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Guild Profile: Tarala Online Adventures Profile by Jay Watamaniuk, March 12 2003 In September 2002, BioWare opened the Neverwinter Nights Guilds and Registry system to Neverwinter Nights game owners. Since then a thousand guilds have been created and over 23,000 people have registered as members. The guilds range from roleplaying and gaming-based guilds to those exploring specific areas of the Neverwinter experience such as scripting, building or dungeon mastering. We'd like to take this opportunity to thank the thousands of players who have made this system an overwhelming success and profile many of the guilds which are enhancing the Neverwinter Nights community. This week: Tarala Online Adventures
1. Can you tell us more about your guild and what sort of gamer it would appeal to? We'd appeal to anyone who is new to NWN Online, or an experienced NWN player who is looking for a place to play that isn't as restrictive as Hardcore Ruleset (HCR)-Type modules, but can be just as fun and challenging. Tarala is a medium sized persistent world module that is located within the Action games category (as listed on GameSpy). We cater a lot to the adventuring crowd, people who like to dive deep into dungeons and slay monsters and gather treasure. We also have a full-player driven economy in place. Shops don't sell anything special, and don't buy anything for much either, making players barter with each other more. The only way to find good items is through random loot drops from monsters, or to have someone craft them. We use Mojo's Ambrosia Trade Skill (ATS) system, so players can craft items and sell them. Item drops from monsters are uncommon enough to keep the crafters busy. Tarala uses a lot of customized systems to making gameplay in NWN more fun and balanced for our style of play. Leveling isn't too difficult at the lower levels, but gets progressively harder as you get higher. There are also experience bonuses for parties, to encourage people to play together.
If you don't feel like leveling or crafting, there's a casino if you want to try your luck at winning big money, and NWN Chess if you are a chess fan. There's also capture-the-flag arena for players who like to PVP. One of my favorite things is something we just added, a Treasure Map system. It's very similar to Ultima Online's (UO) treasure map system, where someone finds a treasure map, and has to have a rogue to decode it. After that, they have to figure out where the chest is hidden, and dig it up...and if you're a UO player, you know that's when the *real* fun begins. So far, I've been running Tarala off my cable modem and home computer, but the really great guys at http://www.gamehosts.net are going to be hosting us pretty soon. It'll be really nice to move the player limit up from 30 to 64 :) 2. Can you give us some background on the development of your guild? Tarala started back in July after NWN was released. I always had aspirations of making a MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) or something, and when NWN came out; a mini-version would be just as good. It started as one area, with respawning creatures for people to kill. Over time, it grew larger, adding in new content like ATS or customized parts of the HCR system. 3. How do you see your guild developing over time? I think our community will start to grow larger, maybe even form sub-communities as players start to form their own guilds. 4. How has BioWare's NWN Guilds and Registry system helped in developing your guild? For a persistent world to be successful, it has to have a place for the community to gather outside the game. The forums for the guild provided that, and things like a marketplace forum where players could trade items that they collected. It was nice to have forums with postings that matched with the account names you see in the game. The calendar and news posting system was really cool as well :) 5. What is different about playing with a guild than simply playing a multiplayer game or even the single player game? Playing online is nice because you get to meet other people. Having a guild lets you play with a consistent group of players, be it in a PW or Campaign module. You have real players by your side instead of a henchman, who always seems to run off randomly and die somewhere. It's much more amusing if a fellow player does that. =) 6. What has been one of the difficulties in keeping a guild active? Sometimes, there can be a lull in out-of-game-activity, mostly because people are too busy playing in the game than posting outside. The only time they get to posting sometimes is if the server is down and they want to talk to their friends, or if they have something to gripe about :) 7. What suggestions would you have for people thinking about creating a guild in the NWN universe? If you find a group of players you want to keep in touch with, form a guild! One of the really great features of the BioWare guild system is you can see what servers your guild mates are playing on. It makes it much easier to find them and join them. There's also a really nice server listing option, kind of like a favorites server list for guilds. 8. Do you have any advice for NWN fans that want to join a guild? Read their forums and meet their players to get a feeling for the atmosphere before you join, so you know it's the right guild for you. I just joined a guild once because of its title and it turns out one of their officers was someone who tried to purposely crash our server. Wasn't happy about it when I found out :) 9. What is the strangest thing ever to happen in a guild game? There was some server lag, and everyone started switching bodies. Somehow, someone became one of the loot bags on the ground.:)
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