The latest news from Earth & Beyond, Westwood's upcoming massively multiplayer space role-playing game, is an ambitious new guild system being implemented in the coming weeks. Recently, GameSpot had a chance to talk to Westwood Studios about the new guild features. The team says that it is "really supporting guilds above and beyond current MMORPGs. We recognize that socialization is the heart and soul of any massively multiplayer game, and features like grouping, chatting, and a guild system go a long way to making it easier for players to interact. Aside from the grouping features in the game, we're also adding a robust guild RPG system that actually rewards guilds based on individual members' accomplishments."

The big news from Westwood this week is that it is implementing an innovative new guild system in Earth & Beyond.

According to producer Eric Wang, Westwood has been brainstorming and planning the guild system for some time but wasn't sure if it would make it into the game by ship or not. Now that it will, the team is ready to talk about it. Says Wang, "We always had these ideas, but we didn't know if we could get them in for live. It turned out that we got some extra time, and we were able to fit them in. We didn't have a guild system until very recently. It will go live to the general public [in the next few] weeks."

The big news is thus Westwood's unique new guild system. So in addition to providing advanced chatting and grouping capabilities for those who create and join guilds, Earth & Beyond is also offering real in-game benefits to guild members and doling them out in a level-based system, with each guild member contributing experience to the guild pool of experience points, which can then be used to purchase in-game amenities for all members.

What Earth & Beyond will do is track the individual accomplishments of each guild member and then award the entire guild experience points. Every time a guild member scores a kill, the guild will get a fraction of experience points. If a guild member makes a successful trade, the guild will get experience, and so on. Just ascharacters gain experience, the guild too will record experience points in three separate pools for combat, trade, and exploration. Thus, a guild whose members all engage in combat will have high combat experience but low trade and exploration experience. Meanwhile, a guild filled with Jenquai explorers would likely have lots more exploration experience than anything else.

In this way, players who want to investigate guilds or join a prospective guild can see what sort of emphasis a particular guild has and what sort of members it values or covets. If you just like to shoot things up, then you'll want to look for like-minded individuals, and the Earth & Beyond guild system will list for you the guilds with the most combat experience. Likewise, if you enjoy trading more than anything else, you can search for trade-intensive guilds to join.

Guilds can be started with a minimum of six players. This group is halfway there.

It's important to note that when you gain experience for your guild, those experience points aren't being taken away from you. Instead, you add bonus experience to your guild pool. So if you gain 5000 experience points from exploration, your guild might get five exploration experience points. As your guild gains experience, it will level up, just like a character. And like in other RPGs, the experience points needed for the next level will increase proportionally as you grow in level. Thus, to go from level two to level three, you will need more experience than it took for you to advance from level one to two.

So what does leveling up actually do for you? Those experience points you accumulate will then allow your guild leader to purchase amenities for your entire guild. Each time you hit a new level, you are awarded points to spend on guild bonuses. Only the guild leader will be allowed to make purchases, so there will be no interface or method within the game for polling guild members and casting votes. Westwood trusts each guild to make its own decisions about how to purchase amenities and, when the decisions are made, to empower the leader to finalize those orders. Says Wang, "The guild leader is the one who makes the purchasing. How they make the decision is up to them."