I was following this game for a while before it came out and there was a dead give away that the team was NOT about quality but where rushing the game out.It had to do with crafting,they started talking about a great crafting system,then as time went by they started detracting from it until it was like they didn't care about it at all.When i see a dev take the root of purposely cutting corners just to get a game out,i lose interest.
There was yet another important factor.I was looking forward to the videos they were putting out but in all of them they acted like children,i am not talking about funny,just immature,it really turned me off.
Yet another problem,if you are going to sell your game as a predominant PVP game RvR,you had better put a LOT more effort into it than just two factions.That is the LOWEST amount of effort you could possibly put in a RVR game.It points right back to point 1,rush the game out,just to get a game out.I can spot cheap lazy designs a mile away,they are right in front of our eyes to see.
I look for developers that are showing me they put some heart and soul into their game,i don't want to see assembly line game development,wit hsystems that could take less than a few hours to design.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
WAR was awesomely fun, at the time, in the early game at launch. So many people, all the PQs and RvR lakes and scenarios popping, great combat mechanics...
Just didn't have enough polish, and once you got high enough level the lack of polish and even completeness of content was SEVERLY lacking.
I didn't start playing WAR until a year or so after launch, but I did find it great fun and played it for a year or so.
Lack of polish was a serious issue. I was stunned that I could get stuck on what were very little more than pebbles and fall to my death from blades of grass. I mean the bugs were just... Wow. Oh, and the LoD? I know it doesn't matter to gameplay per se, but when any character more than a few yards from you turns into a weird repeating four frame run animation, it doesn't help things. And then there were the imbalances. While perfect balance is impossible to achieve, and probably not even really desirable, the imbalances were often pretty lol. Lastly, much of the PvE was flat broken, but to be honest no one I knew cared -- if you wanted PvE, WAR wasn't really going to be very satisfying.
Personally I didn't like the SCs past teir one or so, they were good for early leveling but quickly turned into farmville -- either farm or be farmed. Seperating organized groups from PuGs and having T4 class by RR as well as level would have helped, IMHO. Mostly they just weren't my thing, though, I wouldn't say they were a design mistake, much as I would have preferred the focus be on the lakes, nor would I say they were a good inclusion.
In any event, even with all the issues -- and they were legion -- the game was great fun... For a while. In the end I think the problem is that PvP isn't the "endless content" people try and pretend it to be. Very quickly you learn to assess enemies, both individually and groups, and pretty much know how things are going to go -- granted, the real fun is in defying those expectations, but that invariably ends up being the exception rather than the rule. There's only so many times you can take a keep, flip a zone, or what have you, and it's even harder to update and add to that than PvE because of the inherent need for things to remain 'fair -- have one side's keep even two microns close to their spawn point and you'll get eaten alive. Having all the capitals might have helped with longivity some, but in the end the result would have been the same. Personally I don't buy that three factions would have made squat worth of difference (human nature is not for the two weak factions to gang up on the strong, it's for the two weak factions to vie for favor with the strong), and I keep wondering how many times it has to fail (I'm looking at you, TSW and GW2, though no doubt those don't count -- they never do when things go south for PvP) before that particular myth dies a well deserved death.
As for whether or not Jacobs deserves credit or blame for WAR, if you're the one in charge both go with the territory and if you can't accept that you have no business being in that position.
I played War for a year from launch and had soem great times but eventually I got tired of awful patches,extreme class balance swings and the broken end game(fortress and city invasions,RvR lakes in general were a lot of fun).Add to that an awful engine and no real sense of direction from the devs and most of my guild and myself quit at the same time.
On a side n9ot I can't believe the way the CU fanbois jumped all over this thread,I beleive we they have now taken the crown from GW2 fans as the most over sensitive and intolerant fans on these forums lol.
Their revisionist history of this game and Mark Jacobs remidns me of this forums reaction to old Smedley....100% villified until Smedley mentioned the word Sandbox and suddenly with that oen word people were saying he wasn't so bad etc.Now I don't hold Mark Jacobs solely responsible for what happend to War but he does command a large share of it.
On a side n9ot I can't believe the way the CU fanbois jumped all over this thread,I beleive we they have now taken the crown from GW2 fans as the most over sensitive and intolerant fans on these forums lol.
I loved this game when I first started, the tier one battlegrounds were amazingly fun. The I got to tier two and started to realize some classes were kinda OP. Got to tier three and realized the lack of balance sucked and pvp had lost its flavor. Tried making some new toons and playing in tier one for a while but finally just stopped playing. If they could have kept the magic of tier one though more of the game, i would have played forever.
"Sean (Murray) saying MP will be in the game is not remotely close to evidence that at the point of purchase people thought there was MP in the game." - SEANMCAD
I actually enjoyed WAR for close to 6 months. I even had a lot of fun with it as it definitely had its upsides. Ultimately it had some major flaws that prevented me from staying with it in the really long term. Here's my take on some of the more major things that went wrong with WAR, in no particular order:
1. The world PvP was large-scale warfare, but they were too ambitious with the average Joe's computer power vs. the game's graphics rendered by the engine. I had to turn graphics down very low to the point where it wasn't very enjoyable to watch.
2. Gameplay wasn't always as fluid as one would wish. Collision detection glitched, animations would play when you made an attack even if you couldn't do the attack at the time. There were plenty of these. The game didn't come across as very polished.
3. Instanced scenarios took a lot of people away from PvP, and while some scenarios were a lot of fun, others were quite a bore.
4. World PvP was poorly thought out. You got rewarded for taking keeps, but not for holding them. People quickly started keep trading.
5. Too many characters with knockbacks and other types of CC made combat messy.
6. The world felt fragmented with its small areas separated by load screens. This made the MMO world feel small and not like a world.
7. The typical WoW-like level grind separated players across various tiers, making it difficult to enjoy the vast majority of the otherwise innovative Public Quests as wells as the open PvP zones. You were then forced to level up through PvP scenarios or a WoW-styled PvE leveling grind.
8. The tactics system was interesting, but overall I felt the character build system wasn't as engaging as it could've been.
9. The lack of a 3rd faction destroyed the world PvP as the side with the biggest RvR groups continually dominated, also causing people from the opposite faction to switch sides, making the matter worse.
10. The original concept of the 3 different fronts (Chaos vs Empire, High Elf vs Dark Elf and Greenskins vs Dwarfs) wasn't implemented.
It seems CU is addresses some of the issues WAR suffered from. Some of the real important ones, too. Time will tell if MJ avoids all of the mentioned pitfalls and avoid making too many new ones. 1, 3, 4, 7, 9 and 10 at the very least shouldn't be an issue for CU.
From what I played at launch and what I've just played now, they game seem a little better.
I'm curious from this community, do think it was Mark Jacobs failure as lead designer that crumbled the game ?
Even as lead designer he still took orders from someone else over at EA/Mythic even if it strayed from his vision, he did not get final say. The suits have all the power.
In my opinion you are just trying to get a bunch of doomsayers to agree and flood these boards with yet another obsured belief.
My wise advice, stop dealing in "What if's" and only deal in absolutes.
The suits traditionally do not hold "all the power". A lot is left up to the leads as they tend to know more about what is actually going on than anything. While I agree that Dren is taking this a bit overboard, this is indeed a fair question. Based on what I have seen I would put most of War's problems on Mj's head since at worst he is the one who holds all of the responsibility as lead.
The leads do more facilitation than coming up with all the ideas and implementing them. That is a team of people. As a lead you are also pressured by suits more so as well.
Suits: So.... MJ.... when will the PvP be done that is the last component... when can we get this out the door?
MJ: Well I have this great idea on how PvP should work, but, it will delay the game by an extra 3 months.
Suits: That is not going to work whatelse you got?
MJ: Well I got the standard PvP that we discussed and the team came up with. We can have that ready in 3 weeks.
That is not generally how its handled. While the suits will often set deadlines, and make demands for certain kinds of features its rarely that cut and dried, and they tend not to move the goal posts too much. That is sort of the leads job, setting the overall vision and keeping it on track. If the game sucks its because he screwed up somewhere.
Lol, ain't nobody got time for you... I am done. For the record I don't think it is that cut and dry but I didn't feel like writing a whole scripted story. I felt any pleeb could grasp the point I was trying to make.
I don't think Greg Zeschuk agrees with your point.
"No, I definitely reject it. And I can explain it too. The best analogy I use, in a positive way, is EA gives you enough rope to hang yourself. It was really interesting because we really made all the choices we wanted to make ourselves; these are all things we wanted to try. And that's something to remember - while we were independent we didn't have quite the resources we had as part of EA, and then we got to EA and it was like "wow we can do all this stuff." We had to be really thoughtful about what we wanted to focus on.
I remember this really distinct moment where - it was probably five or six months - we were just starting to wrap our head around how we worked with the company. And it took months for this formal period of joining EA, and learning how everything works, and when the initiation was done, we were sitting around asking how do we do stuff. It dawned on us, you just do it. That was the biggest revelation, that rope that EA gives you; they don't second-guess you, they don't say you shouldn't do that. We had complete creative control over a lot of it; some fans didn't like some of it and some of it was experimental, quite frankly.
The one caveat is at the end of the day for any company you have to run a profit, so you have to be thinking of things that actually make you profitable. So while you're taking all these creative risks in trying crazy stuff you almost have to simultaneously focus on the bottom line. The top line is not enough. In some ways, being independent I would say we had to be more conservative - being part of a big company, you could be more aggressive and try stuff. I think that's something people [struggle with] when they join EA; they do too much or they do too little."
Don't forget that when Warhammer launched, it had a LOT of empty servers. And i'm not talking about servers being filled up the first day or two then people leave, i'm talking about empty servers from the start that never filled up. Mythic assumed they were going to get a lot more players then they actually did. AND they assumed they were going to hold on to those players a lot longer then they actually did. They assumed they were going to be the next WoW in terms of popularity but their bad planning and bad coding ultimately brought their demise.
The Tier System split the game and the player base up even though bolstering was available and could have mitigated the need to do such a thing.
Scenarios vied with RvR (presumably the core of the game) and further split the player population up.
Constant flipping and laughable city seiges completely invalidated the value of victory and defeat in RvR.
Engine performance in large battles like Forts and later systems that were put in place to counter such problems: caps.
Only 2 player factions, didn't even make sense from a lore stand point. (Should have been 6 factions actually, or at the least, 3 opposing.)
Public Quests didn't ruin the game, but they didn't add much either, PvE was very weak in WAR.
the world in warhammer isnt instanced at all, its a zoned world just like wow. Only wow has 4 large zones and war has 16 medium sized zones. they dont split it off into separate instances like AOC, TSW, swtor etc..
the world in warhammer isnt instanced at all, its a zoned world just like wow. Only wow has 4 large zones and war has 16 medium sized zones. they dont split it off into separate instances like AOC, TSW, swtor etc..
Actually, you can see the portals, the single points of entry into the next zone, very unlike in WoW where you can enter a zone by crossing from anywhere accessible.
Those who tread with ill intent Beneath our sacred firmament, Whether of Hammer or of Tree, Albion's might shall strike at thee!
the world in warhammer isnt instanced at all, its a zoned world just like wow. Only wow has 4 large zones and war has 16 medium sized zones. they dont split it off into separate instances like AOC, TSW, swtor etc..
Actually, you can see the portals, the single points of entry into the next zone, very unlike in WoW where you can enter a zone by crossing from anywhere accessible.
I don't know why people hold this against Barnett. He was Mythic's PR guy for WAR, that was his job. He was probably the only one who actually DID his job right in that entire mess of a development process. Not his fault the end result didn't deliver.
Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.
With there already being hundreds of autopsies on WAR already, why is there a need for yet another (Yes even with CU being in development).
I'm 100% certain no further enlightment can be gained by the 700th exhumation, hell there probably isn't a single molecule that hasn't been prodded & tested by now, this thread seems like vanity, the starter truly belives he has something new to offer?
I played this for years, and a rabid GW fan as well (and DAoC for seven years).
It as good, and had some lovely moments; however ...
Two realms = fails
The three pairings, nice idea, but didn't work - give that this had been tried with multiple start points in DAoC and abaddoned in later versions, the Chaos gods only know why they went back to this design.
Scenarios killed it to a certain extent - but the answer was not getting rid of scenarios, but making Open RvR better. T1 RvR lakes always had actions - because they were fun, T2 T2 and T4 were not and hence did not attract the same level of decication. Again DAoC battle ground provided the same picture with the Lv24 Battleground being very popular. Again, simple rule - make it fun.
End PvP city sacking - I only did this once when the actual number of players was capped (much later in the design). It was epic, triggering the big bosses to come and fight on your side was good. I think the main problem with city sacking was that it very very rough to start with and by the time they sorted it, it has just such a bad reputation - rule one, don't release anything until it works, make it a beta part of the game until you are happy it has been sorted.
For me, the graphics let it down; its not about having the most poligons, its about good looks. DAoC look good, for all its age; WAR went down the Warcraft over the top cartoony look, and WAR was meant to be grim.
Finally, WAR was missing something (and it pains me to say it). Whatever that is, a soul, a loved and treasured game, genius, I don't know. DAoC had it, WAR, LoTR, and Warcraft were close but not close enough.
So, for CU.
Rule 1: More than two realms. Tick
Rule 2: Good graphics. Well the concept art is awesome, hopefully tick.
Rule 3: A fun game with a soul. DAoC had it, WAR just missed the mark - fingers crossed as there's nothing else out that that me and missus want to play.
I don't think Greg Zeschuk agrees with your point.
"No, I definitely reject it. And I can explain it too. The best analogy I use, in a positive way, is EA gives you enough rope to hang yourself. It was really interesting because we really made all the choices we wanted to make ourselves; these are all things we wanted to try. And that's something to remember - while we were independent we didn't have quite the resources we had as part of EA, and then we got to EA and it was like "wow we can do all this stuff." We had to be really thoughtful about what we wanted to focus on.
I remember this really distinct moment where - it was probably five or six months - we were just starting to wrap our head around how we worked with the company. And it took months for this formal period of joining EA, and learning how everything works, and when the initiation was done, we were sitting around asking how do we do stuff. It dawned on us, you just do it. That was the biggest revelation, that rope that EA gives you; they don't second-guess you, they don't say you shouldn't do that. We had complete creative control over a lot of it; some fans didn't like some of it and some of it was experimental, quite frankly.
The one caveat is at the end of the day for any company you have to run a profit, so you have to be thinking of things that actually make you profitable. So while you're taking all these creative risks in trying crazy stuff you almost have to simultaneously focus on the bottom line. The top line is not enough. In some ways, being independent I would say we had to be more conservative - being part of a big company, you could be more aggressive and try stuff. I think that's something people [struggle with] when they join EA; they do too much or they do too little."
Don't forget that when Warhammer launched, it had a LOT of empty servers. And i'm not talking about servers being filled up the first day or two then people leave, i'm talking about empty servers from the start that never filled up. Mythic assumed they were going to get a lot more players then they actually did. AND they assumed they were going to hold on to those players a lot longer then they actually did. They assumed they were going to be the next WoW in terms of popularity but their bad planning and bad coding ultimately brought their demise.
Good read, thanks. Basically, they blew it. Fair enough.
There is NO miracle patch.
95% of what you see in beta won't change by launch.
Hope is not a stategy. ______________________________ "This kind of topic is like one of those little cartoon boxes held up by a stick on a string, with a piece of meat under it. In other words, bait."
Originally posted by ShakyMo Then just about every mmo on the planet is instanced with your terminology.
Only the cookie cutter garbage we get nowadays... Asheron's call, from 1999, had a full open world 100x the size of any of the current games, without any need for zoning to explore it.
Comments
I was following this game for a while before it came out and there was a dead give away that the team was NOT about quality but where rushing the game out.It had to do with crafting,they started talking about a great crafting system,then as time went by they started detracting from it until it was like they didn't care about it at all.When i see a dev take the root of purposely cutting corners just to get a game out,i lose interest.
There was yet another important factor.I was looking forward to the videos they were putting out but in all of them they acted like children,i am not talking about funny,just immature,it really turned me off.
Yet another problem,if you are going to sell your game as a predominant PVP game RvR,you had better put a LOT more effort into it than just two factions.That is the LOWEST amount of effort you could possibly put in a RVR game.It points right back to point 1,rush the game out,just to get a game out.I can spot cheap lazy designs a mile away,they are right in front of our eyes to see.
I look for developers that are showing me they put some heart and soul into their game,i don't want to see assembly line game development,wit hsystems that could take less than a few hours to design.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
2 Factions.
Poor production quality.
Overhype thanks to Paul Barnett.
Those are the 2 things that wen't wrong IMO.
SUP
I didn't start playing WAR until a year or so after launch, but I did find it great fun and played it for a year or so.
Lack of polish was a serious issue. I was stunned that I could get stuck on what were very little more than pebbles and fall to my death from blades of grass. I mean the bugs were just... Wow. Oh, and the LoD? I know it doesn't matter to gameplay per se, but when any character more than a few yards from you turns into a weird repeating four frame run animation, it doesn't help things. And then there were the imbalances. While perfect balance is impossible to achieve, and probably not even really desirable, the imbalances were often pretty lol. Lastly, much of the PvE was flat broken, but to be honest no one I knew cared -- if you wanted PvE, WAR wasn't really going to be very satisfying.
Personally I didn't like the SCs past teir one or so, they were good for early leveling but quickly turned into farmville -- either farm or be farmed. Seperating organized groups from PuGs and having T4 class by RR as well as level would have helped, IMHO. Mostly they just weren't my thing, though, I wouldn't say they were a design mistake, much as I would have preferred the focus be on the lakes, nor would I say they were a good inclusion.
In any event, even with all the issues -- and they were legion -- the game was great fun... For a while. In the end I think the problem is that PvP isn't the "endless content" people try and pretend it to be. Very quickly you learn to assess enemies, both individually and groups, and pretty much know how things are going to go -- granted, the real fun is in defying those expectations, but that invariably ends up being the exception rather than the rule. There's only so many times you can take a keep, flip a zone, or what have you, and it's even harder to update and add to that than PvE because of the inherent need for things to remain 'fair -- have one side's keep even two microns close to their spawn point and you'll get eaten alive. Having all the capitals might have helped with longivity some, but in the end the result would have been the same. Personally I don't buy that three factions would have made squat worth of difference (human nature is not for the two weak factions to gang up on the strong, it's for the two weak factions to vie for favor with the strong), and I keep wondering how many times it has to fail (I'm looking at you, TSW and GW2, though no doubt those don't count -- they never do when things go south for PvP) before that particular myth dies a well deserved death.
As for whether or not Jacobs deserves credit or blame for WAR, if you're the one in charge both go with the territory and if you can't accept that you have no business being in that position.
^
I played War for a year from launch and had soem great times but eventually I got tired of awful patches,extreme class balance swings and the broken end game(fortress and city invasions,RvR lakes in general were a lot of fun).Add to that an awful engine and no real sense of direction from the devs and most of my guild and myself quit at the same time.
On a side n9ot I can't believe the way the CU fanbois jumped all over this thread,I beleive we they have now taken the crown from GW2 fans as the most over sensitive and intolerant fans on these forums lol.
Their revisionist history of this game and Mark Jacobs remidns me of this forums reaction to old Smedley....100% villified until Smedley mentioned the word Sandbox and suddenly with that oen word people were saying he wasn't so bad etc.Now I don't hold Mark Jacobs solely responsible for what happend to War but he does command a large share of it.
Same folks, different precious.
Mostly, anyway.
I actually enjoyed WAR for close to 6 months. I even had a lot of fun with it as it definitely had its upsides. Ultimately it had some major flaws that prevented me from staying with it in the really long term. Here's my take on some of the more major things that went wrong with WAR, in no particular order:
1. The world PvP was large-scale warfare, but they were too ambitious with the average Joe's computer power vs. the game's graphics rendered by the engine. I had to turn graphics down very low to the point where it wasn't very enjoyable to watch.
2. Gameplay wasn't always as fluid as one would wish. Collision detection glitched, animations would play when you made an attack even if you couldn't do the attack at the time. There were plenty of these. The game didn't come across as very polished.
3. Instanced scenarios took a lot of people away from PvP, and while some scenarios were a lot of fun, others were quite a bore.
4. World PvP was poorly thought out. You got rewarded for taking keeps, but not for holding them. People quickly started keep trading.
5. Too many characters with knockbacks and other types of CC made combat messy.
6. The world felt fragmented with its small areas separated by load screens. This made the MMO world feel small and not like a world.
7. The typical WoW-like level grind separated players across various tiers, making it difficult to enjoy the vast majority of the otherwise innovative Public Quests as wells as the open PvP zones. You were then forced to level up through PvP scenarios or a WoW-styled PvE leveling grind.
8. The tactics system was interesting, but overall I felt the character build system wasn't as engaging as it could've been.
9. The lack of a 3rd faction destroyed the world PvP as the side with the biggest RvR groups continually dominated, also causing people from the opposite faction to switch sides, making the matter worse.
10. The original concept of the 3 different fronts (Chaos vs Empire, High Elf vs Dark Elf and Greenskins vs Dwarfs) wasn't implemented.
It seems CU is addresses some of the issues WAR suffered from. Some of the real important ones, too. Time will tell if MJ avoids all of the mentioned pitfalls and avoid making too many new ones. 1, 3, 4, 7, 9 and 10 at the very least shouldn't be an issue for CU.
I don't think Greg Zeschuk agrees with your point.
"No, I definitely reject it. And I can explain it too. The best analogy I use, in a positive way, is EA gives you enough rope to hang yourself. It was really interesting because we really made all the choices we wanted to make ourselves; these are all things we wanted to try. And that's something to remember - while we were independent we didn't have quite the resources we had as part of EA, and then we got to EA and it was like "wow we can do all this stuff." We had to be really thoughtful about what we wanted to focus on.
I remember this really distinct moment where - it was probably five or six months - we were just starting to wrap our head around how we worked with the company. And it took months for this formal period of joining EA, and learning how everything works, and when the initiation was done, we were sitting around asking how do we do stuff. It dawned on us, you just do it. That was the biggest revelation, that rope that EA gives you; they don't second-guess you, they don't say you shouldn't do that. We had complete creative control over a lot of it; some fans didn't like some of it and some of it was experimental, quite frankly.
The one caveat is at the end of the day for any company you have to run a profit, so you have to be thinking of things that actually make you profitable. So while you're taking all these creative risks in trying crazy stuff you almost have to simultaneously focus on the bottom line. The top line is not enough. In some ways, being independent I would say we had to be more conservative - being part of a big company, you could be more aggressive and try stuff. I think that's something people [struggle with] when they join EA; they do too much or they do too little."
Interview can be found here
Don't forget that when Warhammer launched, it had a LOT of empty servers. And i'm not talking about servers being filled up the first day or two then people leave, i'm talking about empty servers from the start that never filled up. Mythic assumed they were going to get a lot more players then they actually did. AND they assumed they were going to hold on to those players a lot longer then they actually did. They assumed they were going to be the next WoW in terms of popularity but their bad planning and bad coding ultimately brought their demise.
Marc Jacobs wasnt the project lead, Jeff Hickman was (hes now doing a "sterling" job with swtor)
what went wrong
1 EA
2 see 1
WAR: what went wrong?
Those who tread with ill intent
Beneath our sacred firmament,
Whether of Hammer or of Tree,
Albion's might shall strike at thee!
the world in warhammer isnt instanced at all, its a zoned world just like wow. Only wow has 4 large zones and war has 16 medium sized zones. they dont split it off into separate instances like AOC, TSW, swtor etc..
Actually, you can see the portals, the single points of entry into the next zone, very unlike in WoW where you can enter a zone by crossing from anywhere accessible.
Those who tread with ill intent
Beneath our sacred firmament,
Whether of Hammer or of Tree,
Albion's might shall strike at thee!
They're still not instanced.
I don't know why people hold this against Barnett. He was Mythic's PR guy for WAR, that was his job. He was probably the only one who actually DID his job right in that entire mess of a development process. Not his fault the end result didn't deliver.
WAR was launched unfinished.
People raged and left because it was unfinished.
The game was fixed & updated.
But F2P conversion never came.
Thus the game failed.
With there already being hundreds of autopsies on WAR already, why is there a need for yet another (Yes even with CU being in development).
I'm 100% certain no further enlightment can be gained by the 700th exhumation, hell there probably isn't a single molecule that hasn't been prodded & tested by now, this thread seems like vanity, the starter truly belives he has something new to offer?
I played this for years, and a rabid GW fan as well (and DAoC for seven years).
It as good, and had some lovely moments; however ...
Two realms = fails
The three pairings, nice idea, but didn't work - give that this had been tried with multiple start points in DAoC and abaddoned in later versions, the Chaos gods only know why they went back to this design.
Scenarios killed it to a certain extent - but the answer was not getting rid of scenarios, but making Open RvR better. T1 RvR lakes always had actions - because they were fun, T2 T2 and T4 were not and hence did not attract the same level of decication. Again DAoC battle ground provided the same picture with the Lv24 Battleground being very popular. Again, simple rule - make it fun.
End PvP city sacking - I only did this once when the actual number of players was capped (much later in the design). It was epic, triggering the big bosses to come and fight on your side was good. I think the main problem with city sacking was that it very very rough to start with and by the time they sorted it, it has just such a bad reputation - rule one, don't release anything until it works, make it a beta part of the game until you are happy it has been sorted.
For me, the graphics let it down; its not about having the most poligons, its about good looks. DAoC look good, for all its age; WAR went down the Warcraft over the top cartoony look, and WAR was meant to be grim.
Finally, WAR was missing something (and it pains me to say it). Whatever that is, a soul, a loved and treasured game, genius, I don't know. DAoC had it, WAR, LoTR, and Warcraft were close but not close enough.
So, for CU.
Rule 1: More than two realms. Tick
Rule 2: Good graphics. Well the concept art is awesome, hopefully tick.
Rule 3: A fun game with a soul. DAoC had it, WAR just missed the mark - fingers crossed as there's nothing else out that that me and missus want to play.
Let's try to keep this simple: if a player has to go through a portal to enter the next zone, it's instanced and NOT A OPEN world design.
Those who tread with ill intent
Beneath our sacred firmament,
Whether of Hammer or of Tree,
Albion's might shall strike at thee!
collectors edition still sitting in closet
1. 2 factions only....server pop. balance determined who won/lost
2. class balance....that bright wizard rain of fire shit went on for way to long.
3. to few updates especially on the pve side.
4. the whole "sacking the city" at the end didn't nearly feel as awesome or fulfilling as that british guy made it sound like it would be ;p
Good read, thanks. Basically, they blew it. Fair enough.
There is NO miracle patch.
95% of what you see in beta won't change by launch.
Hope is not a stategy.
______________________________
"This kind of topic is like one of those little cartoon boxes held up by a stick on a string, with a piece of meat under it. In other words, bait."
Only the cookie cutter garbage we get nowadays... Asheron's call, from 1999, had a full open world 100x the size of any of the current games, without any need for zoning to explore it.