Once again it makes it to Europe first.

http://www.war-europe.com/#/releasenotes/?note=week5

It's update time once again and so here is the latest peek behind the scenes at EA Mythic. First off the line this week is the Cities Team:

Hello from the Cities Team!

This week some truly exciting work is being done. As you walk through the streets of Altdorf or the Inevitable City, there are HUGE buildings that dominate the sky; think "Big Ben" or the "Eiffel Tower". We call these structures "Marvels". Marvels help us provide the iconic look and feel of a city and make them immediately recognizable. But as amazing as they are to look at, until this week you couldn't actually enter inside.

It was a major let down, many of us wept. But now we are rejoicing as we are building the interior structure of the Bright Wizard College, the grand hall and throne room of Emperor Karl Franz, and the terrifying Magus tower of the Inevitable City.

The process of buildings these interiors requires a great deal of planning. In keeping with our guiding principle, WAR is everywhere so these interior spaces are not simply places to take screenshots, but places to wage epic battles! So, with that in mind we carefully proto-type our play spaces, check them out for the number of players we expect to engage, and then the very necessary Games Workshop concept approval process, and finally we start to model and texture them.

We're on the last phase now so it's all coming together. We look forward to meeting you all inside these cities, making new friends, and bashing some heads together.

-Cities Team

All of this should be available to explore once the beta reopens so we're eager to hear your thoughts.

Next up are the Items Team. After last week's revelations about the trophy system, this week they have some news about another customisation aspect - armour dyes!

We've started applying tints to armors throughout the whole game. Some tint colors are "reserved" - they'll only be used on specific cool bits of armor. Also, some colors will have specific in-game meaning. All the other colors will be distributed among everything else.

We've also been finishing up the details of our dyeing system.
Will players be able to dye their armor? Yes.
Will players be able to "bleach" or revert dyed armor back to its original color? Yes.
We'll keep you all updated as this system progresses.

As an aside we've also been playing around with some itemization systems to make random drops "feel" better to the player. These systems will make it much more likely that a player will be able to use an item that drops.

-Items Team

We are sure that this will be fantastic news to most of you - especially the part about more useful item drops.

Another aspect of the game that really brings the world to life is animation and so here is the Animation Team to give you some insight into their work:

Since the Animation group isn't a unit that's responsible for core gameplay features, you don't often hear much about what we're doing unless it's directly related to something that's filling another team's needs. Here's an update to fill everyone in on what we've been working on.

Elves. Getting the Elf careers that we're rolling out this round up to where we're all happy with them being ravenously consumed (after such a patient fasting) has been really our top priority goal. Following closely behind is support for the Elf starter zones and monsters for those pairings. We've been working closely with code to get a system in for "monsters what ride other monsters" since we can't keep those crazy content writers from making zones full of elf cavalry. No, this does not mean we have either player mounts or mounted combat. It just means that we can hook a couple things together and have it be able to fight that way without having to do some crazy zillion bone rig with both rider and mount being in the same model.

As an interesting factoid, the proof of concept work was done on the Lab Rat (skaven model you've seen in so many videos), and our first tests were retargeted onto a goblin wolf rider. The main reason you keep seeing the Skaven show up in so many of Paul's video diaries is that, since he's not a player character, and NPCs don't require a ton of work, I know that nobody will be needing him for anything important. This way I can continually do R&D with a valid model whose anims work "ok" on most humanoids, and I'm not ever keeping, for example, someone from polishing the Empire Male set because I'm busy testing a new feature. And because I like them. A lot. (EDIT: Trust me, his fervor over Skaven is scary!)

There are a ton of things we've been doing in conjunction with the Cities team as well, and they make me keep adding more insanity to my spreadsheets. But we're getting a lot of neat ambiance in.

Issues from previous beta stuff that we've been improving upon:
" Swimming should be functioning a little better across the board, not final, but Code has made a lot of improvements, and we've now got splash sounds happening where appropriate (no fx yet though).
" Hopefully not stealing any C&C thunder, but animation and FX integration is improving a lot, and now we finally have the ability for both weapons on a dual-wielding character to have weapon trails.
" Flying creatures now path around properly and don't move to a point, wait, then pop to the next point, where they'll wait. It's all smoooooth and stuff.
" We changed the way that the client handles build-up times on abilities, and the new system will ensure I can't screw it up. It defaults to stretching the "build" anim for any ability that has a cast time.
" Draw and Holster is now working more as intended again. We're working on adding hot-swaps between melee and ranged weapons when you hit X for those rangey hybrid types. Stock melee or caster guys should just see things working correctly.

Staying with the general theme this week of art and graphics, we have more details of the new and redesigned UI system that was hinted at in previous updates:

UI Overhaul and Redesign

User Interface, or User Interactions, or the Team of Extreme Awesomeness as we're often called, has always had a unique challenge. It is our responsibility to present each of the varied systems in the game (RVR, Careers, Crafting, Trophies, Public Quests) in ways that make them easy to understand and easy to use, while still reflecting how exciting they are. And we have to tie these wildly different systems together, visually, so it doesn't look like you're staring at the interface for twenty different games each time you open a new window.

So we made a decision to revisit the UI from the ground up. Which means, literally, we're touching every window in the game. Nothing that was in the game a month ago can be considered finished.

It's an exciting, but daunting prospect.

Our first two attempts at overhauling the UI were with two huge, and somewhat independent systems, the maps and the Tome of Knowledge. We showed updates of both those windows in the last few weeks, but showing you what they look like now doesn't give you any indication of the direction that we're going with the rest of the UI. The maps and the Tome are stylized parchments, a look we're not going to use for the default windows.

So our third, and probably most visually impactful, attempt to overhaul the UI was to take on the look of the default window.

There's a joke around here that starts with us showing UI mockups around to other people on the team, and ends with the punchline ""There's too much brown."" So when the UI designers and artists sat down to reevaluate the UI with our ""ground up"" mentality, we decided to get away from brown.

This fellow here is the inspiration for our new UI color scheme:

And to give you an idea of the holistic way in which we're approaching our UI redesign, here's an example of some things that have gotten extremely long discussions in the past few months:

-Use of Color
-Use of Iconography
-Messaging Types
-Things Over People's Heads
-Icons on the Map and Minimap
-Toggles versus Checkmarks

By the time beta reopens, you won't see an entirely new UI. We've been working on establishing the fundamentals, and will, over time, be incorporating the new look into every window. Aside from changing the look of windows, we're also revisiting the functionality of every UI element. But you will begin to see it, window by window.

So here's a mockup of what you should begin to look for...

The New, Improved, NOT BROWN, User Interface Default Window.

-UI Team

These changes are just the beginning of the full UI that will be replacing the placeholders you've been using up till now.

Visual customisation is of course, very important. Just as important is the opportunity to customise the abilities of your character. This has been a work in progress for some time and now for the first time you can read how it will work:

Career Mastery (Specialization)

We know that you've all been eagerly awaiting more details on how we plan to allow players of the same career to differentiate themselves from one another, and we're thrilled to be able to take this opportunity to unveil the Mastery system for the first time!

General Overview

Career Mastery will allow players focus on different facets of their career giving them the opportunity to differentiate themselves from others, while still making sure that every character, no matter how they're specialized, can still perform the basic and fundamental purpose of their career. For example, every Sword Master will be an able tank, capable of absorbing much more damage then a lighter fighter. However someone who specializes in the Sword Master's defensive path will find that they are generally more durable, able to hold aggro better in PvE and able to defend their friends more efficiently in an RvR scenario. Meanwhile a Sword Master who chooses to go a more offensive route will still be able to take a hit, but may find themselves hard pressed to defend & protect as well as their counterpart, admittedly they will be hitting quite a bit harder as a trade off.

To begin at the most basic layer, every player will have four grouping of skills: Core skills and skills that fall under one of three different Paths of Mastery. The Core skills include a small handful of abilities which are simply critical to the career (to continue the example above, a Swordmaster would find that their Taunt and Guard abilities are Core). These Core skills automatically improve as you gain ranks; once you learn them, they won't require any further investments. Moving beyond that, each career will have three paths available to Master, each of which emphasizes one specific facet of the career's abilities. While the Core skills represent a more automatic progress, the pathed skills are heavily player-controlled.

Each Mastery contains Base skills, Supplemental skills, and also has its own Mastery level. Base skills are the Actions, Tactics & Morale a player is granted as a reward for achieving a specific level, every character of that Career will always be able to purchase these skills, however their total effectiveness is intimately tied to the player's level of Mastery. Supplemental Skills are the Actions, Tactics, and Morale that a player can only unlock by increasing their Mastery of a given path, like Base skills Supplemental skills continue to increase in effectiveness as you're Mastery level increases. The Mastery level itself is the current amount of Mastery a player has in a particular path, players will be able to choose just how much Mastery they desire in each of the three paths available to them.

Earning Skills & Increasing Mastery

Skills can be earned in one of two ways Base skills are unlocked when you achieve a specific rank then purchased at you're trainer, players can choose to skip a Base skill if they desire but there is no good reason not to. Supplemental skills however are only unlocked once you reach a certain Mastery level, once unlocked a player has to choose to spend points to purchase these skills. This is a difficult choice b/c the same points used to purchase Supplemental skills are used to increase Mastery level. These points are referred to as specialization points, and are earned every rank, a player will never have enough Specialization points to completely Master multiple paths while purchasing Supplemental skills. It is a tough choice b/c every point of Mastery earned improves EVERY action in that mastery line by a small amount this includes the Base Skills you automatically get. One level of Mastery can seem trivial however they add up and 5 or 10 points of Mastery makes a significant difference!

There is some amount of automatic leveling of power for skills in the paths outside of their Mastery. This is done to make sure the ability is not completely useless to the player, in fact many abilities may still be useful for secondary effects such as Stun even if they have horrible damage/healing values b/c their Mastery level is lower. When comparing the general power of an ability of a path with 100% Mastery and one with 0% Mastery you will see around a 30 - 35% difference in power. Remember this number can be improved (or widened) further depending on which Tactics and Stats you focus on as well.

Simple Examples

Example #1 - How a Base Ability improves with Mastery

Graceful Strike, a melee attack which causes monsters to hate you more than normal would be a base ability that falls into the Path of Vaul, which is the Sword Master's defensive-oriented Mastery. Every Swordmaster, whether or not they've specialized in that path, would have access to that ability. However, after a certain point, the damage and additional hatred will have reached their full potential, and will stop increasing. If the player then decides to use part of their specialization to increase their Mastery in the Path of Vaul the damage and extra hate will increase above that cap - and the further they specialize into that Mastery, the greater and greater the effectiveness becomes, however this ability still retains some use to players of other Paths who will find it useful for it's additional Hatred generated since it is still better then many of the standard Melee attacks.

Example #2 - Purchasing additional Supplemental Skills

To stick with our hypothetical Swordmaster, for example, let's rejoin him after he's spent several of his specialization points to gain further Mastery of his defensive path (Path of Vaul). Once his Mastery increases sufficiently, he'll see that a new attack has become unlocked called Crushing Advance. This ability is a shield slam that not only does damage and interrupts casting but also briefly increases his chance to block attacks further bolstering his defense. In order to purchase it, he'll need to divert his next point away from increasing his Mastery further, and spend it to gain the attack instead. This is only one such example of an additional supplemential Skill, players will also have access to improved tactics and a powerful Level 4 Morale in their Mastery

For the astute you'll have also noticed that the Path of Vaul seems to have a focus on using a "Sheild" instead of a "Greatsword" tricky eh?

Closing

In the end every player can decide not only how deeply to Master each path, but also which additional skills they might want to purchase from that specialization choice. You may choose to go full-bore down one path, max out its Mastery and purchase every supplemental skill, making your character outstandingly good at that aspect...but you'll only have enough points remaining to Master another path halfway at the most. Do you go as far as you can in a second path? or do you split your other points between multiple paths? Do you purchase the supplemental skills in those other paths, or do you decide to push your Mastery as high as you can? Maybe you decide not to push one path to its limit, and instead purchase several supplemental skills from multiple paths - but remember, you need Masteries to make those skills more powerful, too! Our specialization system will be a rich and flexible tool to customize your character exactly the way you want them!

We hope you enjoyed the sneak preview of the Career Mastery system, we have high hopes that these improvements will further enrich our character systems. We'll be listening closely for additional questions and feedback and answering them as we can over the next couple of Beta update letters.

-Combat & Career Team

Finally for this epic edition of the beta update, we have some very interesting news from the RvR team. This week they are talking about the changes to open world RvR including a very exciting new development:

The first stage of changes and additions to open world RvR is under way and I've been cleared to share with you a glimpse of the details. We received a lot of feedback regarding warcamp camping, the battlefield objectives, and the feeling of the RvR area as a whole and we have been listening. We have begun making changes to the battlefield objectives to provide more incentives to players to capture them, as well as making them more dynamic and interesting.

Now for the part that has been the top-secret project the RvR team has been hard at work on: Keeps. Yes, you read that right - we are adding Keeps. Keep warfare, namely protecting your keep and capturing your enemy's, will play a significant role in open world RvR and the campaign.

The first pairing to have keeps on Beta will be Empire and Chaos. The art for the keeps will not be polished when Beta reopens, but this is very intentional. Our primary goal at this stage is to make sure the game play and functionality of the keeps are very solid and you can expect to see a lot of "focus discussion" posts from members of the RvR Team as we request targeted feedback.

What about Siege? There will indeed be siege in WAR. However, siege will not be ready when Beta reopens. I will have more information for you as we get closer to having it ready for release to Beta.

-RvR Team

Expect to hear more in future updates about this system, for now though we hope that you will enjoy discussing the basics that are outlined here.

"There's too much brown."

I've been saying that about Skullbreaker since I got here.

=D

Great work in the cities, glad to hear their so far along. Items made me /joygasm because there was nothing more annoying then looking for some mail with nice stats and getting some cloth with +arcane damage.

Good update

Agreed, I can see it not being too difficult to make it so that "random" drops have a tendency to be useful to your class, though I would imagine they will still be relevant to other classes as well for the sake of trade and money sinks. One of my biggest WoW pet peeves was that almost all of the random drops you'd get were so far below your level that they were a modest upgrade at best, and even if your class could use them it was always more lucrative to sell items than to keep them. I hope WAR deals with this, and makes random drops more useful for the level range that can aquire them.

*I think WAR will even make vendor items viable. Not just there for show like in WoW.

Glad their redoing the UI. Improvements = awesome

Aye, WoW vendor items were pointless, which made the vendors pointless for anything above selling/repairs.

Also glad UI improvements are INC... just hope they scale down the brown.

Hmm, nice info, but figuring this hasnt even been offically released outside the Beta board someone over at War-Europe I hope had permission to release this.

Mythic seems to do a lot of great stuff lately. lets hope they can fullfil all their plans/promises and that they can stay on track concerning their time table. i want to start playing right now.

Atomics:
Hmm, nice info, but figuring this hasnt even been offically released outside the Beta board someone over at War-Europe I hope had permission to release this.

Heh, War-Europe is the Official Warhammer Online Site for Europe, run by GOA.