PAX Prime 2015 Day 1 Recap

ArcheAge: Heroes Awaken

Leadership and Heroes

The long needed quality of life upgrade mirroring the Korean version 1.8 changes is coming to ArcheAge within the month! With it comes a far greater sense of guild functionality, faction politics, and much needed rallies to force the world into turmoil and fear. Sounds fun! With the addition of new housing on the eastern and western hills surrounding the new massive territory battle map, players will be able to set down and construct the most elaborate housing in-game yet. Let’s break down the details.

The political system is the most important element of the new changes, that more or less will tie into everything else in this update. Now through the acquisition of leadership points, players can rise up to become “heroes” of their realm via a combination of hard work and political campaigning. By grouping with others, attending world events, and receiving new praise commendations from other players (limited daily), players will compete on a popularity chart not too unlike the Republican primary pollings. The top 20 players after 3 weeks of fierce community service will then need to campaign over the course of the fourth week to rally the support of their faction members. Of them 10 will be elected to sit at the adult’s table come Thanksgiving harvest! By that I mean you get the shiniest, most bad ass AOE buffing cloaks ever seen in the game. Not to mention enough sparkles to make you the biggest target on the battlefield, as you should be given the cape’s stats.

Now like all good politics, the system is build more as a tiered system, with one ultimate hero sitting atop the pile. Then 2 VPs, 3 of the third tier, and finally a fourth tier of four. The capes vary in stats based on your positioning, as well as vary from other faction’s capes on similar levels. For instance, one faction might offer capes with attack speed bonuses, while another might be a powerful movement speed. A rather frightening element of these capes is that they do indeed stack, meaning you can bring a full line-up of your heroes to the battlefield to put some serious pressure on any foe attempting to stand in your way.

Beyond just being a bad ass, these seats of power (that literally no one else is able to sit emote in except those elected) offer a couple interesting perks. One involves spending points to enable new large party quest events. The other is a Call to Action, which sends out a summon to anyone with over 30 leadership points, to immediately teleport them to the calling hero, presumably for large scale combat.

Guild Overhaul

Beyond the new political system being rammed into the player driven world of ArcheAge, we also see guilds receive a massive overhaul in terms of functionality, purpose, and contribution to the overall scheme of the game. Now guild leaders can advertise their guild for a small fee (roughly a few gold per week in testing) on an in-game user interface offering potential recruits the ability to Tinder swipe their way through brief descriptions of your guilds stats, goals, and overall theme before submitting a request to join your company. These recruits are forwarded to the guild leader and anyone set on the managerial council for review before acceptance.

You’ll want to take advantage of this to start recruiting as guilds can now can experience and level up to 8 to gain additional perks for their members. This is primarily done through world event participation (killing two birds with one stone you greedy political guild leaders!), some specially marked quests, and a few other rare exceptions being tested. In addition to passive stat gain that customizable to your guild through leveling, you can enjoy some competitive fun past level 3 when the GvG challenge option becomes available.

Rather than whisking preset teams away to instanced realms for combat, GvG challenges take a far more brutal guerrilla warfare approach. Even in the normally safe city zones protected by NPC guards, battles can fall upon you from the rooftops, or in the open seas. No where is safe during these hour long skirmishes. Nor are PK penalties enforced. This is KOS incorporated gameplay at its finest.

If your guild truly has it out for another guild, you can even send out this challenge up to three times per day, though the cost of initiating the challenge grows exponentially with the third challenge be a true blood money ordeal.

Domination Battleground Upgrades and Housing Upgrades

The more organized battleground Ayanad Ruins will be seeing a fun twist involving upgrading each faction’s fortress through collection of materials found in the free for all center point of the region. Doing so not only grants your side boons towards slaughtering your foes as the fortress grows, but also prestige. Prestige is a new currency that can be traded for some pretty nice loot, including Epherium Cloaks, and Luna Scales that promise 100% success in socketing gear. Serving your guild through a variety of guild missions can net you further prestige, once again tying all these new systems together in a working economy with fun gameplay at the center.

Housing is seeing community specialization implemented in the Heroes Awaken update as well. Though we were unfortunately cut off for another Trion appointment before seeing the mansion sized structures, I was fortune enough to go over the 24×24 stock housing and middle of the road step up. The basic housing now offers the harvester, rancher, and miner update. All three will build your house upwards to include a secondary floor, while providing new utility on your renovated first floor. The Miner update adds a new renewable node you can pull ores around every hour. The Harvester upgrade introduces a third planting block to allow you to reap 50 more seeds than a normal house. The Rancher update adds a stable for storing various barnyard animals. A huge benefit of these new houses is they all unlock the power to bulk craft basic items to speed things up. Anyone heavily into crafting knows how valuable and long overdue this feature is.

My brief glimpse at the second tier housing offered massive almost feudal looking mini-castles. The options on tap here are Armorer, Tradesman, and Apothecary, though I didn’t get a full rundown of what each does. That concludes my twenty minute super rush through what will be by far the largest update to hit Archeage since launch.

Continue to Trion – Atlas Reactor (Newly Revealed!)