scenarios killed it. they wanted an open world with RvR but people just went and played the instanced scenarios instead. no wonder the world was empty.
Careful, I've been flamed to death for saying this, but I agree.
I quit when everyone was too busy sc grinding to come take a keep.
Killed it for me too. Especially when they boosted rewards so grinding the same senario over and over became the optimal way to advance your character.
so you rather do that "kill 10 mobs" , "fatch this" , "talk to him/her" repeateable quests?
My impression of WAR is that Mythic didn't have a clear and defined idea of what kind of game they were making. It seemed very schizophrenic to me. Like their design goal was to be able to check "Yes" next to all playstyles and settings. The result was a game that has its fingertips stuck in several different pies, but doesn't go beyond that. There is no strong core "identity" in WAR that I could ever see while playing it.
I think the fact that there are so many different opinions of what ruined the game in this thread - each dealing with a different game system - also illustrates that.
To me, WAR was a very literal example of Mythic "trying to cater to everyone". It's also a great example of why that approach isn't necessarily the best to go with.
"If you just step away for a sec you will clearly see all the pot holes in the road, and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
scenarios killed it. they wanted an open world with RvR but people just went and played the instanced scenarios instead. no wonder the world was empty.
Careful, I've been flamed to death for saying this, but I agree.
I quit when everyone was too busy sc grinding to come take a keep.
Killed it for me too. Especially when they boosted rewards so grinding the same senario over and over became the optimal way to advance your character.
so you rather do that "kill 10 mobs" , "fatch this" , "talk to him/her" repeateable quests?
False dichotomy.
Aside from scenarios or "kill/collect" quests, there are other avenues they could have explored, or found a better balance between those they did.
"If you just step away for a sec you will clearly see all the pot holes in the road, and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
It was the PVE game that killed it. Boring droll, pointless. The PQs ended up being empty and hardly if ever used. Even I liked them at first, but something changed past the first tier, I'm not quite sure what. Maybe because it was more of the same just longer and less exciting to plod through. The game could literally have had a cap of 10 and done fantastically.
I agree and I'll add. The fact that they took a RPG that doesn't have levels. A RPG based on career choices and percential skill, for them to turn it into a level grind was about the dumbest move they could have ever made. Other nails they drove in their coffin was there total focus on PvP. One thing I know over all the years on playing MMO's is no matter how good the PvP is the fact that the PvE side of the game was so incomplete and also lacking challenge it would never last. Don't get me wrong I was in love with the Public quests at the start. Since they didn't scale though when making alts, public quests weren't even an option to do 1 month after realease.
I raced to the game store to get it on realease and the first 2 weeks my friends and I were fooled. Warhammer Online was the first ever MMO were the higher level you got the worse the PvP got. They promised that they wouldn't have stun locks and stuff like what people face in WoW PvP. Low and behold stunlocking getting frozed til dead was WAY worse in War. To there credit they did fix alot of those problems through patches but the main problem of the fall of War was PvE.
The mobs didn't even have socail aggro on the outside world. You could litteraly pull mobs one by one even if they were standing right next to each other. The game dissapointed me so bad, I had so much hopes for the game. I have all the 2nd addition Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying books and manuals I had high hopes of a HUGE PvE world with all the lore. They somehow destroyed hands down the best roleplaying system of and PnP RPing game.
I mean Warhammer is one of the few game where you can make a character and be able to adventure with seasoned characters. Its also one of the few RP games where level doesn't dictate who you can play with. Wether you are a Rat Catcher or Knight of the Inner Circle a skeleton is still a thtreat and can kill either. I thought we would be seeing this translated to MMO. I was pumped, then the game came our and I was leveling and I was like WTF!!! If they had just taken a chance to be different and used the system and the world thats in the books game I feel the game would have been a huge success. War also has the endless critical damage chance. Wether you poking with a dagger or weilding a 2hander during a play session you have a chance to kill ANYTHING with one hit. Basically, it is possible to kill a Dragon with one lucky hit. Even though the chance would be unlikely it is still possible. Sadly no MMO will ever let us do that. They have to have their scripted boss fights where you and I have to get on youtube to find the plan how to kill the bosses.
All that said though the decided NOT to stick with the books and chose to take a huge diverse would with many different faction and condense them down to two factions and turn a skill based game into a 40 level grinder. Lol, Dark Elves fighting along side of Orcs, and Chaos. This crap just doesn't even jive with any lore or even make sense. I still can't believe Games Workshop just stood by and let them butcher there lore. Sad man, truely sad. If they just took the PnP RP books verbatim and translated them to an MMO it would have been a great game.
Sorry about the short novel, Thanks to all who read all my crap. I understand if you chose not to.
scenarios killed it. they wanted an open world with RvR but people just went and played the instanced scenarios instead. no wonder the world was empty.
Careful, I've been flamed to death for saying this, but I agree.
I quit when everyone was too busy sc grinding to come take a keep.
Killed it for me too. Especially when they boosted rewards so grinding the same senario over and over became the optimal way to advance your character.
so you rather do that "kill 10 mobs" , "fatch this" , "talk to him/her" repeateable quests?
False dichotomy.
Aside from scenarios or "kill/collect" quests, there are other avenues they could have explored, or found a better balance between those they did.
get real, no matter what, it will still become old after awhile.
My wow guild is a pretty good raiding guild with some serious pvpers in it, and multiple people have said variations of the following.
1. We would all play warhammer if it went F2P.
2. Land of The Dead was this games nail in the coffin, apprently the worst thing ever implimented in the game. (I actually stopped playing before this was introduced, so i'm not terribly familar with what it is, but some of the guys swear by this. As i understand it, it required you to pvp only so you could unlock a pve instance with had really good gear or something to that effect? In any event, they beleive it ruined rvr in the game, but i can't say for myself)
3. It had pretty damn good art direction, dark fantasy mmoness on a larger budget was nice to see.
4. They really needed to max Destruction less cool. I know they tried for a long time to fix this, but at launch, EVERYONE was Destruction, and they should have seen ti coming. I don't know why, but if you look at WoW for example, Horde rules the pvp servers, Warhammer was a pvp game, so it reasons to beleive that the vast majority of pvp people for some reason choose the scary looking group. And this broke the RVR mechanic for a months, which is why a lot of us wanted to play the game.
I don't even know how they could have fixed that, they were working with a license.
5. Boring level grind. Games have shown how you can do more then kill 10 of x over and over and over again.
6. Public Quests might have been the best thing they brought to the genre.
Too much emphasis on Scenarios (and rewards from Scenarios) took people away from the open world. However, this might also be to the boring PvE leveling. Everyone decided it was better to level through Scenarios. And as mentioned, without people running around the open world, public quests were difficult to complete.
Many of you have already stated something similar to this, so hopefully its not too hard for Mythic to see where they went wrong. I think DaoC was had its great moments too, but it also had a few problems (aside from everyone bashing ToA, buff bots were another lesson to be learned). Maybe if Mythic has any money left they can try a third time somewhere down the road and combine the best from both DaoC and WAR. I personally think DaoC II is their best bet, but that may never happen.
The same hype that is being put out for Rift that we saw in previous games is at work here. People predicted Warhammer would hit 2 million subs. Both Warhammer and Aion were hyped to unhealthy levels. This is what is happening to Rift. Rift is less of a game than the total sum of it...it is actually quite shallow. Two starter zones. The races all pretty much look the same. For a fantasy based MMORPG that is sorta sad. Game looked so promising at first. I was swept up in the dynamic nature of the Rift's until I got past the first zone and realized that they are all pre-scripted events on timers - never changing. I soon grew bored and even became aggravated later because the Rift's spawned to frequently.
I saddens me that once again certain people hype up a game to the point that it seems more than what it is. Rift is the new Warhammer, Aion, LotR, [insert name here], game...and when people falsely hype a game and get people to buy into it...it doesn't hurt the people out for money...they'll get their money one way or another. We're the ones in the end that get hurt the most. We gamers are stuck with another boring, lack-luster game. Thanks but no thanks.
They should have at least had a taste of endgame before writing reviews. 'endgame' in WaR is about PvP and the latest patch absolutely ruined that. If there ever was a time to return to WaR, now would not be it.
Yeah the whole game didn't link together well. RvR Lakes were usually empty, PVE was lacklustre and RVR was just RVR. If you weren't gank-fested with stuns and knockbacks you were really just running the same thing over and over.
The major problems that game had was they simply forgot to "link" each area together with each element of the game. PvE contributed nothing to the game, PvErs got the short end of the stick, Public Quests were quite often deserted because people beelined the straight road to the next zone (look up the in game map and most zones are simply one road with the entire quest line directing you straight to camp/next zone)
PQ's out of the way were empty. Their "Easy, medium, hard" PQs didn't solve anything and just appeased those who thought it meant you could ajust the difficulty slider for the PQ (you can't.) I remember people calling for the PQ zones to recognise how many people were in the zone in order to adjust the mobs to suit the groups in there. But the anti-soloers got shirty with it.
RvR was just RvR. You get in, you hit stuff, it dies, you die, respawn, go again early on. There was never really a tangiable benefit to RvRing apart from gear progression. Plus the queues at times ¬_¬
Three starter areas per zone when you're only spending an hour in each zone because of the rate of levelling didn't help either (They've made this bit worst. Nordland hardly has any quests nowadays compared to launch day O_o)
Anyway what they needed to do imo was link everything together. Have the RVR lakes with objectives be the main area of the game with major, critical and minor objectives to secure. Have an RVR scenario be relevant to the RVR Lake so the losing team of the scenario couldn't capute the critical objective of the RVR Lake for example. Have PQ's refresh defensive icons and npcs that were on-con for your side that spawned in the objective locations you had secured (allowing the PvPers to cut down their own defence forces and get into attacking). Have the 1st zone RVR lake contribute to the 2nd zone RVR lake by having it so if you capture all battlefield objectives some overpowered boss ranked monster several levels above the zone levels would 'attack' the critical objective in THAT zone, forcing the opposing team to either be extremely good and PVP while PVEing or to back off and hold the line out of range waiting for the result to swing in their favour so they can launch an attack.
That's just a basic summary and outline but it would have linked everything together and given everything a point and a role to play. PvErs could avoid RvRing if they so chose (especially since the choice is there they could have built a huge quest hub world for every zone building on a PvE story that would have been accessible at any level) particularly if rewards for gear were point based or token based depending on what you did in game but were all convertable on a 1:1 basis.
That's the problem with WAR imo, nothing to do in PvE really, empty PQs, empty world, an' alright scenario bash-time and not much else (though I do notice there is some progress on RvR lakes nowadays but it's too little too late really.)
Comments
so you rather do that "kill 10 mobs" , "fatch this" , "talk to him/her" repeateable quests?
Which FF Character Are You?
My impression of WAR is that Mythic didn't have a clear and defined idea of what kind of game they were making. It seemed very schizophrenic to me. Like their design goal was to be able to check "Yes" next to all playstyles and settings. The result was a game that has its fingertips stuck in several different pies, but doesn't go beyond that. There is no strong core "identity" in WAR that I could ever see while playing it.
I think the fact that there are so many different opinions of what ruined the game in this thread - each dealing with a different game system - also illustrates that.
To me, WAR was a very literal example of Mythic "trying to cater to everyone". It's also a great example of why that approach isn't necessarily the best to go with.
and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
False dichotomy.
Aside from scenarios or "kill/collect" quests, there are other avenues they could have explored, or found a better balance between those they did.
and the cash shop selling asphalt..." - Mimzel on F2P/Cash Shops
I agree and I'll add. The fact that they took a RPG that doesn't have levels. A RPG based on career choices and percential skill, for them to turn it into a level grind was about the dumbest move they could have ever made. Other nails they drove in their coffin was there total focus on PvP. One thing I know over all the years on playing MMO's is no matter how good the PvP is the fact that the PvE side of the game was so incomplete and also lacking challenge it would never last. Don't get me wrong I was in love with the Public quests at the start. Since they didn't scale though when making alts, public quests weren't even an option to do 1 month after realease.
I raced to the game store to get it on realease and the first 2 weeks my friends and I were fooled. Warhammer Online was the first ever MMO were the higher level you got the worse the PvP got. They promised that they wouldn't have stun locks and stuff like what people face in WoW PvP. Low and behold stunlocking getting frozed til dead was WAY worse in War. To there credit they did fix alot of those problems through patches but the main problem of the fall of War was PvE.
The mobs didn't even have socail aggro on the outside world. You could litteraly pull mobs one by one even if they were standing right next to each other. The game dissapointed me so bad, I had so much hopes for the game. I have all the 2nd addition Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying books and manuals I had high hopes of a HUGE PvE world with all the lore. They somehow destroyed hands down the best roleplaying system of and PnP RPing game.
I mean Warhammer is one of the few game where you can make a character and be able to adventure with seasoned characters. Its also one of the few RP games where level doesn't dictate who you can play with. Wether you are a Rat Catcher or Knight of the Inner Circle a skeleton is still a thtreat and can kill either. I thought we would be seeing this translated to MMO. I was pumped, then the game came our and I was leveling and I was like WTF!!! If they had just taken a chance to be different and used the system and the world thats in the books game I feel the game would have been a huge success. War also has the endless critical damage chance. Wether you poking with a dagger or weilding a 2hander during a play session you have a chance to kill ANYTHING with one hit. Basically, it is possible to kill a Dragon with one lucky hit. Even though the chance would be unlikely it is still possible. Sadly no MMO will ever let us do that. They have to have their scripted boss fights where you and I have to get on youtube to find the plan how to kill the bosses.
All that said though the decided NOT to stick with the books and chose to take a huge diverse would with many different faction and condense them down to two factions and turn a skill based game into a 40 level grinder. Lol, Dark Elves fighting along side of Orcs, and Chaos. This crap just doesn't even jive with any lore or even make sense. I still can't believe Games Workshop just stood by and let them butcher there lore. Sad man, truely sad. If they just took the PnP RP books verbatim and translated them to an MMO it would have been a great game.
Sorry about the short novel, Thanks to all who read all my crap. I understand if you chose not to.
get real, no matter what, it will still become old after awhile.
Which FF Character Are You?
My wow guild is a pretty good raiding guild with some serious pvpers in it, and multiple people have said variations of the following.
1. We would all play warhammer if it went F2P.
2. Land of The Dead was this games nail in the coffin, apprently the worst thing ever implimented in the game. (I actually stopped playing before this was introduced, so i'm not terribly familar with what it is, but some of the guys swear by this. As i understand it, it required you to pvp only so you could unlock a pve instance with had really good gear or something to that effect? In any event, they beleive it ruined rvr in the game, but i can't say for myself)
3. It had pretty damn good art direction, dark fantasy mmoness on a larger budget was nice to see.
4. They really needed to max Destruction less cool. I know they tried for a long time to fix this, but at launch, EVERYONE was Destruction, and they should have seen ti coming. I don't know why, but if you look at WoW for example, Horde rules the pvp servers, Warhammer was a pvp game, so it reasons to beleive that the vast majority of pvp people for some reason choose the scary looking group. And this broke the RVR mechanic for a months, which is why a lot of us wanted to play the game.
I don't even know how they could have fixed that, they were working with a license.
5. Boring level grind. Games have shown how you can do more then kill 10 of x over and over and over again.
6. Public Quests might have been the best thing they brought to the genre.
and
7. I really miss DAoC
Too much emphasis on Scenarios (and rewards from Scenarios) took people away from the open world. However, this might also be to the boring PvE leveling. Everyone decided it was better to level through Scenarios. And as mentioned, without people running around the open world, public quests were difficult to complete.
Many of you have already stated something similar to this, so hopefully its not too hard for Mythic to see where they went wrong. I think DaoC was had its great moments too, but it also had a few problems (aside from everyone bashing ToA, buff bots were another lesson to be learned). Maybe if Mythic has any money left they can try a third time somewhere down the road and combine the best from both DaoC and WAR. I personally think DaoC II is their best bet, but that may never happen.
The same hype that is being put out for Rift that we saw in previous games is at work here. People predicted Warhammer would hit 2 million subs. Both Warhammer and Aion were hyped to unhealthy levels. This is what is happening to Rift. Rift is less of a game than the total sum of it...it is actually quite shallow. Two starter zones. The races all pretty much look the same. For a fantasy based MMORPG that is sorta sad. Game looked so promising at first. I was swept up in the dynamic nature of the Rift's until I got past the first zone and realized that they are all pre-scripted events on timers - never changing. I soon grew bored and even became aggravated later because the Rift's spawned to frequently.
I saddens me that once again certain people hype up a game to the point that it seems more than what it is. Rift is the new Warhammer, Aion, LotR, [insert name here], game...and when people falsely hype a game and get people to buy into it...it doesn't hurt the people out for money...they'll get their money one way or another. We're the ones in the end that get hurt the most. We gamers are stuck with another boring, lack-luster game. Thanks but no thanks.
I will not be buying Rift.
They should have at least had a taste of endgame before writing reviews. 'endgame' in WaR is about PvP and the latest patch absolutely ruined that. If there ever was a time to return to WaR, now would not be it.
Yeah the whole game didn't link together well. RvR Lakes were usually empty, PVE was lacklustre and RVR was just RVR. If you weren't gank-fested with stuns and knockbacks you were really just running the same thing over and over.
The major problems that game had was they simply forgot to "link" each area together with each element of the game. PvE contributed nothing to the game, PvErs got the short end of the stick, Public Quests were quite often deserted because people beelined the straight road to the next zone (look up the in game map and most zones are simply one road with the entire quest line directing you straight to camp/next zone)
PQ's out of the way were empty. Their "Easy, medium, hard" PQs didn't solve anything and just appeased those who thought it meant you could ajust the difficulty slider for the PQ (you can't.) I remember people calling for the PQ zones to recognise how many people were in the zone in order to adjust the mobs to suit the groups in there. But the anti-soloers got shirty with it.
RvR was just RvR. You get in, you hit stuff, it dies, you die, respawn, go again early on. There was never really a tangiable benefit to RvRing apart from gear progression. Plus the queues at times ¬_¬
Three starter areas per zone when you're only spending an hour in each zone because of the rate of levelling didn't help either (They've made this bit worst. Nordland hardly has any quests nowadays compared to launch day O_o)
Anyway what they needed to do imo was link everything together. Have the RVR lakes with objectives be the main area of the game with major, critical and minor objectives to secure. Have an RVR scenario be relevant to the RVR Lake so the losing team of the scenario couldn't capute the critical objective of the RVR Lake for example. Have PQ's refresh defensive icons and npcs that were on-con for your side that spawned in the objective locations you had secured (allowing the PvPers to cut down their own defence forces and get into attacking). Have the 1st zone RVR lake contribute to the 2nd zone RVR lake by having it so if you capture all battlefield objectives some overpowered boss ranked monster several levels above the zone levels would 'attack' the critical objective in THAT zone, forcing the opposing team to either be extremely good and PVP while PVEing or to back off and hold the line out of range waiting for the result to swing in their favour so they can launch an attack.
That's just a basic summary and outline but it would have linked everything together and given everything a point and a role to play. PvErs could avoid RvRing if they so chose (especially since the choice is there they could have built a huge quest hub world for every zone building on a PvE story that would have been accessible at any level) particularly if rewards for gear were point based or token based depending on what you did in game but were all convertable on a 1:1 basis.
That's the problem with WAR imo, nothing to do in PvE really, empty PQs, empty world, an' alright scenario bash-time and not much else (though I do notice there is some progress on RvR lakes nowadays but it's too little too late really.)