OnlineWelten Artikel zum Onlinespiel Stronghold Kingdoms

Onlinewelten: Hello Simon, could you introduce yourself and your company Firefly, please? How many people are working on Stronghold Kingdoms right now?

Simon Bradbury: My name is Simon Bradbury, co founder of Firefly Studios and designer on Stronghold Kingdoms. Firefly is perhaps best known for our PC RTS series ‘Stronghold’. We are currently working on 2 projects, one of which is our MMO, Stronghold Kingdoms, the other we will announce shortly!

Onlinewelten: Since when did Firefly plan to develop a Stronghold-MMOG? When did you start the development? In what development stage is Stonghold Kingdoms now?

Simon Bradbury: We have been working on Stronghold Kingdoms for over 2 years now and have just gone into a closed Alpha test. We have had an amazing response already to our announcement of the game and will be letting many more people in to a bigger beta test towards the end of the year.

Onlinewelten: Can you tell us a bit about the background story and setting of Stronghold Kingdoms?

Simon Bradbury: Kingdoms is set in the Middle Ages in a divided kingdom were players will have a chance to rewrite history! Starting out as a lowly ‘village idiot’ players quickly rank up, aiming to gain office, power and prestige in medieval society. Alliances and power blocks will form, politics, trading and diplomacy will compete with rule by an Iron fist!

Onlinewelten: In your press release you mentioned, that Stronghold Kingdoms is an unique hybrid of web and PC based gaming. Can you explain that further? What can we expect gameplay wise? Is the game browser based only - or is it mixed with a game client?

Simon Bradbury: Essentially it is a very light PC client (that will run on pretty much anything!), that works very much like a browser based game, communicating with a server over the web. The PC client enables us to be much richer graphically than a browser based game, with richer controls and better response and feedback. Basically Stronghold Kingdoms sits somewhere between ’Stronghold’ the RTS game and browser based games such as Tribal wars or Travian.

Onlinewelten: Can you tell us more about the game world, please? Will the players be able to “visit” places known from the real world?

Simon Bradbury: Yes - the maps will all be localized and will be very detail political maps of regions of the world. E.g. the Uk or medieval Germany.

Onlinewelten: Players can build and expand their own villages, castles and so on. Is it possible for players to visit the other player-owned areas in-game and walk there?

Simon Bradbury: Not exactly, you can send an army to camp outside another player’s castle and then smash it to pieces! Seriously, you can play peacefully however and focus on farming, trading, diplomacy, politics and a range of other less aggressive activities. It’s important to realize the Stronghold Kingdoms is not at all an RPG in the mold of WOW for example it’s very much a Strategy game.

Onlinewelten: How do pillages, sieges and wars work?

Simon Bradbury: Players will design and build castles and very much like in Stronghold, and a good layout will absolutely bring a much stronger defense. To siege a castle an attacker places his troops in an attack order around the castle (or in the general area if he has no intelligence reports) and presses ‘Launch Attack’. Its not an RTS in that you control your troops in real time, but you do get to watch the battle when it hits and orders that you have given will modify your troops behavior and the outcome of the siege.

Pillages, razings, captures and ransacks are all different types of attack that you can engage in as an attacker.

Wars tend to spring up between different factions and houses within the games organic power structure.