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Why did these games "fail" ...or did they?
Emergence
Member Posts: 888
I am curious, as I primarily quit these games because the populations died, or in EQ2's case horrid PvP (sorry, but i shouldn't have to min-max and spend hundreds of platinum to get max gear just to PvP, and this was just dumb).
1) WARHAMMER
2) VANGUARD
3) To a lesseer extent just to throw it in-- Everquest 2?
4) Do you think WAR or VANGUARD going F2P would revive it?
If being a developer means being quiet, mature, well-spoken, and disconnected from the community, then by all means do me a favor and believe I'm not one.
Comments
WAR
performance issues - a lot of them
very little content - I had done most there was to be done with TWO characters in THREE weeks. After that there was only the gear that could be grinded from city sieges and that didn't interest me one bit.
bugged
imbalanced - like they did zero testing in beta
Vanguard
performance issues
bugged - very much so
old school
level cap was stretched - many level-ups without any skills or abilities gained
quests were "stretched" - Instead of killing just 5 bandits, you had to kill 50. This was the theme througout the whole game.
you out-leveled the quests fast - I spent lot of time abandoning quests. I could go to a village, see that the quests were of my level pick them up, finish one or two, and notice that I've already out-leveled the other five.
quests very standard fetch and kill all the way
very strict tank 'n' spank combat
silly fast respawn times for monsters
many quest lines were broken - unfinishable without GM help
annoying crafting minigames - They went to some lenghts to make using a bot difficult here. Thing is... if it makes you want to use a bot, is it fun?
crafting and resource gathering was very much grinding - not to mention very boring
unfinished
hardly any players - I wonder why that is...
I played VG when the devs/community said "this is how the game should've been during release." And still it vas very much unfinished.
I don't think EQ2 failed that much.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
Well, that pretty much summed it up...lol...
Good job. Might as well close this thread now :P
If being a developer means being quiet, mature, well-spoken, and disconnected from the community, then by all means do me a favor and believe I'm not one.
yw
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky
I agree with everything the above poster said, the one right after the Op. I agree that EQ2 did not "fail" but for me it failed. I really enjoyed EQ2 back during KOS. I had a lot of fun with the many different classes and races, I just wish their was more starting areas. Heck I even loved the unbalanced PvP. I loved the Kunark expansion. I dont know why, the quests were boring, but the music was soothing and I really liked the scenery. But with the addition of the cashop and the many implementations made to make the game "easier" in a sense I have lost interest. I hated the idea that there were things people could have that I could not have just because they paid extra. Now, I know that those who pay extra are entitled to more, but I felt that since I was already paying a monthly sub for the game to be develpoed than I should receive the benefits of the time the developers spent developing. Probably it all went downhill for me with the TSO expansion.
In short, the cashop is annoying in EQ2 and over the years many little changes to the game have turned me off, though I miss the pretty cool people I got lucky to guild with.
1 - no idea
2 - Well, Sigil bankrupted and SOE took over. SOE however has a likewise game, EQ2. So why would they give enough funding to Vanguard ? Or advertisement ? It took years to fix the bugs. And while the game is in a fine state now, it is not going to continue much after this point.
3 - Uh, EQ2 failed ?
4 - Thats pointless now. Nobod gives a damn about Vanguard any more.
Not really, he obviously writes a lot of crap about VG.
There was no shortage of new abilities on higher levels, unless one played Cleric before they introduced Affinities.
The main problem with VG was simply: Not enough devs, not enough advertisement.
And the game being "old school" was one of the points why the game was so awesome.
EQ2 was great when it first came out. It was fun to group up and level up through dungeons (it was kind of an old school game at one point where when you died you actually had to find your shard), instead of the mainly solo quest to top now. It got too easy, and is just another WoW clone now (but better imo). But I believe this game really did not fail at all.
With Vanguard, I played the beta-one month after release, and it was the first game I ever rage quit over. Too many things would happen to my character (disconnected and lost four levels, get stuck in the middle of the ocean etc.) I couldn't play it any longer. I went back to it last year for a bit, and it is a hidden gem now (though it still has bugs). But I really wish SOE would revive that game.
I played WAR in elder beta but didn't buy the game until a couple of years ago. I did enjoy my time of pvping to level cap. But got bored of the end game grind and have not been back for a year now.
Or it could have been that the performance was so terrible at launch that pretty much no one could play it.
VG was definitely a mess when it got released, but he claimed he was writing about later stages.
EQ2 is not a failure in my book. It's still not a bad game and it's got a decent amount of servers still open. I played it last December until sometime in January and had a decent time. I personally got bored, but plenty of people still play it. SOE never really supported Vanguard and as far as I know it is dead/failed. EQ2 just released another expansion.
Warhammer, oh man, did that game fail in my eyes. So many problems dating years back before it was released. Mark Jacobs, Paul Barnett, Rob Denton, and Jeff Hickman...those guys made a pretty terrible game lol. All the PR hype about the game before release ended up doing a ton of damage. Statements like "WAR IS EVERYWHERE" and "No one is going to be standing in the back healing!" all turned out to be false. Mark Jacobs saying before release that he was aiming to take down wow and "if we are opening up servers in 6 months after release, the game is a sucess, if we are closing them down, we did something wrong". Then, because they completely messed up the launch and opened up a crap ton of servers, spreading the player base thin, they were forced to close down a bunch of those same servers about not long after release. I wasn't in closed beta, but from people that i knew in my guild and friends that were in it, the game was not even ready for release, after being pushed back a couple times by Mythic. Mythic has always been terrible with communication and this was seen in beta as many pleas for changes in the game went ignored.
On top of that, the game has always been buggy, the same bugs are still there more than two years after release. When the game launched, a TON of people had stuttering/hitching problems, plus the servers couldn't handle large fights in the least. And of course they only had two factions, completely ignoring how successful their three faction system was in DAoC. It was rumored that Games Workshop mandated two factions, but i really have no idea, probably just laziness or an attempt to copy WoW. More content has been removed from this game than any other I have played (forts, scenarios, guild keeps, the whole pre-1.4 rvr system, wards, keep lords, keep guards, too many to list). In two years really, the only major content they added was LotD and, well damn I think that is it. Well, if you count that last "expansion" as content I guess they did add a little more. Bioware became involved, siphoned off their dev/art talent to SWTOR, which made things worse. Nowadays, well, the game is still in rough shape and personally I don't think a f2p or "freemium" model will work. Down to two NA servers, and supposedly Badlands, a server that was recently the highest pop server of them all, is starting to dwindle in population.
Here's an article about, explains better than I:
http://www.brighthub.com/video-games/mmo/articles/44427.aspx
/warhammer rant off
Don't get me wrong though, there were times the game was fun, I played it quite a bit. Just one of the more frustrating MMO experiences I have ever had. I really like the Warhammer universe and it was painful to see a game like this come out, wasting the IP.
the question is this: would be the warhammer considered such a big failure, if it was not take up by fans as a (failed attempt) for daoc2? (not sure if they did or didnt marketed it this way, WO was never my kind of mmorpg.
Well, no. I don't think anyone that was a fan of DAoC ever saw Warhammer Online as a DAoC 2. It was very evident from the beginning of closed beta that it was nothing like DAoC. Everyone wanted Camelot 2, but we got this instead.
Still do this day, I believe they should have just made DAoC 2 and put the Warhammer IP on top of it. Would have been great game. For some reason of another, Mark Jacobs wanted to do something different, and in the end all he ended up with was a poor copy of World of Warcraft. I believe in the very beginning, WAR was even a PvE-centric game, but due to the cries of testers, they tacked on all the RvR lakes. I think in the beginning it was mainly just pve dungeons and scenarios.
well, i didnt ment literally that they saw it as daoc2. but more or less in every rant against WO were things like "why didnt day make pvp meaningful with things like fighting for artefacts as in daoc" "why didnt they go with only 2 factions instead of 3 as in daoc" etc. - really it seems like players WERE expecting it to be daoc2
and therefore my question: would it be seens as such fail, if it did came (same game) from different game company?
Ahh I see. Well for me, I wasn't really expecting DAoC 2, even though that is what I would have wanted. It wasn't failure in my eyes because it wasn't camelot 2, it was just bad game that was poorly managed and tried to recreate what WoW had done.
Hard to tell if it came from a different company; if it would have been a bigger or lesser failure. I guess if everything happened the same way, but with different people/company, I think it would have probably even been worse. I know a lot of people cut Mythic a lot of slack because they knew that they had made a really good game some years prior. Hell, even after they had a billing mixup and Mythic charged my bank account 10 monthly payments in one day (I had cancelled my sub about a week before this happened, and I got charged even though my sub wasn't active), I still came back to the game later because for some reason or another I had some hope that Mythic could turn it around. I think if it was another no-name company, I would have called it quits a monht after release. Or maybe not; maybe it would not have been so bad. I know that supposedly they had sold close to 800-850k boxes by the first few months of the game, and now they are probably 10-30k subscribers. I suppose if it would have been a smaller development company, they probably would not have sold so many boxes, thus losing "less" subscribers.
WARs troubles can be summed up in 2 words: Electronic Arts. Mythics original vision for WAR was sound, the team was knowledgable and experienced from DAoC, and they had a stellar I.P. to build off of. Hitching the Mythic horse to the EA wagon just let the clueless EA coachman drive them out the barn before they were ready. Every issue it had at release draws its roots from a lack of development cycles.
Warhammer fanatic since '85.
Yes, I will agree with you. That definitely played a part. It is unfortunate that Mythic, whether it was lack of funding or whatever, had to turn to EA. But even before they turned to EA, there were some problems with the game; they even had to push back their own release date before they signed with EA, but of course things only got worse when they inked that deal. The game definitely needed more testing, they never even finished those extra cities they had planned and had to release the slayer/black guard much later on (which were supposed to be in at release).
My poor Magus will never rift again. Can't go back anymore.
I liked VG. The only real complaint I had about it was the world was too big. There are people who do play it but it seemed like you were alone most of the time. They should make and EQ with VG+ graphics. The quest and crafting system needs to be rethought. 10 years ago it would have been fine.
This isn't a signature, you just think it is.
None of those games really failed.
1 - Warhammer was pretty fun brought some new things into MMOS and as far as i know is still pretty poular today.
2 - Vanguard - Sure launch was messed up but lots of people brought the game, still quite a few people play today.
3 - EQ2 - well this game was good from the start many people played and still do.
So how do you mean failed ? Do you mean did not beat wow to the most popular MMORPG?
Most of the games are now getting on a bit people move onto new things happens with everything i guess but wow is a different beast all togeather how or why people continue to play that game i have no idea haha
Except EVE every SUB based game in the west has less than or slightly above 100 K subs ... around 6 months after launch.
I think 100K players is still awesome if you see the terri bad state in which some players are playing and ... still paying.
They simply are not very good games to pay sbscriptions for.
So most games now go Free to play to squeeze the last dollars/cents out of the shrinking fan base.
After the Free to play step there is only way down: shut the servers and the last one shut the lights...
This Free to play transition will have hard consequences for every new game launching (wait till you see those trends in the coming months when people drop like flies in new hyped launches).
So WHY did they fail ?: the majority of people don't want to pay 15 dollars a month for a game that really is not a good game (for them).
You have to be 500% better as a sub based game than a free one (like Lotro) these days. And no they simply are not.
F2P is killing all (even the F2P ones, because they only fill gaps for 2 months and no drive to play further ...)
Watch the trends.
no, what he means that (at least with vanguard i am rather sure of that (what i shame, i think it is a great game)) they didnt earn enough money even to cover the costs => they failed
Man i was so hyped up about Warhammer, i coulnt wait for release, sniffing evry bit of info i could snif on, then the release of Warhammer, i was amazed by all the bugs and lag they had ingame...
PvP balance was so epic fail, i realy felt like playing an alpha stage mmo in development, and i quited after 2 months to never look back.
Horrible MMO that had one of the most EPIC IP's up till that time.
Aion is second, i waited for 2 years, ignoring all the people who had foretold this game could not live up to its standards. boy was i disapointed again at release day.
Bugs, boring grind, pvp unbalance, faction unbalance, no loot from dungeons even if i run that dung 8 times in a row....
L1 and L2 was also a hardcore grind, but it had something to kept you going forward, aion dint have that.
Many mmo's dont deserve to see the daylight, let alone being hyped up by fan boys luring people in a fail game
Still i feel i learned alot from those mmo's.
IF he means that then im sure he needs to put age of conan on that list as that will game will never cover the production costs..
Tho i cant believe EQ2 would be on it as that was always been a very popular game
Another note for Warhammer is timing. Sep 28th 2008 it came out, which was 2 months before WoW's Wrath of the Lich King expansion. Which didn't give much time for people who were hoping for WAR to draw them away from WoW. I'm a sucker for this. Althought I did manage to get max level in WAR before unsubscribing due to endless crash to desktop bug they had going. If WAR was released in the state its in now back in 2008, I think it would of done much better, they fixed a lot of stuff.
Also look at Final Fantasy that came out and people were upset that they were shipping out a incomplete game. I think if most developers ran under the same motto Blizzard runs with "It will be done, when its done" or something to that nature, most of these games would of been more successful.
Timing is everything imo. More or less talking about releasing with other competive games in the same genre.
Wait when blizzard released wow it was buggy and laggy as hell..
It took then quite a bit to get it all sorted but they still have server issues to this day.. I got a mate who playes and he said they servers in wow where up and down all night last night..
All MMOS probally get released early and not quite finished because publishers want to start making cash back asap..
You basically get skills or improved versions of skills every even level: (12, 14, 16...). Not only that but there may be even 4-6 level gaps where a class doesn't receive anything new: Only along the lines of fireball IV, V, VI. And nobody cares if you can change your appearance to a dwarf - It doesn't make you any more powerful!
How is that not streching the level cap?
Advertisement wouldn't have saved that game. I wouldn't play it even if it had no technical issues. It just wasn't good enough.
I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been -Wayne Gretzky