OnlineWelten Artikel zum Onlinespiel Stronghold Kingdoms

Onlinewelten: Can players loose all their buildings and other stuff?

Simon Bradbury: It is possible to lose all your villages and buildings, but it’s actually quite hard to do so and there will be methods to prevent very damaging attacks (captures etc) whilst you are away etc.

Even if you do lose everything however, all your ranking and research will remain, so you would get off to a very, very fast restart.

Onlinewelten: Talking about content like the PvP content (sieges, wars), will you offer PvE content as well?

Simon Bradbury: Yes we will! Currently I can tell you there are wolf lairs and bandit camps, distracting the alpha testers, but we have many other PvE concepts that we are currently testing on our dev server.

Onlinewelten: Can you tell us more about the social network (community features)? How can players find and interact with each other? Do you offer some tools like a search function, chat-system and so on?

Simon Bradbury: There will be many social linkages, with geographical networks such as the local ‘parish’ or ‘county’ and power based ones such as ‘factions’ and ‘houses’. There will also be inbuilt social linkages such as liege lords and Vassals. The actual details of chat and search we are not revealing yet, but rest assured as it’s a PC client we can afford for this to be a rich user experience.

Onlinewelten: How will the faction and election system work?

Simon Bradbury: Factions are created by players and are self ruled entities that can themselves then join into more powerful Houses that have a color on the political map. Elections are held at every administrative level, from small parishes to counties, provinces and eventually to be elected King or Queen of the country.

Onlinewelten: Can the players learn skills, profession or other specializations? How does it work? And how can players earn points for learning more?

Simon Bradbury: Definitely, this is a key part of the game. As players level up they get a set number of research points each time, which can be spent on any of the available 700 researches. Each arm of the research tree open up different possibilities, many that everybody will want to do and some that you will have to think strategically about as to whether they fit your play style and aims!

Onlinewelten: Will players who don’t start with the first day (release) still have a chance to compete with other players?

Simon Bradbury: Yes, new players will be fed in, in new parts of the country and ultimately the game is won by controlling all of the kingdoms for example. Even bigger players will need help to do this and a good player will always be an asset to any ambitious house. Bigger player are also severely punished for attacks on smaller players with a sliding scale that takes away their ‘honor’.

Onlinewelten: Will Stronghold Kingdoms come in a box or as digital download? And have you determined a business model?

Simon Bradbury: It will be released boxed and digitally. But we haven’t released details of the payment model yet!

Onlinewelten: When will we get the chance to have a look into Stronghold Kingdoms? Will you organize closed or open beta tests?

Simon Bradbury: The Next intake of testers will be in about 3 months time when we go into closed Beta. Please visit www.strongholdkingdoms.de to sign up

Thanks, Simon