Runes of Magic unleashes guild castles

by Shawn Schuster Mar 10th 2009 at 6:00PM

Filed under: Betas, Fantasy, Screenshots, Game mechanics, Guilds, New titles, Player Housing, Free-to-play, Runes of Magic

Here we are nine days before Runes of Magic is set to officially launch, and the new features just keep popping up. Case in point: today's announcement from Frogster concerning the activation of guild castles in the game. Starting today, your guild can have their very own guild castle to furnish to their likings. This gets us one step closer to the long-awaited guild battles where guilds can fight over thrones. Plus, guild castle just sounds so much cooler than guild hall or guild house, amirite?

How can you get your very own guild castle? All members of the guild must be level seven and the guild's community coffers must be stocked with enough wood, ore and gold to accommodate. The instanced castles will contain a guild bank, full furniture availability plus teleporters and gates to make travel times quicker. Once guilds obtain their own thrones, they can battle it out with other throne-holding castles for domination and loot. The complete guild battle functionality will be introduced to the game at a later date. Follow along after the cut below for the complete press release and more images of the guild castle.

Guilds in Runes of Magic can now move into their own castles

Berlin, 10 March 2009: From today players will be able to have their own castles in the fantasy world of Taborea. Frogster is activating the long-awaited 'Guild Castles' feature on the live servers of Runes of Magic that will give guilds the opportunity to move and furnish their personal guild accommodation. The next step for the Berlin publisher is to enable the guild wars function. The aim: to destroy the throne of an opposing guild.

However, building a castle isn't going to be so easy: The guild must first of all climb to level seven and must have its community coffers well stocked with ore, wood and gold. Should guilds fulfil these conditions, they will then have access to an individual fortress located in an instanced part of the game world. This will then make a range of opportunities open to the guild. For one, the guild castle will contain a central bank for its members and also the players themselves will be able to decide with what kind of furniture they wish to furnish their castle. Whether carpets, chests, tables or cupboards, everything is – as it is already in player's houses – freely movable. As a crowning, yet sinfully expensive element, guilds can even acquire a throne for their castle. Guilds can, however, also acquire practical functions in exchange for resources: upgrades such as gates or teleporters will not only shorten journey times, they will also be useful tactical elements in the planned guild wars.

In future conflicts, guilds will be able to conquer opposing castles. However, guilds may go to war only if they also possess their own throne. The goal of the combat is the opposing guild's throne. The destruction of a throne marks the end of the conflict and the defeated guild loses its dearly acquired throne as well as a part of its assembled resources. Over and above this, there is a plan to introduce guild furniture which is reserved specifically for use in the castle and which will in effect grant the guild special bonuses. The guild wars are presently in development and an exact launch date has not as yet been announced.

Runes of Magic started the open beta with an English and a German version in the middle of December 2008. All interested players can now download the online-role playing game and enter into the fantasy world after creating an account for free on www.runesofmagic.com.

Tags: frogster, frogster-interactive, guild, guild-castle, housing, rom, runes-of-magic

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

david said on 6:15PM 3-10-2009

Neat game... BUT... paying $20 for a horse to RENT? No thanks... that game should have never had a rent fee in the first place, they need to allow people to actually buy the horse with IN-GAME gold... don't force people to buy that with real money...

Vulturion said on 6:25PM 3-10-2009

I did find the game intriguing - though even through my Nvidia panel I couldn't get graphics anything like seen in the screenshots - but the real money rental system was probably the terminal turn-off.

As with Atlantica, I just cannot get my head around these item malls that rent out perks ; consumables make sense because at least they accelerate progress or allow permanent reselections, but making impulse "ooh, shiny !" buys evaporate after 30 days baffles me.

Mr. Digital said on 2:15PM 3-11-2009

As has already been pointed out, you can rent horses for in-game gold, and it's about $20 if you want to buy one permanently.

MrGutts said on 6:19PM 3-10-2009

You can rent horses in game with gold, but you can't buy them.

danarchy said on 7:00PM 3-10-2009

you can buy the mounts outright for like 35 bucks in diamonds or whatever. Seems pretty steep unless your busy like me and ended up buying your epic flyer in wow...for like $85 bucks worth of gold....
Then again 20+ hours of dailys when you make $68 an hour is a freaking horrible use of resources.
Honestly I dont mind these f2p games, in the end I would probably spend the same amount.

eggmanjr said on 7:43PM 3-10-2009

its only about ten bucks for a horse, you can buy 1000 diamonds for 50 bucks and horses are currently selling for at 199 diamonds each.

Lateris said on 10:29PM 3-10-2009

No offense--I am sorry but anyone paying for items in a virtual game is making a huge mistake. I am being polite in regards to what I really want to say.

Amana said on 11:30PM 3-10-2009

@Lateris:
Right. Because you *don't* pay for virtual items when you're paying a subscription hmm?
And you *don't* pay for virtual items when you buy a game in the first place hmm?

Allow me to be less polite than you; if an individual has a 'gaming budget', whether they spend that as subs, initial purchases, or item mall transactions - what the hell difference does it make, moron?

Nadril said on 11:54PM 3-10-2009

Technically you're forking out $15/mo for whatever items you can find in a normal MMO, how is this different?

MrGutts said on 8:24AM 3-11-2009

Each individual values their time different from one another.

If someone wants to waists hours upon hours grinding away to get a item like a horse, so be it.

If someone would rather pay it up front and not waist his or her time to get said horse so they can enjoy, then so be it.

But don't be judging other people on how they get to that point.

Forkboy77 said on 7:55AM 3-27-2009

its only like 8 bucks to buy a horse,, which is 7 less than a month of Warcraft.

Jeni said on 8:25AM 3-11-2009

This is a good game. It's got everything about WoW, WAR, DDO, LOTRO and EQ2 that I like, plus steroids on those things. The problem comes down, for me, to the inequality of the US vs the EU game. The EU game is further along and gets a lot of love, a lot of deals, a lot of GM support on the forums. The US portion of the game, run by a sister company, has none of those things. Unfortunately, that will be the breaker for me. Luckily, I managed not to buy diamonds for my house thus far and I've managed to save a bit of money.

I hope someone takes a look at this game, sees all the things that are right about it, and makes it into a sub based sort of game without the cash shop.

I will definately miss my priest/rogue.

Mr. Digital said on 2:21PM 3-11-2009

I'm not sure I quite understand this comment. It seems to me the game gets plenty of attention.

If this game went subscription based, I wouldn't play it anymore. Part of its charm is that its so high quality and yet still free-to-play, and it's much higher quality than other free to play games. Nothing against LotRO, I enjoyed it, but I canceled my subscription there because I'm actually enjoying this more.

Like others have alluded to, if I want to spend $5 a month on it I can, if I want to spend $5 every other month on it I can, or if I don't want to spend any money on it, I can. And if I do spend money on it, I can choose exactly what that money goes for and I'm supporting a game I enjoy.

Saylah said on 9:07AM 3-11-2009

I'm stoked about the Guild Castles. I'll probably join a larger guild to be able to take part in this stuff. I was going to do a small casual guild but we'd miss out on all these features and PVP options.

Subscriptions + box price is more than I've spent in ROM for the conveniences and things that make the game fun to me. Like others have said, people value their time differently. Spending hours grinding gold and doing dailies, I personally find a waste of my time, adds no valuable gaming experience, isn't fun and not what I call entertainment. We're all paying for virtual items so we should drop the holier than thou ideas. :-) Except that I'm in control of mine and don't pay anything when I'm not paying. i also won't have to go thru the annoyance of unsub/resub when I don't have time to play. It's win-win for me.

I'm enjoying myself very much in ROM.