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Why did this game fail?

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  • kakasakikakasaki Member UncommonPosts: 1,205

    Originally posted by Sovrath

    I thought the sieges were poorly done.

    I had no plans to play this game but picked it up on a whim and found I was having more fun in scenarios and public quests than I had in a very long time.

    Problem was, for me at least, I was expecting the sieges to be epic and a main part of this game. Instead I learned that the whole thing was about "flipping keeps".

    There was no pride in ownership, no reason to take a keep other than to come back to it and take it again for more points.

    the RvR part floundered as there didn't seem to be reasons to do it but people did flock to the scenarios which took away from the RvR.

    Besides the fact that there were numerous bugs and issues.

    The PvE was pretty lackluster.

    I sometimes think devs are a bit clueless about things. I was talking to a developer at PAX who was not associated with Warhammer and we were talking about pvp and pve and the topic of Warhammer came up. I'm hoping he was just being diplomatic but when I said that they didn't do pve all that well and explained that I could pull a guard and the guard next to him who was talking wouldn't even noticed as the first guard came to attack me, he said "well, that's not what they do, not their thing".

    My thougth was "really?" My girlfriend could see that was a flaw and she doesn't even play games.

    It's a shame because they had a lot of areas where a lot of work went into them but that players rarely go to.

     

    That is what did it for me too. I gave the game a year but since the RvR was pointless, really saw no reason to saty. Pity because the scenarios were a blast!

    A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes to be true he generally believes to be true...

  • zimboy69zimboy69 Member UncommonPosts: 395

    i loved warhammer online

     

    the sad thing was two sides  and where are the  skaven 

    a player race of skaven would have been amazing

    warhammer would have been amazing with 6 sides and if it didnt suffer from huge lag

     

     

    but it reminded me of days in xroads when wow first came out  but nothing comapired to the 100-200+battles i saw in warhammer it was quite exciting

     

     

     

    image

  • IkedaIkeda Member RarePosts: 2,751

    The pulling of the Slayer class at launch lost me immediately.

  • Loke666Loke666 Member EpicPosts: 21,441

    Originally posted by Yamota

    I mean it brought alot of nice features to the MMORPG genre. Such as ability to viably level from level 1 to cap by doing just PvP,  PQ, defensive and offensive targetting, interesting mechanics like that of the BW and Disciple of Khaine.

    Yet it recently announced merging of yet another round of servers to a total of two or three, globally, and probably will shut down completely before the end of the year.

    But why is that? I for one spent 400+ hours playing it so it isn't that bad. Reason I left was because the end-game was/is junk, maybe that is it?

    They focused on the wrong group of players.

    Mythic did have many fans from DaoC and Warhammer have millions of fans, but instead of making a game for either of both of those they tried to take Wows players (and said so in many interviews before launch).

    Wows players love Wow. 

    If Mythic either would have reskinned DaoC with Warhammer on top of it or used mechanics and the world from the Warhammer fantasy RPG things would have gone a lot better.

    For Pete's sake, they did only make Altdorf right and that is just because GW said that they would pull their license if they didn't remake it. Warhammer is one of the best and most detailed worlds ever created and they got one city right, not to mention that they cut out everything adult and most of the nasty humor warhammer have.

    The final nail in the coffin was when they cut out the entire endgame and half the content 6 weeks before launch, stating that it needed a little more polish and would be patched in soon but that never happened.

    A good game must find the right group of players and make a game for them. STO did the same, they tried to make a game for casual MMO players instead of Trekkies which would have given them many faithful players.

  • NeikoNeiko Member UncommonPosts: 626

    I skimped the last two pages a bit, but here is why it failed for me overall.

     

    Only 2 factions in a RvR based game. (I mean... Really? Let's take DAOC, take what is good about it, and then take it out... <_< )

    No incentives to really fight in rvr (This is more or less a showing of the times, where people are not willing to have fun for the sake of fun, but sometimes it really just wasn't worth it)

    Balancing issues. Destro had a decently large population compared to Empire. Their reaction to this? First they gave empire more exp/renown to try and have people go over there. Next reaction? Buff empire classes but not destro counterparts.

    AOE issues/zerging. AOE ruled the game. It was pretty much bright wizard or go home past t2. They implemented ways to fix this in the choppa/slayer, but didn't use it in the old classes (Does AOE up to x amount of targets is how it should be done in a game like this)

    Performance/Visual. Pretty much self explained. Visuals were not great (I loved the style though), and it ran like crap on most systems.

    Lack of PvE players. A lot of the public quests were great, they were also the first (IIRC anyways) to implement it. The problem was, if you did PvE, you did not level up your renown. So everyone just did scenarios 90% of the time and played merry go round with the keeps to keep their renown up.

    Liner skill tree system. It really was crap.

    Their "fix" to lag in zones with high amounts of people was not letting new people in.

    A side note, I really wanted to see the orc capital, but that never came to plan.

  • channel84channel84 Member UncommonPosts: 585

    Broken class balancing issue made me quit that game

  • ScorchienScorchien Member LegendaryPosts: 8,914

    Scenarios killed this game ..

  • GTwanderGTwander Member UncommonPosts: 6,035

    The universal cooldowns, it made strategy pointless since you could spam your best attack repeatedly. I couldn't play past tier one because PvE was boring, and leveling through PvP instead involved winning every match as a Maurauder using nothing but Impale, and still getting a 20+ kill to 2-3 death ratio. I only died because playing smart made it way too unfair for the others.

    I can only imagine the design team muttering "hurrrrr" all day from their undeserved offices.

    Writer / Musician / Game Designer

    Now Playing: Skyrim, Wurm Online, Tropico 4
    Waiting On: GW2, TSW, Archeage, The Rapture

  • Combat glitches and combat responsiveness prevented basic combat gameplay from being fun.

    The client performed very poorly, especially in large battles. A big problem for an open world PvP game.

    Initially intended to focus PvP on instanced scenarios, the game was, based on player feedback, retrofitted into an open world RvR game. This didn't work in a two-faction game as one faction would continuously dominate on a server.

    The game world was very fragmented with loading screens between zones. This prevented the game world from having that immersive feel many players look for in an MMO.

     

    The game did have some great features, such as Public Quests, PvP leveling, PvP tanking and a lack of permastealth classes. It also easily had the coolest orcs ever seen in any game.

    Had they just made Dark Age of Camelot 2 I think they would have been a lot more succesful.


  • Originally posted by Ikeda

    The pulling of the Slayer class at launch lost me immediately.

    The Slayer class never existed prior to launch. It was the Hammerer that was pulled before launch, and was never seen again. Later they added the Slayer as a replacement.

  • youngkgyoungkg Member UncommonPosts: 357

    Originally posted by Yamota

    Yeah I always thought, and still think (looking at you SW:TOR), that copying WoW is a misstake. I mean what are they thinking? I will take WoW and add some features and bling bling and then all the sudden WoW players will play their game instead?

    Nevermind that WoW is/was already established and had a ton of content which a new game cannot possibly have.

    The only one that can kill WoW is Blizzard and maybe with Kung Fu Panda they started that?

    However I personally felt the RvR focus of WAR did separate it from the pack, but I guess it just wasnt well implemented.

    The system they used for pvp (RvR) didnt compliment the end game with just 2 sides going back and forth caping then losing then recapping....that kind of system needed 3 realms to be successfull, its just monotonous with only 2.

     

    To top it off they cut there demographic in half trying to deliver 2 different experiences and failing at both.

  • cagancagan Member UncommonPosts: 445

    Originally posted by Axxar

    Combat glitches and combat responsiveness prevented basic combat gameplay from being fun.

    The client performed very poorly, especially in large battles. A big problem for an open world PvP game.

    Initially intended to focus PvP on instanced scenarios, the game was, based on player feedback, retrofitted into an open world RvR game. This didn't work in a two-faction game as one faction would continuously dominate on a server.

    The game world was very fragmented with loading screens between zones. This prevented the game world from having that immersive feel many players look for in an MMO.

     

    This...

    I remember the 20v20 rvr battles where I was getting 0.2 fps (thats 1 frame per 5 secs) on my super desktop computer and then crashing to desktop...

    Then we discovered walking inside walls to capture castles...

    Then we discovered to bug/glitch keep commander so the enemy can never take the castle...

    then I uninstalled....

  • Loke666Loke666 Member EpicPosts: 21,441

    Originally posted by youngkg

    The system they used for pvp (RvR) didnt compliment the end game with just 2 sides going back and forth caping then losing then recapping....that kind of system needed 3 realms to be successfull, its just monotonous with only 2.

    To top it off they cut there demographic in half trying to deliver 2 different experiences and failing at both.

    Originally were each race supposed to have one city each and there were talk about being able to backstab the other side if things went too well. The whole keep thing was a last minute solution, the endgame was supposed to be more about sieges and less about small keeps.

    Still, you are right. The lore to actually put greenskins and chaos on the same side is rather suspicious as well. They should have buffed chaos with skavens and greenskins with lizardmen or something and used 3 sides instead, it would have made RvR a lot more fun.

    Adding bloodbowl as a scenario would also have made the game more fun.

  • ZippyZippy Member, Newbie CommonPosts: 1,412

    It did not have a PvE raiding endgame.  Almost all games without a PvE raiding endgame fail.  PvP is simply not enough to keep people playing.

  • xenogiasxenogias Member Posts: 1,926

    It had a few issues and almost every single one of them was enough on its own to cause a person to leave. I'll name the ones off the top of my head that I can think of right now. Please keep in mind that I gave up on them fixing it about 3 or 4 months in. By that point the worlds where pretty dead. After that I can not speak to what they did or didnt do.

    #1 Its launch was terrible. That caused ALOT of people to up and leave never to look back. There where so many bugs at launch it was honestly pretty pathetic. That tied into alot of the other issues I'm about to list.

    #2 Beyond Tier1 the PvP was severly unbalanced. Tier1 was somewhat unbalanced but not so badly that it was unplayable.

    #3 PvE was horrible. Beyond almost everything being buggy and/or broken (I'm lookin at you PQ's and instances).

    #4 Sieges and open world PvP in general was badly done.  What fun is it to capture point trade for the most PvP points (forget what they are called after all this time).

    There is alot more but I will stop there. What I will say is WAR had ALOT of great ideas. Mythic just did a terrible job of implimenting them and fixing bugs. I have to admit playing a melee combat healer was some of the best fun I have had in an MMO.

    The ideas are why I have hopes for GW2. Alot of the same ideas but (if you believe what Anet is saying) much more polished and fleshed out.

  • cagancagan Member UncommonPosts: 445

    Oh yea I completely forgot about the PQ's

    It was all fine till I hit lvl 35 or so. After that every single PQ bugged or glitched. We worked for an hour to summon final boss (last stage) then boss appeared for 1 sec and Pq reset.

    Another time kill 40 sorcerers mission would not advance beyond 37 or so...

    In the final area only 1 pq worked out of 5 or so. We kept doing that 1 working pq and got boring after a while...it was so buggy...

  • ComafComaf Member UncommonPosts: 1,150


    Originally posted by Yamota

    I mean it brought alot of nice features to the MMORPG genre. Such as ability to viably level from level 1 to cap by doing just PvP,  PQ, defensive and offensive targetting, interesting mechanics like that of the BW and Disciple of Khaine.

    Yet it recently announced merging of yet another round of servers to a total of two or three, globally, and probably will shut down completely before the end of the year.

    But why is that? I for one spent 400+ hours playing it so it isn't that bad. Reason I left was because the end-game was/is junk, maybe that is it?

    yup maybe dat wuz it.

     

    In all seriousness, this company and the game it produced at the cost of sacrificing the most unique medieval pvp mmorpg of all time deserves to have its plug pulled.  The developers had absolutely no clue as to how to recreate the Games Workshop classes that Blizzard Entertainment so badly wanted (as Vivindi?) back in the day before they were forced to copy paste and make up their own version of nearly the same concept.  They did it far better, however.

     

    The ui is terrible.  It's clunky to say the lease.

     

    Broken pet pathing (White Lion, anyone?)

     

    The aoe issue was always an issue, but there were other problems, like a Choppa being able to do more damage with a melee swing when he was a throwing range than an archer could with a ranged attack...

     

    Absolutely boring mechanics - especially their rework of a brilliant pvp environment from Dark Age of Camelot - into 1 less realm and of course the eventual stagnation of one side being much larger/better led than the other (this always happens in 2 faction models, however).

     

    On top of this, the developers deluded themselves into thinking they had someting viable (We are going to RvR you in the face!) and came up with a number of silly sales pitches and hat tricks, not to mention the best/worst used car salesman of all time, Paul Barnett - only he really did fail at selling his product.

     

    The list goes on and on.  The point is, and sadly MOST folks have no clue as to what a three realm RvR mmorpg is, or what depth is, or immersion, or housing, or any of the expected things you'd see in an mmorpg before WoW released the McDonald's of mmorpgs in quality and creativity. 

     

    We had a fantastic mmorpg that was in dire need of updating, i.e., Dark Age of Camelot.  But because Mythic was sold to EA, and because EA turned around in september of 2009 and fired a majority of the staff that made Dark Age brilliant (look it up), it became apparent, especially when Marc Jacobs was "let go" after Warhammer's failure became apparent in what was  making EA look like a Stalanistic purge.

     

    Here's a sad quote when you know what happened the following year:

     

    So we were faced with a choice. We could stay independent, and that had some risk. Or we could go with EA, and that also had some risk. What made the choice simple at the end was that EA said we were going to have the opportunity to not only make Warhammer the best game we could make it, but going forward, other games as well. That was pretty tough for us to turn down.   - Marc Jacobs.  http://www.gamespot.com/news/qanda-mythic-boss-mark-jacobs-6152975 

     

    I honestly believe that Marc Jacobs had no idea he was murdering Dark Age of Camelot (which became apparent when in 2009 it was announced that we would finally get a new server, i.e., Origins, and then the plan was pulled with such lack of concern for the player base that no mention was ever made of it again, despite thread after thread begging for its inception).

     

    Dark Age of Camelot was sacrificed so that Warhammer could succeed.  In the end, it failed miserably.  As a recourse, it's a shame that EA continues to refuse to revitalize an epic mmorpg like DAoC.  Now I know how the EQ1 folks, the Shadowbane people, Asheron's Call, Vanguard Saga of Heroes folks, and a few others feel about seeing their beloved title never brought into the 21st century.

     

    It sucks.  And, in an industry where the ENTIRE CONCEPT OF THE MMORPG GENRE IS TO PROVIDE A FUN SOURCE OF ENTERTAINMENT - the developers have [I am a fuzzy bunny and I love to pick flowers] the diminishing intelligent part of the player base in order to appease the majority.  We live in a world where the majority thinks McDonald's is good food - so what does that say for the mmorpg industry?

     

    /flustered. 

     

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  • youngkgyoungkg Member UncommonPosts: 357

    Originally posted by Loke666

    Originally posted by Yamota

    I mean it brought alot of nice features to the MMORPG genre. Such as ability to viably level from level 1 to cap by doing just PvP,  PQ, defensive and offensive targetting, interesting mechanics like that of the BW and Disciple of Khaine.

    Yet it recently announced merging of yet another round of servers to a total of two or three, globally, and probably will shut down completely before the end of the year.

    But why is that? I for one spent 400+ hours playing it so it isn't that bad. Reason I left was because the end-game was/is junk, maybe that is it?

    They focused on the wrong group of players.

    Mythic did have many fans from DaoC and Warhammer have millions of fans, but instead of making a game for either of both of those they tried to take Wows players (and said so in many interviews before launch).

    Wows players love Wow. 

    If Mythic either would have reskinned DaoC with Warhammer on top of it or used mechanics and the world from the Warhammer fantasy RPG things would have gone a lot better.

    For Pete's sake, they did only make Altdorf right and that is just because GW said that they would pull their license if they didn't remake it. Warhammer is one of the best and most detailed worlds ever created and they got one city right, not to mention that they cut out everything adult and most of the nasty humor warhammer have.

    The final nail in the coffin was when they cut out the entire endgame and half the content 6 weeks before launch, stating that it needed a little more polish and would be patched in soon but that never happened.

    A good game must find the right group of players and make a game for them. STO did the same, they tried to make a game for casual MMO players instead of Trekkies which would have given them many faithful players.

    I hope to see this ip again done the right way...not in EA's hands.I believe WAR had a release date before they announced the that the highlighted content would be cut and pasted in when it was ready....The game obviously wasnt ready but EA still forced this thing out 1 year before it was ready imo....

     

    As for THQ's WAR 40k...well im skeptical but who knows...

  • JimmacJimmac Member UncommonPosts: 1,660

    Why did war fail? Because it was not fun. It was unfun. Why was it unfun? The combat abilities were simplistic and bland. The PVE was ultra linear. WAR was missing the gameplay mechanics from DAOC that allowed for awesome PVP strategy and tactics. The classes were kind of neat (like the dwarf with guns and grenades), but they simply were not fun to play in PVP. Whereas DAOC was like live action chess, WAR was like football with guns, minus any fun associated with football or guns.

  • MmocountMmocount Member Posts: 194

    Originally posted by youngkg

    I hope to see this ip again done the right way...not in EA's hands.I believe WAR had a release date before they announced the that the highlighted content would be cut and pasted in when it was ready....The game obviously wasnt ready but EA still forced this thing out 1 year before it was ready imo....

     

    As for THQ's WAR 40k...well im skeptical but who knows...

    The game had already been delayed and funded for a whole year extra beyond the original release date and from day 1 of the delay Mythic was saying the game was practically done, they just wanted to 'polish' it. Considering how it still ended up in the end, you can't really blame EA for shoving it out the door eventually. Who's to say how much longer it would've take them to do it right.

  • cagancagan Member UncommonPosts: 445

    I did preorder WAr and didnt cancel when they announced the 6 capitals were reduced to 2 and the other 4 will be released shortly after the game comes out.

    I am still waiting....

  • ScalebaneScalebane Member UncommonPosts: 1,883

    This is why companies should never ever ever ever ever get involved with EA the destroyer of game companies.

    they don't give a crap about your small company they just bought out, they just want the cash and if you don't deliver you get ripped to shreds.

    when will these companies learn to never sign up with the devil EA?  i dunno but they all have paid the price, hopefully bioware isn't next...

    i know these companies need money but i'd rather die then take a cent from EA.  

    Activision is just as bad anymore but lucky for blizz they don't have to answer to activision at all :)

    image

    "The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
    - Lewis Thomas

  • SkuzSkuz Member UncommonPosts: 1,018

    Topic Necromancy, thought this dead horse had already been beaten to life & death a few times already.

  • ComafComaf Member UncommonPosts: 1,150

    Originally posted by Jimmac

    Why did war fail? Because it was not fun. It was unfun. Why was it unfun? The combat abilities were simplistic and bland. The PVE was ultra linear. WAR was missing the gameplay mechanics from DAOC that allowed for awesome PVP strategy and tactics. The classes were kind of neat (like the dwarf with guns and grenades), but they simply were not fun to play in PVP. Whereas DAOC was like live action chess, WAR was like football with guns, minus any fun associated with football or guns.

    As always, someone always says it better than I.  Very nicely put!

     

    DAOC = Live Action Chess.  Absolutely!

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  • HrothaHrotha Member UncommonPosts: 821

    No idea why WAR failed exactly. I had a semi-good time. Played it right from the start and it was really something for 1-2months I enjoyed playing. I even came back twice. The cosmetic items really were interesting, along with the RvR. The character design was also very good imho (speaking of orcs and goblins). PvE on top of that, especially the instances were awesome designed! Really!

    PvP lacked heavily of balancing at some points. But I cant tell you people why the sub-numbers dropped. At some point I quit this game, because it lacked of content. There was literally nothing frustrating which gave you a negative reason to quit.

    So the conclusion might be: No expansion release. No interesting addons. As far as I remember it was as interesting as WoW in its vanilla state. But they somehow didnt put more effort in it to continue what they had developed.

    Correct me if I'm wrong.

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