One of the biggest draws of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is the ability for players to form guilds and maintain keeps from which they can operate from. EA Mythic associate producer Josh Drescher and designer Christian Bales recently gave out a couple of details regarding both of these topics in an interview with Ten Ton Hammer.

According to Drescher, the philosophy behind the guild system "came directly from Mark Jacob's original vision for the game."

He explained that unlike older MMOs where the guild system was "just a chat channel and a roster," Warhammer Online was designed from the ground up with guilds in mind:

Very early on in the original design of the game, Mark made it clear that we had to do something different. We had to design the game from the ground up with large scale guild interaction in mind (cooperatively and competitively) as being one of the major focuses.

With regards to taking and maintaining a keep, both Drescher and Bales painted a rather intricate picture of how they expect it to be implemented in the game. According to them, the keep can only be claimed by a guild's Standard Bearer, which Bales explained further:
 

The Standard Bearer is actually a title within the guild. It's a rank and is unlocked through the rewards obtained through guild progression. Those titles are assigned out to specific members of the guild by people with permission to do so, like your guild leaders and officers.

The role of Standard Bearer is a prestigious title to have and their job is to take the Standard out into battle and plant it, carry it, and claim the keep, so that's where we were going with that type of role.

Once the lord of the keep is killed, the Standard Bearers can then come in and plant their Standard at the keep thus taking full control of it. The Keep Lord then becomes a mercenary and will then be joining your forces as long as he is paid.

Speaking of getting paid, they also touched a bit on maintenance. Apparently, being able to hold on to a keep is going to be closely tied with how much money the guild has stored in the bank.

It really seems like Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is coming along rather nicely. If the game lives up to the hype, then we might be seeing yet another strong IP in the realm of MMORPGs.