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General: Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Was No Failure
Drew
Member Posts: 434
The Devil's Advocate has returned and in this week's installment, MMORPG.com's own Drew Wood is slipping on the horns and cloven hooves to take on an argument that's been echoed for the last three years: Warhammer Online's level of success. See what Drew has to say about Warhammer and dive in to let us know what you think.
Working under that logic, the game had a good financial turnaround. The gameplay was solid but a little buggy, though no more buggy than many games that have launched since. The RvR was near-revolutionary and brought some exciting changes to the industry. Finally, the IP was done as much justice as could have been done for a video game.
Read more of Drew Wood's The Devil's Advocate: Warhammer Online Was No Failure.
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Comments
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Look how many players are left, look how many players are playing much older titles......
This must be some kind of joke, saying WAR wasnt a failure, its probably the biggest failure of the MMO world when you think about the size of the IP.
I played it for a quite a bit myself, but this article is so out of touch with reality.
For me it was a failure. (VARNING: this is an opinion.)
WAR was no good in the end open world pvp only works with 3 factions as they are the player balance to population issues. Mythic should have learnt from what was a success with DAOC and one of the critical factors is a the 3rd faction. By leaving it out they killed the game before it started. What has happened to mmorpg.com
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The game had so many good ideas, executed so poorly. The main reason the game failed was you can't have RvR with 2 factions. It's impossible. I don't know what they were thinking even trying it. A DAoC style Warhammer game would've made billions. All the PvP crowd would've been lapping it up like a dog with anti-freeze. It really hurts my heart to see my two favorite things, Warhammer and Mythic fail so horribly.
Drew you seem to like to point at number of classes, races, reviews and things of that nature to support your claim that Warhammer was a success. It seems that your biggest supporting bullet point is some claim that the game was "profitable" at release. A claim which really has never existed.
If you want to play with numbers try looking at some that actually point to the level of success of a game.
1 CEO "departed" from the company he started
Nearly 100 game servers closed, leaving 6?
Several rounds of massive employee layoffs
1 company dissolved and absorbed into another
Sure warhammer has survived and most certainly EA has cut the costs of running the game so that it is at least generating a positive income, but only by the absolute lowest form standards could the be defined as "success".
When companies invest the amounts of money and resources into a company like Mythic, do you think they are hoping to receive a game that performs as Warhammer did? Do you think they consider Warhammer a success?
I'm certain they don't.
No.
And I say that as a current active subscriber. I still play WAR and I like it.
If WAR had been based on a different IP, we would consider it a success. But it was based on one of the best fantasy IPs, and to not be more successful, is somewhat of a failure; though I think people that consider it an epic failure are mistaken and probably miss the previous point.
"Never met a pack of humans that were any different. Look at the idiots that get elected every couple of years. You really consider those guys more mature than us? The only difference between us and them is, when they gank some noobs and take their stuff, the noobs actually die." - Madimorga
WAR didn't really use its IP that well I feel. Not as well as SWG or WoW did, and certainly not as SWTOR will. But with that said it was still a fairly solid MMO, I ruined the game for myself after trying to play with a group of friends and everyone picking different servers and sides due to queue times on specific servers. I think if they had something similar to Rift's server transfer system at release I would still be playing. There were some balance issues, I hardly saw any bugs, and the leveling through the BGs was tons of fun.
"They essentially want to say 'Correlation proves Causation' when it's just not true." - Sovrath
to try to argue that WAR wasn't a failure is..... leaving me puzzled.
The potential in the IP , the expectation from a huge fanbase , and the makers of DaOC. If you have these 3 ingrediens fresh today nothing short of dominating the mmo scene (besides wow) should be considered a succes
IF you take SWTOR you have an IP with a potential in that leaqe, a fanbase that huge and Bioware as makers. If that turn out to have a WAR like first year, it can't be called anything but a failure.
sry but their is no case to be made for WAR that justify changing that view. War failed huge. End of story
Warhammer IP was raped by the fail game.
I have been in Beta since the very start of it and i can tell you one thing: Devs pissed on beta testers. They completely ignored what we said and they "always knew better wat players like". They were dismissive and ignorant to say the least. They deserved it but the IP did not.
Seriously ima warhammer IP freak i love the books figures etc [even tho i stick to books only] and i had hoped for good warhammer mmo.
Damn, if only Blizzard made Warhammer... I wouldn't mind WoW-like WAR, not at all.
ROFL to call war hammer not a failure is funny at best. IHMO its not a success either.
a game focussed on rvr with no one around in tier 2,3,4 is a fail to me capturing a whole map alone without seeing 1 enemy or ally is a failure to me.
It's a bit of a tangled discussion, though the Devil's Advocate has a point or 2 as well.
1. Financial Success: If it did better than break-even at least it's not a disaster, but neither was it the WoW-killer and sub goose that everyone hoped who made it and where the 1 month's subs looked to be heading but never did.
Pass / Fail
2. Game Design: WAR was imo a combination of a core technology/design of DAOC and a merge with some WoW like features and decisions. How did that fair? Not as polished as WoW, lots of wasted content and changes during development and biggest failure not translating 3 FACTION RVR from DAOC to WAR instead going for the WoW 2-Faction model for PvE.
Pass / Fail
3. IP: The problem with WAR also was using the IP as a skin for the above technology, cherry-picking some of the most iconic classes from Warhammer and stuffing them into 2 factions instead of potentially multfactions. The Homes of the races were disparate and flying between zones was a terrible was to split the population up (eventually new starter experience was used). The capitals were pretty lame for the IP esp. the Destro capital in the Chaos Wastes imo. Some sub-quests brought the IP alive really well eg Sewers and Tzcheech in the Imperial City etc. But with the richness to choose from and the lack of some ppl's favorite playable races eg Skaven... not good enough.
Pass / Fail
4. Gameplay: There was some really fun gameplay in WAR from Keep Sieges, general RvR when the populations were brimming with players and excellent scenarios. Public Quests and some fo the quest stories were well realized too. The Classes were fun and inventive eg Dwarf Engineer and the Iron Breaker's Grudge mechanic etc.
Pass / Fail
5. Production Values: I liked the art style of the Warhammer world and the artists did a fine job realizing it imo. The music was good and the spell effects were good to etc as was the range of NPC's and Environments.
Pass / Fail
IMO: Overall the biggest disaster was deviating too far away from what Mythic's expertise and experience was with DAOC and going for
Factions, possibly more races could have been added later as dictated by the players feed-back...
Conclusion: 2* out of 5*
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014633/Classic-Game-Postmortem
WAR was supposed to be a serious competitor to WoW, so to call it a success would mean that it equalled or better this expectation, which of course it did not.
As pointed out it should have had 3 factions and Mythic should have known this, GOA's management of the game was very bad in the EU as well, the netwrok code makes the game very laggy which is a major problem even now.
Having said all that I am a current subscriber and enjoy the game play the graphics and the classes very much, it is a crying shame that this game failed.
I wish that EA/Bioware/Mythic could do something/anything to turn this game around, re-release it with an expansion that includes a brand new faction for example. The MMO genre would be better off for it...................
I periodically suggest (harass?) on the official forums by posting a new thread or response asking for a third class.
"Never met a pack of humans that were any different. Look at the idiots that get elected every couple of years. You really consider those guys more mature than us? The only difference between us and them is, when they gank some noobs and take their stuff, the noobs actually die." - Madimorga
imho WAR never failed at all......it's still one of the better games around (altough i aint playing it myself anymore).
I cant think of a personal Top 10 where war would not have its place for me.
The only thing they did wrong was the 2 faction rvr instead of 3 factions.
just mho
I don't think the Devs ignored the Beta testers. I was in Beta also. they made a lot of changes in beta. What utterly shocked me was how far their initial design missed the mark. Remember, initially there was going to be no PvP except for the scenarios and a capital city seige....until the beta testers pretty much threatened death on the devs....then they added in siege warfare.
I think the Mythic devs utterly lost their minds before they designed WAR. If it wasn't for the beta testers, it would have failed even harder. Even now, the only part of the game people praise is the RvR...and that would not have existed if the Beta testers hadn't screamed for it.
In the end, all this talk about Subscribers, Money and Graphs of Success..is Bull to us players.
What I care aboout is if the game gives me fun or not. Nothing else counts. And Warhammer, was frustrating in its gameplay and disapointing as a design and iteration of a beloved IP.
Hence, it was not fun for me, and thus I quit playing looking for something Fun.
That is all there is to it, people get attracted by a given IP an MMO is based upon, by its Screenshots or its Videos its nice Graphics and Music, but once atracted, it is the gameplay and the design that keeps them, otherwise they leave for something else.
If you design games to sell Boxes, do not expect to have a lasting Subscriber base.
I am not going to bash all the effort and all the work (or the invested money) many people put in to making WAR, but in the end the combination of the selected features and elements as defined by the design allong with the rendition of the finished product and that way it played out made for a game that was not fun to many people except the minority that stuck with it.
WAR sold like 1 millon boxes, and now has less than what 100k subs left, that is 900k players that did not like the game....90%...of people who bought the game did not like it.
You can play Devil's Advocate all you want but the facts are there in your face.
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ESKA, Playing MMORPG's since Ultima Online 1997 - Order of the Silver Serpent, Atlantic Shard
I remember hearing beta testeres talk about how much fun RvR was. Once I was able to pick up the game, I found that most players were in scenarios because that gameplay type had better rewards. The only RvR that was to be found was hugely ring-around-the-rosey keep capture where players were taking empty keeps while the enemy was away taking a different empty keep. I don't know, I sort of blame the playerbase. I think WAR had a lot more potential that was never realized (in the time that I played it.)
Vault-Tec analysts have concluded that the odds of worldwide nuclear armaggeddon this decade are 17,143,762... to 1.
Well, a game that missed the expectations that much must be called a failure even some fans like something about it.
AoC still has more subs and that speaks for itself as AoC is one of the bigger failures too.
How it is possible to miss the mark that far like WAR did...it seems good mmos be more a chance of luck, like a rare planetary constellation, when all the publisher, developers, programmers, artists work together for the same goal once in a dozen years and it never happens twice...
"Torquemada... do not implore him for compassion. Torquemada... do not beg him for forgiveness. Torquemada... do not ask him for mercy. Let's face it, you can't Torquemada anything!"
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The only things that I like is the pq idea
So no, I wouldn't call a game that's facing extinction a success
RIP Orc Choppa
Yeah, this happened because one side would outnumber the other by ridiculous numbers, so the "ring around the rosey" keep taking was the only viable option.
That would have all been fixed with a 3 faction system...that mythic pretty much invented.....and then ignored.
p.s. In beta, the numbers were a lot more equal, and people went toe to toe, which was fun. But a limited player beta environment is totally different than real world.
In the real world what do you do If you're outnumbered 5 to 1? You run like hell and attack vulnerable positions you have a chance at winning at. Nobody wants to run facefirst into a wall of steel that they can't possibly beat just do to horrible odds.
Ask Custer how that worked out for him...
EPIC failure.
Where are the faction cities promised at release? Never appeared.
Where is the inter-factional conflicts? Not even in the game....Elves and Dwarves skip around hand in hand as do Dark Elves and Chaos....this is NOT Warhammer.
Where are the Forts? Gone.
Have they fixed the bugged PvE raiding yet? No. It's still a case of group vs bugs instead of group vs mechanic. Pathetic.
PvP balance? Nope, broken. 2 faction is BORKED, it means the ONLY way to keep Chaos and Empire with even numbers is instances, open world pvp is about numbers...DAoC got this right with the third faction, EA threw the baby out with the bathwater with WAR....it does NOT work.
Population? In the toilet.
Biggest large IP flop of all time? Arguably yes.
Expresso gave me a Hearthstone beta key.....I'm so happy
It's a shame really because the game itself was not even bad. It simply needed a year or so more development not to get rid of the bugs (there where not to many tbh), but to get the end-game PvP working properly (fortress sieges for example) and fix the networking issues (without using quick fixes) and maybe to expand a bit on the PvE side.
The PvP was fun and overall balanced, battleground where interesting to play, Public quest where usually fun to do (especially when the factions where competing and ending up becoming a PvP match :P), The quest and story line where not to bad (admitingly though I find the books I read more interesting). The game definitly made me interested in the Warhammer lore and been reading a few books about it.
I have no regred playing the game at all. I do admit though it never capture the atmosphere that I got from the books. It was simply to black and white (one side is evil, the other side is not), with in the books it's often was not.
Warhammer fell SO far behind it's expectations and potential, how can one not see it as fail?
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