

Some games, that I will not mention, if you go out, you might find a quest and you do this whole quest and you get back and it says “You get a sword or a shield.” And you’re thinking “Man, I could use both of these things, but the sword is DPS, so let’s go with the sword.” So you pick the sword and the guy pops another quest, and he offers you… a sword. Now you’re thinking to yourself “Dammit, I wish I had known this ahead of time”

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Public Quests will provide some of the best loot in game

What we tried to do is we took a step back and said “How do we make our itemization system just better than any other one that’s come before it?” We built a cadence of design. In chapter 1, tier one we are going to give out these items. In chapter two, tier 1, we’re not going to give the same items but across quests, PQ’s, and influence rewards, give you the ability to get an upgrade that won’t make you regret picking that sword from earlier. Another example would be (and this is a true story), you’ll be fighting and you think “My hammer’s getting a little bit dusty, a little bit low in levels, I wish I had another hammer.” Next quest you get, it pops up a hammer. It’s like “Wow, that’s almost like somebody thought about that. Like they planned that out, like “It’s time to give them another hammer.”

Adam: Also on the RvR side of that, once again, the vast majority of the itemization in the game, the stuff you get through quests or the stuff you get from RvR merchants, that’s planned itemization. It’s really meant to make sure that the player is always upgrading and churning through the basic levels of items to make sure they never fall behind on power or never really surge way ahead on power. So on the RvR side of things; we have what we call RvR merchants. What these are is these are merchants that spawn only in Keeps, only after the players have captured the keeps. At that time, if the players have a high enough RvR rank they can go cash in a little gold and purchase equipment that’s similar to, like Mike was saying, the quest drops that you would’ve gotten in and around the same range. That’s kind of the core of the way the itemization works.

Now, the other part of your question, which I’m sure you’re asking, is how we designed our loot system so that people can’t get loot that’s way overpowered for their level. Obviously, there’s lots and lots of math under the hood. When it comes down to it, every item has a level on it. That level is equivalent power level that the players get. Obviously the rarer the item is the higher the level it is, but we always clamp that down making sure that the equip levels are always similar to the item power level, and that player’s around the average power that we’re expecting them to get to.

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Ten Ton Hammer would like to thank Adam Gershowitz and Mike Donatelli for taking the time to do this interview, even with a launch on the horizon