E308: Warhammer Online's customization options explained

One component of Mythic Entertainment's Warhammer Online that we haven't seen a ton of is character customization. We know that the collector's edition will contain 'rare heads', for example, but what of in-game options. That's exactly what the team set out to correct at last week's E3. Mythic's Adam Gershowitz lays it out for us - make sure to read below the cut for some exciting news about guild banners!

I noticed earlier there was a demo for what looked like character customization options?

Adam Gershowitz: One of the things we've been having a bit of a hard time with, because we show people live demos, is showing the breadth of customization in the game. So we've put together this presentation which shows off what we have. As you're aware, all of our equipment is career-specific. We've taken a page out of the FPS playbook – we want you to be able to identify a character's career from a distance. Expanding on that, we're showing the armor progression from low to high level in the game. We have over 400 armor sets in the game, they're split pretty evenly amongst the 20 careers. What you're seeing here are just three of the careers - the Warrior Priest, the Witch Elf, and the Chosen – going through some of the armor. I don't think it's all of the armor, maybe just half of it.

There are quite a number of pieces that go onto the characters, and there are number of pieces you don't see here, even more out in the world. The other part of our customization system is our full-fledged tinting system. These are very atrocious colors, they're not final I promise. It just shows players what we can do – including white. It's something folks have wanted in feedback for a long time. It's important to note that even though we're going to have a lot of colors available some may only be obtainable through certain successes. For example, we may choose to only let you have deep red crimson armor via high-level RvR rankings. Or maybe only allow certain colors from guild ratings, or via merchants that required you to have a certain city rating.

Are any of those keyed to Tome unlocks?

I don't know, but I wouldn't put it past Carrie [Gouskos] to try to sneak it in. [laughs]

Are there any other customization options in the game?

The final part of this is the banner system. Camelot had a really good system, it was the first banner system and we saw no reason to break from the standard. We just wanted to make it a heck of a lot more expansive. So we just put way more options into the system, all of higher quality. Everything is full color now, and you can see where we're flipping through – 17 of 278, 18 of 453 ... someone actually sat down, did the combinatorics, and worked out that there are something like 1.5 million choices available for players.

Since there are so many choices it actually allows us to do something we've never done before today - guilds can lock in their heraldry and keep it unique to themselves. That's a feature of our living guild system as well, and the leveling of guilds. With unique heraldry you encourage groups to grow and gain prestige and stick around longer. We want splintering off to form a new guild to be kind of a big deal, an undertaking. We want guilds to be ongoing, living events where – even as people come and go – the guild name is something that goes down in history for as long as the server is around.