Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Why did WAR flopped??
Miklosan
Member Posts: 176
Hi,
What are your opinions about why Warhammer Online totally flopped? Okej, not "totally flopped" perhaps since it's still a big game compared to many other MMO's out there but still...
It was allways this talking about "the WoW-killer
" But what excactly happened along the way? The game seemed to be something extra, new ideas etc...
Nowadays from the "WoW-killer" I mostly hear: -Houston, we got an empty server!
So, what happened?
Comments
A moderate success doesn't equal a "flop".
it wasn't enough like DOAC to appeal to those fans yet not different enough from WOW to draw players from that.
It certainly wasn't a flop, but it didn't even come close to meeting the expectations of the developers, the fans or the industry.
I think their biggest problem is that they had so few classes or races and they were so narrowly focused. With a very small range in skill sets. Very early on, my characters felt like they had plateaued and had nothing but upgrades to look forward to, with so few new skills after level 20. Or the fact that most classes were just a copy and past of another with different names and maybe a few very minor flavor differences. The world was too small and too linear and lacked a lot of the complexity of their older game, Dark Age of Camelot. I've played both and I liked DAoC much, much better.
I like WoW casual game play, but WAR failed to do it right, so I found the classes boring, the quests interesting, the Tome of Knowlege amazing, the world clausterphobic, the travel speeds before mounts utterly atrocious, being forced to group for anything that had decent rewards sucked (dungeons, PvP / RvR, public quests), way too slow leveleing curve, everyone of the same class looked exactly alike in each level range, no housing to help you feel attached, RvR that failed to have real meaning and pretty lackluster rewards unless you were one of the rare people to get a gold bag from a keep raid and an economy that favored greed ( I never once bought anything from the AH because of ridiculous pricing), where the heck were all of the fun abilites that I enjoy so much in other games, things like levitate, flight, run speed, teleports (short range and long range), shape changing, water walking, water breathing, under water swimming, submerged temples, floating castles, invisibility, random world treasure chests, flying mounts, escape abilities other than flee, etc....
With PvE raiding, it has never been a question of being "good enough". I play games to have fun, not to be a simpering toady sitting through hour after hour of mind numbing boredom and fawning over a guild master in the hopes that he will condescend to reward me with shiny bits of loot. But in games where those people get the highest progression, anyone who doesn't do that will just be a moving target for them and I'll be damned if I'm going to pay money for the privilege. - Neanderthal
My opinion is:
Generally speaking, it tried to do stuff that other games did better.
---
Waiting for: GW2
*thumbs up*: GW, Eve(, WoW)
*thumbs down*: MO, GA, FE
....the definition of a "flop" is when a game doesn't blow wow out of the water...lol
Definately not a flop, just by no means a roaring success.
Basically, it's a "niche" RvR game .. and niche games just don't get the big subscription numbers.
Playing: EVE, Final Fantasy 13, Uncharted 2, Need for Speed: Shift
WAR didn't flop.. perhaps it just didn't reached the quantity of subscribers compared to the hype.
Here are some reason in my opinion:
1. The game was too pvp oriented without enough PvE content. PvE content tends to be bland and repetitive. Character leveling up tends not to feel like they're stronger.
2. The quests are all about killing x or gather y or other types of fedex task.
3. The biggest attraction was also its biggest flaw. I'm talking about public quest. Apparently each map has several public quest which has pretty much the same reward. People were spread too much out in the public quest area. And just like the law of least resistance, people only do the public quests that are the easiest totally ignoring the rest. A change that I would recommend is that each public quest in an area should give out different rewards, that way people would try to complete almost all of them instead of just the select 1-2. It's such a crying shame that MOST of the public quests are soo under utilized.
4. The public quest are basically all the same, kill X mob or gather Y ingredients or interact with Z items then kill some elite mobs then kill the boss. It isn't really a big flaw except if it's gonna be the same for most public quest then people get bored of it. There's really isn't much variation. The higher lvl ones have more steps but its basically the same.
5. Keep battles are about zerging... which side has the most force will usually win.
6. The abilities of each class aren't much different from the their basic archtype. Unlike WoW.. there's no subclass distinction... soo each class kinda feels bland and unspecial.
That's it in my opinion.
It's hard to imagine how it could defeat a game which is almost exactly like it, but fully entrenched.
____________________________________________
im to lazy too use grammar or punctuation good
My own opinions btw are as follows;
* When I started to play them game, last Aug/Sept, it almost felt like a singleplayer game because of the horrible CHAT-SYSTEM! Maybe they worked that out by now, don't know.
*Alot of people who started to play camed from WoW where the "evil" side, the Hordes usually dominated.(not on every server ofcourse!) So folks choosed that "evil" side in hope for having an advantage and the population got imbalanced which was defenetly not a good thing for a game like WAR.
*Jeff from mythic said something like; We're making a game, not a world. And that's pretty much explain how the WAR's "world" feels like..... a game! (I play MMO's for my fantasy to be carried away for a few hours..., I want a new world!)
I dont know the subcription numbers and their trend, but I found WAR terribly boring. The soulless, ever-the-same-looking characters, the totally lackluster PVE quests and in the RVR every keep was exactly like every other - bash door 1, bash door 2, run up ramp. Just so boring and so not catching my emotional attachment.
People don't ask questions to get answers - they ask questions to show how smart they are. - Dogbert
No definition of a flop would be if the game doesn't meet EA's internal expectations.. which nobody posting on this forums knows.. one way or the other. At least for WAR this would be the definition.
So if the game has a many years long run.. it wasn't a flop for EA.
If it gets shut down by EA .. then no matter what any fan says.. it was a flop.
/shrug
So few classes? Umm, World of Warcraft much?
Yep.
Tecmo Bowl.
No definition of a flop would be if the game doesn't meet EA's internal expectations.. which nobody posting on this forums knows.. one way or the other. At least for WAR this would be the definition.
So if the game has a many years long run.. it wasn't a flop for EA.
If it gets shut down by EA .. then no matter what any fan says.. it was a flop.
/shrug
I thought the publicly stated target was 500,000 subs.
Linear, limited gameplay.
I've played WoW.
Why would I want to play it again?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Guys! I'm hopelessly lost in a mountain of mole hills! Them damn moles!
I've played WoW.
Why would I want to play it again?
exactly. companies have this stupid notion that to get millions of subs you must copy WOW.....yet why would someone stop playing wow to play a wow clone with RvR? one day they will learn in order to get that level of success you must make the anti-wow. the polar opposite of wow.
It was supposed to be the WoW killer? I posted in the WAR forums over a year ago that the game would be trash, and I thank those forums for introducing me to Aion.
The thing a LOT of critics miss when describing their disappointment with the classes is where the roots of the game come from.
From a design standpoint it is a Conversion to computer of a table-top game, it isn't built as a sandbox-style MMO, it's built as a competitive RvR wargame & the classes, races, weapons & a multitude of other things are all firmly & squarely rooted in that heritage, the more Warhammer Lore I find & get into the more that fact becomes apparent, Games Workshop were clearly intrumental & heavily involved in the games creation, & the game probably gives a table top player a fairly decent computer iteration of what they are accustomed to.
WAR is far from a flop, in fact I'd go so far as to say that it has been sucessful & will continue to attract players, but that I do not expect it to hit World of Warcraft subscription numbers because it is a niche-market game rather than a mass-market game, without many players realising it World of Warcraft makes a huge number of concessions to have such a broad appeal, & there is a lot of room in the market place for MMORPG's to co-exist & offer different "worlds" to play in, or experiences.
I don't think WAR sets out to provde a "world" or a sandbox environment, it sets out a tightly controlled arena for competitive play, & then bolts on many extra features "because it can" by virtue of it's computer platform, in my opinion it's a way to have table top games on the internet, but enriched & with a huge amount of backstory, I do think a "Warhammer World" game is possible in a "sandbox" format, but WAR is not it.
There are indeed things that can be improved, not yet has an MMO been released & not needed extensive (we are talking years here) development to bring it to maturity, hell UO & EQ are still around some 9+ years later & continue to throw up surpising developments.
Time will tell, but I have an optimistic outlook for WAR's future, & I think too much hype & pre-conceived expectations of it being a game it wasn't were flying around & that leads to inevitable disappointment for some, & surprising enjoyment for others.
To use an analogy World of Warcraft is like McDonalds, WAR, EQ DAoC are all specialist resaurants, I don't think we have a MMO Burger-King yet, none of the in-development will touch WoW, but I am quietly optimistic about the MMO 38Studios are working on.
1. ORVR had too few interesting objectives. All you had were
- Kill a few monsters then click a flag
- bash a door and then zerg a keep lord
These weren't interesting and there were only two of them. The funnest time I had was in the pqs that had objectives that directly pit you against the enemy's pq objectives however you had to be on a pvp server for these to be fun because they were not in the rvr lakes. These felt like a real war with npcs and players going at it. However I only found 2 of these up to lv 25 where I quit.
2. Scenarios gave superior everything so no one did ORVR
3. ORVR didn't give people the sense they were making a real difference. Taking a keep, objective, or even the capital city didn't feel like it meant anything other than some renown and a few items.
4. Quests were lackluster kill x, retrieve x, and although other games do this too, the mobs in War were super easy and you rarely had to find groups of mobs because they do not attack when you pull mobs near them. Also the mob AI was uninteresting and varied little from mob to mob.
5. The way the zones were setup was a bit too linear. This made it not feel like a real world.
A couple things on this end...
1) I think that WAR is pretty fun when your doing keep battles.
2) A lot of the classes are overpowered in initial tiers or to similar...
3) It's not WoW but it's a WoW clone? wtflmaobbqzombie sauce
4) It's not very addictive thanks to that hellish grind that kicks in...thanks mythic...it's really fun when your doing keep sieges in t2 at rank 9 and all but you only get like 50 xp for a kill against a 21? And you need 48k just to level?
5) WTF is with shadow warriors? You'll animate the guys hands but you won't do a bowstring/arrow or even a quiver?
.../end rant
Honestly...it's just an OK game and as a former WoW player...I still hate them both. I'm gonna give WAR till the end of my sub then I'm gonna look into something else that doesn't waste my breath...Nothing real special that I could live without and nothing really too dull.
No definition of a flop would be if the game doesn't meet EA's internal expectations.. which nobody posting on this forums knows.. one way or the other. At least for WAR this would be the definition.
So if the game has a many years long run.. it wasn't a flop for EA.
If it gets shut down by EA .. then no matter what any fan says.. it was a flop.
/shrug
I thought the publicly stated target was 500,000 subs.
And EA has published the active sub numbes for the current time where? and this is how many months from release?
How about a year from now?
You do realize that an MMO doesn't start making a profit the month it launches right?
Back when UO and EQ came out with what a game cost to produce then they needed 100,000 subs to start making a profit after around 3 years. That's recovering development cost. So in a sense its making a profit every month but you have the development cost to recover before you actually make a profit.
If they wanted 500,000 subs how long did they need that to hit the profit mark.. what if it was 2 years and 1 year in they are at 100,000 subs.
That's why I remain more or less neutral on the topic.. the subscriber numbers after 3 months aren't a long term indication. Tho I would have to say from my point of view rentention is much lower than they expected.
Regardless after its been live for a year if they will release numbers we'll see how its done. I honestly don't expect them to ever release numbers again unless they get things where they should have been and get an increase.
They are carrying a lot of debt right now (not because of war and its EA in general I am talking about). So we'll see what happens.
To be honest a failed game is NOT good for any game player.. I don't feel any vindication if they don't do wel. Even if I don't like the game it needs to do well so that investors will fund games I might enjoy.
That's why I don't really like the entire forum fights we get into here. Any true game player needs every game to succeed even if they don't like it.
I was only trying to define "flop" and I still stand by what I said.. and I don't know what EA projected or where they really are at. So EA may be happy .. I don't know one way or the other.
the word flop is relative. for gamers its a game that fails to live up to what it's advertised to be and for developers/publishers it's money put in compared to the mney coming out and WAR is a little bit of both.
as for why it "flopped" for gamers is because it didn't live up to what they advertised the game to be. outside of the first two weeks RvR was at best inconsistant and at worse non-existant. so it turned out to be mostly a scenario grind and thats not why people were interested in war. i think thats the biggest reason. also, the end game T4 zone control / RvR has been a complete mess since the game launched.
Tier 3 turned a lot of people away from the game to. Tier 1 and tier 2 were relatively pain free lvling through and then it comes to a grinding hault when you enter tier 3. mostly 10 lvls of Tor Anroc grind and the pve wasnt enough to carry you through the lvls and the pve was quite boring at times.
and for the "roll on a more populated server" crowd, the direct success of a MMO depends on wide array of successful servers, not just one or two. and when a game launches its a crap shoot on which server is gonna be a "good" one or a "bad" one. its not very encouraging to a paying customer to invest 2 months into a game to find out they are on a "bad" server. if they launched the game with half the servers they did the story of war as it is now would be quite different.
No definition of a flop would be if the game doesn't meet EA's internal expectations.. which nobody posting on this forums knows.. one way or the other. At least for WAR this would be the definition.
So if the game has a many years long run.. it wasn't a flop for EA.
If it gets shut down by EA .. then no matter what any fan says.. it was a flop.
/shrug
I thought the publicly stated target was 500,000 subs.
And EA has published the active sub numbes for the current time where? and this is how many months from release?
How about a year from now?
You do realize that an MMO doesn't start making a profit the month it launches right?
Back when UO and EQ came out with what a game cost to produce then they needed 100,000 subs to start making a profit after around 3 years. That's recovering development cost. So in a sense its making a profit every month but you have the development cost to recover before you actually make a profit.
If they wanted 500,000 subs how long did they need that to hit the profit mark.. what if it was 2 years and 1 year in they are at 100,000 subs.
That's why I remain more or less neutral on the topic.. the subscriber numbers after 3 months aren't a long term indication. Tho I would have to say from my point of view rentention is much lower than they expected.
Regardless after its been live for a year if they will release numbers we'll see how its done. I honestly don't expect them to ever release numbers again unless they get things where they should have been and get an increase.
They are carrying a lot of debt right now (not because of war and its EA in general I am talking about). So we'll see what happens.
To be honest a failed game is NOT good for any game player.. I don't feel any vindication if they don't do wel. Even if I don't like the game it needs to do well so that investors will fund games I might enjoy.
That's why I don't really like the entire forum fights we get into here. Any true game player needs every game to succeed even if they don't like it.
I was only trying to define "flop" and I still stand by what I said.. and I don't know what EA projected or where they really are at. So EA may be happy .. I don't know one way or the other.
"To be honest a failed game is NOT good for any game player"
good to see someone understands that PC gaming as a whole does not need its games to bomb. As for gamers who revel or delight in games that fail or bomb it is only hurting the PC gaming market. The more MMOs that bomb, the less studios will risk making games for this genre -- and PC gaming as a whole suffers. It really is quite simple, but sadly there are so many who lack common sense --
I would love to see more MMOs hit the 1 million mark or better as this will benefit PC gamers.
I also got tired of war before the first month..... nothing catched me there, and there is something bad about it.... no one is buying it... A few days ago i was in a near best buy and there was tons of war boxes... and the same boxes of 3 months ago... lol... how do I know.. because I notice some strange dust above the boxes....