Aren't any of you concerned that Mark Jacobs vision is still in tact but that he was limited by what EA wanted? And now, after seeing WAR not being what he wanted, he's leaving the company? This seems much more plausible knowing EA than a great developer suddenly becoming clueless.
I doubt EA bought the company and then started making design decisions for mythic and ignoring their direction. Saying EA put an unrealistic time frame on the game, then sure that is a contributing factor, but mythic built this game with their staff.
Mark Jacobs vision of the game is still intact which is the entire problem. Warhammers biggest problems are core level decisions. They are not something that a new designer can just come in and whisk away with a few content patches. There are just to many fundamental problems with the game to be fixed by anything short of a massive overhaul. DAOC had great pvp, but much of that came from the community aspects. I don't think jacobs is a great designer at all and he totally doesn't understand the pve side of games and it looks like he has lost touch with the rvr side as well.
As for the combining these two divisions together it is pretty obvious why it was done. Mythic dropped the ball in an epic fashion and bioware still has a chance (not to mention a very good pedigree). I agree with those who speculate that there will be a lot of mythic personal heading over to the bioware project, because it still has a chance to be a huge success. Warhammer as far as a product goes is dead. It is not going to see a revival above what it is right now If warhammer has similar number in another year that will be a huge success as far as I am concerned, but I very much doubt that happening.
They are not something that a new designer can just come in and whisk away with a few content patches. There are just to many fundamental problems with the game to be fixed by anything short of a massive overhaul.
I keep seeing this a LOT.
Please, tell me, what are the fundamental problems with the game?
I'll have to disagree that the fundamentals of this game, on paper, are the best of any MMO to be released, what did fall short was some of the execution and management since then.
Wow, ... another shot by EA. I can't complain I like BioWare as a company, and I wish for WAR to succeed.. so .. I guess if anyone can do it.. it would be BioWare. Lets just hope they aren't setting themselves up to fail.
Aren't any of you concerned that Mark Jacobs vision is still in tact but that he was limited by what EA wanted? And now, after seeing WAR not being what he wanted, he's leaving the company? This seems much more plausible knowing EA than a great developer suddenly becoming clueless.
I dont think so. First of all can great developers getting clueless, heard of Tabula rasa and Vanguard?
Secondly was WAR a lot like he describe it would be, sure he cut some parts like those 4 citys but many of the things is really his fault, like making 2 factions instead of 3 even though he himself proved that that worked better or changing the warhammer world to make it more suitable to younger players.
His worst decision is still making War close to Wow, GW pioneered a great leveless system that would have worked nice, this was a try to steal Wows players instead of trying to get the million fans warhammer minature and roleplaying games actually have, he said so himself.
No, firing him and put Mythic together with Bioware was a good decision, if MJ takes a long vacation he might remember what made DaoC fun and again try to make his own game instead of trying to make a "better" wow. It is really sad because I love Warhammer but WAR really isn't Warhammer, only Altdorf feels about right.
The question is of course what this will do to WAR, will the new guys revamp the game or just continue running it with a smaller crew? I hope they actually try to fix it, the Warhammer world have a lot to offer.
They are not something that a new designer can just come in and whisk away with a few content patches. There are just to many fundamental problems with the game to be fixed by anything short of a massive overhaul.
I keep seeing this a LOT.
Please, tell me, what are the fundamental problems with the game?
I'll have to disagree that the fundamentals of this game, on paper, are the best of any MMO to be released, what did fall short was some of the execution and management since then.
This is all just random thoughts off the top of my head, because honestly I haven't really put time into thinking of a list of problems, just the overall experience wasn't there.
The conflict of instanced combat vs open world combat. They directly oppose each other in their implementation. The game can't handle the open world combat needed to unlock a city siege, but the city siege is an instance? Scenarios compete against world rvr for populations. So on and so on.
Meaningless conquest of keeps/forts. There is no real ownership or desire to defend something out of pride. Does it really matter if you lose some keeps or your capital right now? If someone is attacking a keep, does anyone really care? Do warbands skip keeps that are defended, because they can just travel down the road to an undefended fort for easier pickings of gold bags?
Lack of motivating rewards for gameplay has resulted into slapstick patching of a gear grind. RR levels, influence, tier sets. It is all just short term fixed used to motivate people to fight each other. These choices are going to make for a very long term gear grind, because they are going to have to either ramp up the rewards or slow down the progression to a grind. The problem here is the gameplay aspects were not even rewarding enough to get people to play them on their own. Slathering those areas with gear was the only way to get people to engage in the primary focus of the gameplay. It is still seriously out of wack. That is why people are joking referring to warhammer as a realm vs environment game.
PvE vs RvR is one of the biggest flaws. There is far to much emphasis on pve aspects of the game to advance RvR aspects. There is not enough pvp mixed into the pve side of the game to mesh the two into a functional game field. Just look at what the last patch is doing. More splitting of the population between pve areas and rvr areas. On top of that (incoming over generalization) the pve stinks. It is terrible, boring and lacks interesting play. There is far to much work needed to make the pve interesting.
Mob AI, worst I have ever seen. Needs a complete overhaul.
Keeps and stationary seige engines. All need lots of work. Siege one keep you have done them all.
Public quests. Great on paper, not very good in execution. Almost all of them play out as one giant combined kill X quest which is something people were already complaining about in mmos. In their current form they are just a bland replacement for dungeons and other types of content. I think it is a great feature, but mythics version of it is very bland and used far to many times.
The whole refusal to release the game with community building features. Message forums, chat channels, rvr communication tools and all of those things. The game missed an important window of time to build social structure and it is going to be playing catch up for a long time if it even can.
The tiered zone system is flawed on so many levels.
Crowd control and area effect are going to be problems for a very very long time and mythic should have known better after daoc.
The engine is so bad that it is crippling the game. Anywhere from characters getting stuck on any tiny obsticle in thier path, combat reaction time all the way to ability to handle the "war" that is supposed to be everwhere.
There is just to much to fix with a few content patches or change in leadership to make everything go away. They honeymoon period is over and mythic has already shown what players can expect from a fully staffed team over the last few months and their team is only going to get smaller. I think mythic has done a fine job on many things up to and including identifying problems, but there is just to much to fix.
All of these things might be fixable, but it is going to take serious amounts of effort, time and some drastic changes to turn the course of the game around. I still play it occasionally with some real life friends (down to 3 of us now from about 20), but I have no real hopes things are going to miracualously get better with a new director or a the 1 or 2 content patches they might add over the next 6 months.
They're making the same mistake that SWG did; they aren't content to have "only" 300k subscriptions because they have set their standards unreasonably high by WoW, and as a result they end up making swinging and poorly thought out changes to the game in a desperate attempt to arrest the decline and reverse the trend. In the end they will only destroy their base faster.
1. Jacobs should have been gone a long time ago. Inflexible leadership is not a good thing. Especially when you look at what Mythic has done over the years, he really didn't have tha much success if anyone ever looks at it for what it's worth. One hit game does not a genius make.
2. This spells death for Warhammer. The person now in charge of WAR is also in charge of the new MMO at EA, SWTOR. That means in simple language, it's like a father who has two children. One he fathered naturally and one that's the bastard from someone else. Of course the father is going to feel more love towards his own child, in this case... Bioware's head will have way more love for SWTOR than WAR. Look for WAR to start running on skeleton crews in the future.
3. EA signals that SWTOR is the future with this move.WAR is about as good as it going to get; there are no more real markets for this game. EA has lost all confidence in this title and its dead in the water. With AION releasing in VERY good shape, high anticipation and rave reviews from just about everyone who's played it, EA does not want to ride a broken down horse like WAR into the fall as it's main earner. They want to get SWTOR out on time now with no delays, so you will see manpower shifted.
4. Jacobs will get a CRAPLOAD of money for "voluntarily leaving" or whatever they call firings at the corporate level these days. I don't feel sorry for him one bit because he's going to make millions. I DO however, feel sorry for all those people he canned over the last months because of his failure to capitalize on this game's huge early success. Those employees are probably still looking for jobs.
5. LOTD is a failure. EA canned Jacobs the day they opened that area up, date wise it looks like. I'm sure someone at EA looked at LOTD, went "EGADS!", ran upstairs and told the head guy at EA what LOTD spelled for the future: a game where RvR was further reduced in a game where RvR was supposed to be the point. EA probably realized this was tha last straw. What else was WAR going to do after this? All the classes are in the game, there is nothing left to "unveil". They are out of bullets.
If you enjoy the game, keep playing. But know that very soon, you will be playing on 3 servers. If you don't mind that and are still having fun, that's all that matters. But for most people, they won't want to be subject to even more moving around and collasping without results in a gear grind game where you keep fighting more and more PvE mobs, and less and less real people.
Please, tell me, what are the fundamental problems with the game?
The fundamental problem is that for the majority of MMO players, Warhammer Online simply is not fun.
Other fundamental problems are the game makes you gear grind, enemies are not available to kill and hide, and the endgame is busted.
That's about as fundamental as it gets. If you want a "technical" answer, you'll have to talk to number crunchers.
Amen to this.
It's a grind game, with no tactics.
That is to say, it rewards people who just repeat the same activity over and over again.
WoW proved that was a valid business model, but does it better. And Wow's PVE world was much more alive, compelling, full of hidden nooks and crannies.
WAR has a restrictive world design, and the PVP offers no tactical depth. Ergo, boring for most intelligent people.
They are not something that a new designer can just come in and whisk away with a few content patches. There are just to many fundamental problems with the game to be fixed by anything short of a massive overhaul.
I keep seeing this a LOT.
Please, tell me, what are the fundamental problems with the game?
I'll have to disagree that the fundamentals of this game, on paper, are the best of any MMO to be released, what did fall short was some of the execution and management since then.
This is all just random thoughts off the top of my head, because honestly I haven't really put time into thinking of a list of problems, just the overall experience wasn't there.
The conflict of instanced combat vs open world combat. They directly oppose each other in their implementation. The game can't handle the open world combat needed to unlock a city siege, but the city siege is an instance? Scenarios compete against world rvr for populations. So on and so on.
Meaningless conquest of keeps/forts. There is no real ownership or desire to defend something out of pride. Does it really matter if you lose some keeps or your capital right now? If someone is attacking a keep, does anyone really care? Do warbands skip keeps that are defended, because they can just travel down the road to an undefended fort for easier pickings of gold bags?
Lack of motivating rewards for gameplay has resulted into slapstick patching of a gear grind. RR levels, influence, tier sets. It is all just short term fixed used to motivate people to fight each other. These choices are going to make for a very long term gear grind, because they are going to have to either ramp up the rewards or slow down the progression to a grind. The problem here is the gameplay aspects were not even rewarding enough to get people to play them on their own. Slathering those areas with gear was the only way to get people to engage in the primary focus of the gameplay. It is still seriously out of wack. That is why people are joking referring to warhammer as a realm vs environment game.
PvE vs RvR is one of the biggest flaws. There is far to much emphasis on pve aspects of the game to advance RvR aspects. There is not enough pvp mixed into the pve side of the game to mesh the two into a functional game field. Just look at what the last patch is doing. More splitting of the population between pve areas and rvr areas. On top of that (incoming over generalization) the pve stinks. It is terrible, boring and lacks interesting play. There is far to much work needed to make the pve interesting.
Mob AI, worst I have ever seen. Needs a complete overhaul.
Keeps and stationary seige engines. All need lots of work. Siege one keep you have done them all.
Public quests. Great on paper, not very good in execution. Almost all of them play out as one giant combined kill X quest which is something people were already complaining about in mmos. In their current form they are just a bland replacement for dungeons and other types of content. I think it is a great feature, but mythics version of it is very bland and used far to many times.
The whole refusal to release the game with community building features. Message forums, chat channels, rvr communication tools and all of those things. The game missed an important window of time to build social structure and it is going to be playing catch up for a long time if it even can.
The tiered zone system is flawed on so many levels.
Crowd control and area effect are going to be problems for a very very long time and mythic should have known better after daoc.
The engine is so bad that it is crippling the game. Anywhere from characters getting stuck on any tiny obsticle in thier path, combat reaction time all the way to ability to handle the "war" that is supposed to be everwhere.
There is just to much to fix with a few content patches or change in leadership to make everything go away. They honeymoon period is over and mythic has already shown what players can expect from a fully staffed team over the last few months and their team is only going to get smaller. I think mythic has done a fine job on many things up to and including identifying problems, but there is just to much to fix.
All of these things might be fixable, but it is going to take serious amounts of effort, time and some drastic changes to turn the course of the game around. I still play it occasionally with some real life friends (down to 3 of us now from about 20), but I have no real hopes things are going to miracualously get better with a new director or a the 1 or 2 content patches they might add over the next 6 months.
I agree with all of this. Very solid analysis.
With regards to what monitvates people to play - I feel that dramatic tension can be an excellent motivator.
That is achieved by opening the space for surprise victories, individual contrubution, clever group play (all of which require some kind of tactical variety, which simply do not exists in this game), and by adding some sense of loss when a battle is lost (and I am not advocating a crippling material loss, but some narrative loss, some drama that unfolds... some sense of occasion).
Comments
I doubt EA bought the company and then started making design decisions for mythic and ignoring their direction. Saying EA put an unrealistic time frame on the game, then sure that is a contributing factor, but mythic built this game with their staff.
Mark Jacobs vision of the game is still intact which is the entire problem. Warhammers biggest problems are core level decisions. They are not something that a new designer can just come in and whisk away with a few content patches. There are just to many fundamental problems with the game to be fixed by anything short of a massive overhaul. DAOC had great pvp, but much of that came from the community aspects. I don't think jacobs is a great designer at all and he totally doesn't understand the pve side of games and it looks like he has lost touch with the rvr side as well.
As for the combining these two divisions together it is pretty obvious why it was done. Mythic dropped the ball in an epic fashion and bioware still has a chance (not to mention a very good pedigree). I agree with those who speculate that there will be a lot of mythic personal heading over to the bioware project, because it still has a chance to be a huge success. Warhammer as far as a product goes is dead. It is not going to see a revival above what it is right now If warhammer has similar number in another year that will be a huge success as far as I am concerned, but I very much doubt that happening.
I keep seeing this a LOT.
Please, tell me, what are the fundamental problems with the game?
I'll have to disagree that the fundamentals of this game, on paper, are the best of any MMO to be released, what did fall short was some of the execution and management since then.
Wow, ... another shot by EA. I can't complain I like BioWare as a company, and I wish for WAR to succeed.. so .. I guess if anyone can do it.. it would be BioWare. Lets just hope they aren't setting themselves up to fail.
I dont think so. First of all can great developers getting clueless, heard of Tabula rasa and Vanguard?
Secondly was WAR a lot like he describe it would be, sure he cut some parts like those 4 citys but many of the things is really his fault, like making 2 factions instead of 3 even though he himself proved that that worked better or changing the warhammer world to make it more suitable to younger players.
His worst decision is still making War close to Wow, GW pioneered a great leveless system that would have worked nice, this was a try to steal Wows players instead of trying to get the million fans warhammer minature and roleplaying games actually have, he said so himself.
No, firing him and put Mythic together with Bioware was a good decision, if MJ takes a long vacation he might remember what made DaoC fun and again try to make his own game instead of trying to make a "better" wow. It is really sad because I love Warhammer but WAR really isn't Warhammer, only Altdorf feels about right.
The question is of course what this will do to WAR, will the new guys revamp the game or just continue running it with a smaller crew? I hope they actually try to fix it, the Warhammer world have a lot to offer.
The fundamental problem is that for the majority of MMO players, Warhammer Online simply is not fun.
Other fundamental problems are the game makes you gear grind, enemies are not available to kill and hide, and the endgame is busted.
That's about as fundamental as it gets. If you want a "technical" answer, you'll have to talk to number crunchers.
"TO MICHAEL!"
I keep seeing this a LOT.
Please, tell me, what are the fundamental problems with the game?
I'll have to disagree that the fundamentals of this game, on paper, are the best of any MMO to be released, what did fall short was some of the execution and management since then.
This is all just random thoughts off the top of my head, because honestly I haven't really put time into thinking of a list of problems, just the overall experience wasn't there.
The conflict of instanced combat vs open world combat. They directly oppose each other in their implementation. The game can't handle the open world combat needed to unlock a city siege, but the city siege is an instance? Scenarios compete against world rvr for populations. So on and so on.
Meaningless conquest of keeps/forts. There is no real ownership or desire to defend something out of pride. Does it really matter if you lose some keeps or your capital right now? If someone is attacking a keep, does anyone really care? Do warbands skip keeps that are defended, because they can just travel down the road to an undefended fort for easier pickings of gold bags?
Lack of motivating rewards for gameplay has resulted into slapstick patching of a gear grind. RR levels, influence, tier sets. It is all just short term fixed used to motivate people to fight each other. These choices are going to make for a very long term gear grind, because they are going to have to either ramp up the rewards or slow down the progression to a grind. The problem here is the gameplay aspects were not even rewarding enough to get people to play them on their own. Slathering those areas with gear was the only way to get people to engage in the primary focus of the gameplay. It is still seriously out of wack. That is why people are joking referring to warhammer as a realm vs environment game.
PvE vs RvR is one of the biggest flaws. There is far to much emphasis on pve aspects of the game to advance RvR aspects. There is not enough pvp mixed into the pve side of the game to mesh the two into a functional game field. Just look at what the last patch is doing. More splitting of the population between pve areas and rvr areas. On top of that (incoming over generalization) the pve stinks. It is terrible, boring and lacks interesting play. There is far to much work needed to make the pve interesting.
Mob AI, worst I have ever seen. Needs a complete overhaul.
Keeps and stationary seige engines. All need lots of work. Siege one keep you have done them all.
Public quests. Great on paper, not very good in execution. Almost all of them play out as one giant combined kill X quest which is something people were already complaining about in mmos. In their current form they are just a bland replacement for dungeons and other types of content. I think it is a great feature, but mythics version of it is very bland and used far to many times.
The whole refusal to release the game with community building features. Message forums, chat channels, rvr communication tools and all of those things. The game missed an important window of time to build social structure and it is going to be playing catch up for a long time if it even can.
The tiered zone system is flawed on so many levels.
Crowd control and area effect are going to be problems for a very very long time and mythic should have known better after daoc.
The engine is so bad that it is crippling the game. Anywhere from characters getting stuck on any tiny obsticle in thier path, combat reaction time all the way to ability to handle the "war" that is supposed to be everwhere.
There is just to much to fix with a few content patches or change in leadership to make everything go away. They honeymoon period is over and mythic has already shown what players can expect from a fully staffed team over the last few months and their team is only going to get smaller. I think mythic has done a fine job on many things up to and including identifying problems, but there is just to much to fix.
All of these things might be fixable, but it is going to take serious amounts of effort, time and some drastic changes to turn the course of the game around. I still play it occasionally with some real life friends (down to 3 of us now from about 20), but I have no real hopes things are going to miracualously get better with a new director or a the 1 or 2 content patches they might add over the next 6 months.
They're making the same mistake that SWG did; they aren't content to have "only" 300k subscriptions because they have set their standards unreasonably high by WoW, and as a result they end up making swinging and poorly thought out changes to the game in a desperate attempt to arrest the decline and reverse the trend. In the end they will only destroy their base faster.
Haven't you got anything better to do? Seriously?
The fundamental problem is that for the majority of MMO players, Warhammer Online simply is not fun.
Other fundamental problems are the game makes you gear grind, enemies are not available to kill and hide, and the endgame is busted.
That's about as fundamental as it gets. If you want a "technical" answer, you'll have to talk to number crunchers.
Amen to this.
It's a grind game, with no tactics.
That is to say, it rewards people who just repeat the same activity over and over again.
WoW proved that was a valid business model, but does it better. And Wow's PVE world was much more alive, compelling, full of hidden nooks and crannies.
WAR has a restrictive world design, and the PVP offers no tactical depth. Ergo, boring for most intelligent people.
I keep seeing this a LOT.
Please, tell me, what are the fundamental problems with the game?
I'll have to disagree that the fundamentals of this game, on paper, are the best of any MMO to be released, what did fall short was some of the execution and management since then.
This is all just random thoughts off the top of my head, because honestly I haven't really put time into thinking of a list of problems, just the overall experience wasn't there.
The conflict of instanced combat vs open world combat. They directly oppose each other in their implementation. The game can't handle the open world combat needed to unlock a city siege, but the city siege is an instance? Scenarios compete against world rvr for populations. So on and so on.
Meaningless conquest of keeps/forts. There is no real ownership or desire to defend something out of pride. Does it really matter if you lose some keeps or your capital right now? If someone is attacking a keep, does anyone really care? Do warbands skip keeps that are defended, because they can just travel down the road to an undefended fort for easier pickings of gold bags?
Lack of motivating rewards for gameplay has resulted into slapstick patching of a gear grind. RR levels, influence, tier sets. It is all just short term fixed used to motivate people to fight each other. These choices are going to make for a very long term gear grind, because they are going to have to either ramp up the rewards or slow down the progression to a grind. The problem here is the gameplay aspects were not even rewarding enough to get people to play them on their own. Slathering those areas with gear was the only way to get people to engage in the primary focus of the gameplay. It is still seriously out of wack. That is why people are joking referring to warhammer as a realm vs environment game.
PvE vs RvR is one of the biggest flaws. There is far to much emphasis on pve aspects of the game to advance RvR aspects. There is not enough pvp mixed into the pve side of the game to mesh the two into a functional game field. Just look at what the last patch is doing. More splitting of the population between pve areas and rvr areas. On top of that (incoming over generalization) the pve stinks. It is terrible, boring and lacks interesting play. There is far to much work needed to make the pve interesting.
Mob AI, worst I have ever seen. Needs a complete overhaul.
Keeps and stationary seige engines. All need lots of work. Siege one keep you have done them all.
Public quests. Great on paper, not very good in execution. Almost all of them play out as one giant combined kill X quest which is something people were already complaining about in mmos. In their current form they are just a bland replacement for dungeons and other types of content. I think it is a great feature, but mythics version of it is very bland and used far to many times.
The whole refusal to release the game with community building features. Message forums, chat channels, rvr communication tools and all of those things. The game missed an important window of time to build social structure and it is going to be playing catch up for a long time if it even can.
The tiered zone system is flawed on so many levels.
Crowd control and area effect are going to be problems for a very very long time and mythic should have known better after daoc.
The engine is so bad that it is crippling the game. Anywhere from characters getting stuck on any tiny obsticle in thier path, combat reaction time all the way to ability to handle the "war" that is supposed to be everwhere.
There is just to much to fix with a few content patches or change in leadership to make everything go away. They honeymoon period is over and mythic has already shown what players can expect from a fully staffed team over the last few months and their team is only going to get smaller. I think mythic has done a fine job on many things up to and including identifying problems, but there is just to much to fix.
All of these things might be fixable, but it is going to take serious amounts of effort, time and some drastic changes to turn the course of the game around. I still play it occasionally with some real life friends (down to 3 of us now from about 20), but I have no real hopes things are going to miracualously get better with a new director or a the 1 or 2 content patches they might add over the next 6 months.
I agree with all of this. Very solid analysis.
With regards to what monitvates people to play - I feel that dramatic tension can be an excellent motivator.
That is achieved by opening the space for surprise victories, individual contrubution, clever group play (all of which require some kind of tactical variety, which simply do not exists in this game), and by adding some sense of loss when a battle is lost (and I am not advocating a crippling material loss, but some narrative loss, some drama that unfolds... some sense of occasion).
Gear grind is a very unimaginative tool.
This question from a guy with a "FAIL COM" avatar for months, and a quote from a fired CEO of AoC who hasn't been around since September of last year?
"TO MICHAEL!"