Interview: Live Like a King In ArcheAge’s Next Update, Ascension

Space for nations is limited, however, to the four spots available on the map. A single nation can hold all four, thus raising the number of people it can invite to its nation but potentially making them harder to manage. I posed the question of whether you could overthrow your king from within your nation, and the answer was… sort of. The nation member cap is greater than the guild member cap, so a nation will often consist of players from separate guilds. “The opportunity is absolutely there, if you have three or four castles, that if someone gets greedy in that secondary guild, for them to kind of overthrow,” explained Fry. Ah, drama.

If your nation loses its last castle, it has 63 days to retake a castle before dissolving into the mists of history. But any guild devoted enough to go to the trouble of creating a nation is unlikely to let it fall so easily. “In the Korean version, that’s only happened two times, and one of those was due to inactivity,” Kwai said.

With only four slots available, though, I wondered if competition would be a little too fierce, as with the “land rushes” early in ArcheAge’s history. It wasn’t a perfect analog, as Kwai explained to me. “When you’re trying to place a house, if they place it first, you have no way to compete against that. But in this system, you can absolutely get your guild together and take it from them. It’s built to support that kind of [competitive] gameplay.” Just like in the real world, if there isn’t enough space for you to build your kingdom, your only option might be to take someone else’s.