Not to mention they built Warhammer on a bad engine, i know they started using that engine before EA got involved so probably didint have the money.
But alot of Wars problems could have been solved if they used say the Hero Egine.
Game has been optimized and runs great ont he currnet engine .. But you suggest they should have used the Hero Engine which is untesteed in an RvR enviroment... As a matter a fact its untested in any sort of enviroment at all ....
I believe it is, it would involve a whole new game and design.
Most ppl have covered most of the problems in each area.
I agree with the OP in respect to immersion loss: The disconnected zones/maps and flightpathing personally hit a point where the game felt: Empty, disconnected and whole areas of content empty theme-park areas.
SO many reasons contribute to WAR failing. But my personal one is only 2-factions for RvR, destroyed the future of PvP when it was actually fun despite the Keep issues.
WAR was a PvP game that didn't have good PvP. That is the reason it didn't meet expectations. The day WAR launched, WoW had better PvP, not to mention an infinitely more polished and deep PvE and crafting system. Why would anyone choose WAR?
Some other, more minor reasons:
Too many public quests requiring too many players - due to population shortages, you mostly had to skip these, which were supposed to be the game's main PvE focus.
Dungeons were few and far between and generally underwhelming.
Crafting was beyond terrible. WAR would have been better if it had been released without it.
Items and Itemization were lackluster. There was pretty much no economy.
Segmenting of population into three different maps, then leaving out the capital cities for the other two factions. Seriously, you have six racial factions on a not-to-big server, why would you split the questing into six different paths? Poor design.
I believe it is, it would involve a whole new game and design.
Most ppl have covered most of the problems in each area.
I agree with the OP in respect to immersion loss: The disconnected zones/maps and flightpathing personally hit a point where the game felt: Empty, disconnected and whole areas of content empty theme-park areas.
SO many reasons contribute to WAR failing. But my personal one is only 2-factions for RvR, destroyed the future of PvP when it was actually fun despite the Keep issues.
Hey what rights to Mythic/Bioware have at changing things in the Game World, under GW licence?
By this I mean, what limits do the developer have at changing lore to fit a better MMO design?
Sorry I disagree. WAR's two biggest failings were the silly mechanics of the upper tier campaigns and the poor balance of the 30+ level classes. That and the population debacle.
I am pretty sure I could log on to the endless trial right now make a character and do some low level RvR and have alot of fun. I can't say that was ever true of the 30+ gane in WAR.
Messed up itemization goals, poor instances, quest grinds etc. All that stuff can be found in other games. Especially the old school games. In fact DAOC had many of the same problems.
But WAR lost its fun in the later game and then all these problems had nothign to balance them out. And certainly for me, I can completely 100% guarantee you that fast travel was not a problem. In fact in the overall design of the campaign the game would simply not have worked on release without some kind of zone fast travel. Perhaps this is indicative of a flawed campaign design. That is a much more complex issue.
But I believe the game could have done OK if they had simply devoted as much time and care to the upper game and made sure it was fun and balanced with sane campaign goals.
In addition to many of the reasons listed here I will add my own.
I loved DAOC and played it for a long time. Despite it's flaws, it had some, it kept me coming back for 2 reasons.
1. 3 Realms! This is so simple yet it really is what did WAR in. By having only 2 realms you were always going to have a pop balance problems and the realm ladder system was horrid with this. When one side gets railed on everyday they stop caring.
By having 3 realms there is always somebody to hit you in the back if you gain the upper hand. This is still true in DAOC today and one of the big reasons why it is still alive, sort of.
If anybody understands the WARHAMMER IP they will get this next part clearly. In Warhammer there are neutral parties that do their own thing and don't always fall into the ORDER and DESTRUCTION sides. There could have been a 3rd faction with Wood Elves, Lizardmen, and Bretonia. I think maybe one of the reasons that they didn't do this is Games Workshop themselves.
Even though these races are neutral most of the time, maybe not Bretonia, Games Workshop wants to have the good vs evil thing going on all the time. You probably couled have put drawf on NEUTRAL and Bretonia on Order I suppose. Mythic should have stuck to their guns and showed that 3 realms in a PvP based game was what made DAOC so great.
Games Workshop probably pointed to WOW and said "Hey, they do it with 2 realms. Beat them." It was not that easy and WOW is very different than what Warhammer was TRYING to become. I don't want to compare WOW and WAR but you get the idea.
2. The world design. DAOC had 3 whole different worlds. They didnt not interact with each other, except for gaining PvE things to help your realm. When you wanted to go PvP you would all go into a different PvP realm with castles and such. This way you could have the best of both worlds. When you wanted to PvP you went there.
When you wanted to PvE you went there. WAR shoudl have stuck to that and gotten more types of players to stay. PvPers run through ad dont understand why they cant attack the other side, or run through PQs and have to fight mobs. PvE people get their zone locked and hosed when the other realm takes it, they log off.
Even though I somewhat liked the semi-merge of PvP and PvE, in sigles zones, it killed off the extreme of moth PvPer and PvEs which make up most of the mmo players. I LOVED PQs and locking zones. I love the tome and reading all the WARHAMMER history
Even though I amd not a WAR fanboy I am a WARHAMME farnboy so I read everything I can about it. The average gamer doesn't care and they can't keep them there long enough to learn about the world, it seemed to work for World of Warcraft.
Just real quick on the technical problems at launch. WOW had many problems when they launched but people (me too) stuck with it because when it first came out it was a wonderful game and we didnt mind if the servers when down or there were bugs. We loved it and stayed to see it through. If WAR had been more solid in design and execution from the first day, people wouldn't even be talking about the bugs and crashing.
Even saying all this I am coming back to WAR with a few friends to see how things are going. I have been away from mmos for a while and I will drop on them here and there to see how they are.
I agree 100% with the OP as when I played Warhammer it didn't feel like a "virtual world" I had been used to in MMOs (been playing since EQ). It seemed like all the zones were very "Square and Retangular" and like the OP mentioned you couldn't get from one factions area to anothers without using teleportation with a loading screen.
I mean the whole reason WAR even sounded a tad bit interesting to me was because in my mind before WAR was even released I had imagined meaningful battles across this vast world where you would be battling for castles and keeps which would determine your advances in a persistant world towards the enemies capitals... something like Planetside but evolved.
Instead we got a bunch of disconnected minigames and everything felt half assed.
Mystic blind sided everyone ( yes screwed them ) by giving too much exp to Scenarios ( battle grounds ) and close to nothing to RvR or open world quest. EVERYONE WAS BITCHING about battle grounds getting all the exp but they did nothing about it. It's kind of like giving us WoW and only giving exp to battle grounds, they may be fun, but for most it's just something for people to do when they only have 20 min to play.
Where do you RvR fanatics come up with this crap. There is almost nothing factual about your "FACT". First of all, why in the world would you even b*tch about xp in WAR, it was ridiculously easy to gain. Scenarios had more xp but RvR is where you got the renown, which is a bigger focus of the game.
The real fact is that WAR's scenarios is one of the game's best features. As a PvP/RvR game, it was great to be able to queue up for a 15 min scenario and gain renown, xp & badges from it. It allowed for casual play and a number of the scenarios were a ton of fun.
RvR was kinda weak and is best explained by RvDoor. It was mostly boring. Aside from that, it sometimes took hours to get anything significant to happen. The concept of RvR in War was better than the actual play.
What I will agree with is that WAR is a well built game that had a ton of potential. However, the three key reasons where Mythic dropped the ball have long been explored and were mentioned early on, especially in beta:
1) Game engine was not coded for actual large scale RvR Battles. Just such epic fail when you advertise your game as mass pvp
2) 2 factions. Just plain dumb when these guys built DaOC. You need 3 factions
3) Class imbalance with CC and AOE. Bright Wizard is all that needs to be said.
Other reasons have been beat to death. The PvE was lacking, aside from PQs, which were an awesome concept. War is a PvP game and some of us actually like simplistic PvE but it was an issue for many. The crafting system was quirky and insufficient, along with the auction house & market. Endgame for both PvE and PvP were weak, city sieges just blew goats.
I actually liked the free play, so I bought a month, and ended up canceling after 2 weeks. The reason was because t2 and t3 was more of the same, but with less action. And because there didnt seem to be any point to the PVP. You never really achieved anything but leveling up. And then going and playing any other game showed me how terrible the gfx were.
Mystic blind sided everyone ( yes screwed them ) by giving too much exp to Scenarios ( battle grounds ) and close to nothing to RvR or open world quest. EVERYONE WAS BITCHING about battle grounds getting all the exp but they did nothing about it. It's kind of like giving us WoW and only giving exp to battle grounds, they may be fun, but for most it's just something for people to do when they only have 20 min to play.
Where do you RvR fanatics come up with this crap. There is almost nothing factual about your "FACT". First of all, why in the world would you even b*tch about xp in WAR, it was ridiculously easy to gain. Scenarios had more xp but RvR is where you got the renown, which is a bigger focus of the game.
The real fact is that WAR's scenarios is one of the game's best features. As a PvP/RvR game, it was great to be able to queue up for a 15 min scenario and gain renown, xp & badges from it. It allowed for casual play and a number of the scenarios were a ton of fun.
RvR was kinda weak and is best explained by RvDoor. It was mostly boring. Aside from that, it sometimes took hours to get anything significant to happen. The concept of RvR in War was better than the actual play.
What I will agree with is that WAR is a well built game that had a ton of potential. However, the three key reasons where Mythic dropped the ball have long been explored and were mentioned early on, especially in beta:
1) Game engine was not coded for actual large scale RvR Battles. Just such epic fail when you advertise your game as mass pvp
2) 2 factions. Just plain dumb when these guys built DaOC. You need 3 factions
3) Class imbalance with CC and AOE. Bright Wizard is all that needs to be said.
Other reasons have been beat to death. The PvE was lacking, aside from PQs, which were an awesome concept. War is a PvP game and some of us actually like simplistic PvE but it was an issue for many. The crafting system was quirky and insufficient, along with the auction house & market. Endgame for both PvE and PvP were weak, city sieges just blew goats.
Class balance had nothing to do with WARs failure.
And with regards to the bright wizard give it a rest. Destruction had the same class with more utility.
I topped the boards on my Wiz and I seen them topped by just about every class in game.
And crowd control...THERE WAS NOT ENOUGH CROWD CONTROL. Mythic caved into the crying they heard from daoc, did a 180, gave tanks the most CC instead of soft casters and there was nothing to stop a tank from getting to you.
I remember having the CC argument before the game was released and I still stand by my opinion. Crowd Control mixes up fights. Without crowd control fights break down to there most basic elements. I hit you, you hit me...wow this is fun isnt it?
An mmo based around pvp with limited or without crowd control is like those old boxing fights where the two guys take each others punches.
My experience with WAR was one of..... Detachment. Take a decent world, then make it possible to jump to anywhere in the world through queues. (same thing that kills WoW immersion, btw). Add to that a glitchy chat system, and a scenario system that allows people to jump in and out of a group without any sense of dependance on each other, and you get a system where it really didn't matter what zone you were in, or what faction you played, it was just bland repetativeness. Plus nobody ever said anything, you get in a group, get your accomplishment, leave the group, and who cares about the other people? Yeah it may have been better if you got a guild and started to do max level PVP, if you could manage to find a guild, but there just didn't seem to be any reason to do so.
I think a major failure for WAR was the virtual world like the OP said. How that translates into a failure, in my opinion, was more than mechanics. I think it is inarguable that the customer base for WAR was littered with ex (and current) DAoC players. For those of you who played DAoC, it was not a small customer base.
DAoC was far from perfect. It had LOS issues, class balance issues, exploits... etc. So it wasn't flawless mechanics that engraved a loyal following to the game. It was an intamacy that evolved as a result of the aforementioned virtual world.
Small guilds and bands of friends flourished. Friday night would roll around, I would band together my my 15 or so guild mates and we'd go do something. You could zerg if you wanted to, or you could roam some distant part of the frontier in hopes of causing trouble. Or, if you wanted to explore the zones in PvE ville. you could do that too.
Who remembers the game when you had to wear the stupid necklace and get ported to the RVR zones. And, oh God, the mile walls?
It's 2010 and I still remember specific nights where we'd hole up in a tower (Before they could get destroyed) and see how long we could survive. More than once it evolved into a relic raid where someone else decided to use it as a diversion and raise a zerg. Speaking of zergs... the zerg was freaking cool in DAoC. Even if you didn't like that style of play, you had to respect the huge, sloshing mass of angry people like a kracken come to devour all in its path. You might wound it... but kill it? NO! Your little 8 man had to speed around it, away from it, or bite it in the backside and flee before its angry wrath could snare you!
Yes... the small community of a guild or 8 friends could have animpact in a world and never even associate with what was happening on the far side of the frontier. Yet, they could be tangents.
Not in WAR. No, no, no... you are a zerg. You run the 'ORVR' zones in a mechanical and obedient path and get into the opponents city in order to get a pair of pants you can put on after you've done the same stinking thing 200 times. My small guild was vanquished. Assimilated into a mass of people who I cared not group with in the first place.
regardless of whatever people say, for me anyways I canceled this game after the first month because the UI was laggy. I'm sorry but a game being released shouldn't have lag to do moves. When I went back to play the game a year later this was still a problem.
Is it really hard to make an mmo where you press the 1 button to do the move and have to wait 1-2 seconds for it to actually go?
If there is a thing that ALL mmo's should learn from WoW it's how to polish the damn game before you release it. Sure WoW had problems at release, but hitting a button and it INSTANTLY casting was thought of to be standard. Since WoW i've played all the AAA titles and only Aion has actually done this also.
Only in the mmo genre can this fact be over sighted for some reason.
The reality is that the failure of Warhammer wasn't the result of a small number of problems. Really, pick just about any aspect of the game and there will most likely be some problem with it. Not some small cosmetic problem, but something that ranges anywhere from extremely annoying to gamebreaking.
Just look at some of the issues brought up in this thread and how diverse the problems were.
Class balance all over the map
Huge crowd control issues
Huge area effect damage issues
Realm balance (or lack of)
Uninspired pve
Horrible mob AI
Overuse of the PQ system
Broken laggy unresponsive game engine and combat system
Server instability for the pinnacle features of the game
Poorly implemented lore
Poorly implemented incentives between PvP, RvR and PvE
Broken RvR control system (pve, pvp, rvr contributions)
Broken public quest contribution system
PvE endgame for a "RvR" pvp game.
Half finished crafting, auction hall and mail systems
A keep conquest system that was added at the 11th hour that conflicted with the direction the rest of the game was aiming for.
Etc, etc.
There was simply to much to overlook to make the game really enjoyable. Not even mentioning things that fall into player tastes like animations, zone/character art differences between the factions, lack of connection to the world/ownership of landmass that needed defending, etc. Deep down there is a good game waiting to get out from underneath all of those problems. Even though some of them are core issues that will never go away.
On top of that Mythic often made these problems worse when they attempted to fix them. Not only was the pace of the fixes slow, but often not well thought out and resulted in things like keep swapping.
Mystic blind sided everyone ( yes screwed them ) by giving too much exp to Scenarios ( battle grounds ) and close to nothing to RvR or open world quest. EVERYONE WAS BITCHING about battle grounds getting all the exp but they did nothing about it. It's kind of like giving us WoW and only giving exp to battle grounds, they may be fun, but for most it's just something for people to do when they only have 20 min to play.
Where do you RvR fanatics come up with this crap. There is almost nothing factual about your "FACT". First of all, why in the world would you even b*tch about xp in WAR, it was ridiculously easy to gain. Scenarios had more xp but RvR is where you got the renown, which is a bigger focus of the game.
The real fact is that WAR's scenarios is one of the game's best features. As a PvP/RvR game, it was great to be able to queue up for a 15 min scenario and gain renown, xp & badges from it. It allowed for casual play and a number of the scenarios were a ton of fun.
RvR was kinda weak and is best explained by RvDoor. It was mostly boring. Aside from that, it sometimes took hours to get anything significant to happen. The concept of RvR in War was better than the actual play.
What I will agree with is that WAR is a well built game that had a ton of potential. However, the three key reasons where Mythic dropped the ball have long been explored and were mentioned early on, especially in beta:
1) Game engine was not coded for actual large scale RvR Battles. Just such epic fail when you advertise your game as mass pvp
2) 2 factions. Just plain dumb when these guys built DaOC. You need 3 factions
3) Class imbalance with CC and AOE. Bright Wizard is all that needs to be said.
Other reasons have been beat to death. The PvE was lacking, aside from PQs, which were an awesome concept. War is a PvP game and some of us actually like simplistic PvE but it was an issue for many. The crafting system was quirky and insufficient, along with the auction house & market. Endgame for both PvE and PvP were weak, city sieges just blew goats.
Class balance had nothing to do with WARs failure.
And with regards to the bright wizard give it a rest. Destruction had the same class with more utility.
I topped the boards on my Wiz and I seen them topped by just about every class in game.
And crowd control...THERE WAS NOT ENOUGH CROWD CONTROL. Mythic caved into the crying they heard from daoc, did a 180, gave tanks the most CC instead of soft casters and there was nothing to stop a tank from getting to you.
I remember having the CC argument before the game was released and I still stand by my opinion. Crowd Control mixes up fights. Without crowd control fights break down to there most basic elements. I hit you, you hit me...wow this is fun isnt it?
An mmo based around pvp with limited or without crowd control is like those old boxing fights where the two guys take each others punches.
Yes it did, many left over the poor class balance issues and the BW was one of the main concerns...BW vs Sorc, the BW AoE set up allowed for a wider area of effect, add to that all Order had to do at points (esp defensive fortress positions) was to gather and stack their AoE's and destruction couldn't get near ESP the sorcs to counter with their AoE's (they were squishy and healers couldn't keep up...hell the healers couldn't keep up with healing the tanks).
Mythic "eventually" started fixing some of these issues but many were either gone or leaving.
Another main issue was the servers Mythic hosted the game on, DAoC got moved to some old servers and they used the ones DAoC were on at the time instead of upgrading to the next gen servers that could have better handled the "WAR" part of the end game (since Mythic decided to make it a funnel system). This led to severe lag, server crashes and limited populace able to participate in the end game fortress seiges (pre city invasion).
The server crashes killed off most of the early populas, poor class balance killed off more...most of the other things were minor by comparison.
Mythic did a lot of great things with the game but poor execution was a nail in the coffin so to speak...
I think a major failure for WAR was the virtual world like the OP said. How that translates into a failure, in my opinion, was more than mechanics. I think it is inarguable that the customer base for WAR was littered with ex (and current) DAoC players. For those of you who played DAoC, it was not a small customer base.
DAoC was far from perfect. It had LOS issues, class balance issues, exploits... etc. So it wasn't flawless mechanics that engraved a loyal following to the game. It was an intamacy that evolved as a result of the aforementioned virtual world.
Small guilds and bands of friends flourished. Friday night would roll around, I would band together my my 15 or so guild mates and we'd go do something. You could zerg if you wanted to, or you could roam some distant part of the frontier in hopes of causing trouble. Or, if you wanted to explore the zones in PvE ville. you could do that too.
Who remembers the game when you had to wear the stupid necklace and get ported to the RVR zones. And, oh God, the mile walls?
It's 2010 and I still remember specific nights where we'd hole up in a tower (Before they could get destroyed) and see how long we could survive. More than once it evolved into a relic raid where someone else decided to use it as a diversion and raise a zerg. Speaking of zergs... the zerg was freaking cool in DAoC. Even if you didn't like that style of play, you had to respect the huge, sloshing mass of angry people like a kracken come to devour all in its path. You might wound it... but kill it? NO! Your little 8 man had to speed around it, away from it, or bite it in the backside and flee before its angry wrath could snare you!
Yes... the small community of a guild or 8 friends could have animpact in a world and never even associate with what was happening on the far side of the frontier. Yet, they could be tangents.
Not in WAR. No, no, no... you are a zerg. You run the 'ORVR' zones in a mechanical and obedient path and get into the opponents city in order to get a pair of pants you can put on after you've done the same stinking thing 200 times. My small guild was vanquished. Assimilated into a mass of people who I cared not group with in the first place.
Virtual world is defintely a factor.
I enjoyed your post as it reminded me of good times had in daoc.
Nothing has come close in pvp in terms of excitement sine daoc. The night and day were actually dark and light. And the color of the gear mattered because it made you harder or easier to spot depending when you were fighting.
There was just something about taking that first steps into thid at night. My eyes were scanning in anticipation of scout classes picking me off without seeing who was shooting me....it was like being on a hunt. And the thrill when you did see someone that didnt see you!
The only thing I found fun in WAR was the PQs and the Battlegrounds. I LOVE being able to just log in and jump right into a Battleground. Make a new character, jump into a battleground. Rinse. repeat. After level 10 though I just couldn't do it. A year or so ago I FORCED myself to level up doing quests and the occasional battleground. I got to level 22 and stopped playing.
Warhammer would have been amazing if...
**Instanced Battlegrounds were taken away (hear me out), and replaced with Public Quests like the pvp PQs in the Dwarf and Goblin area. In the end, the winner gets a chest, some items etc. This would have made each battleground scenario interesting with a storyline. RvR is just fine. I really liked all the little quests to do while your fighting to get your flag. I also found the cooldowns on the enemies flags sufficient. I personally cannot remember any time I thought, Sheesh order always has this tower.
**This may have been just me but the classes were for the most part, uninteresting. You have 3 trees that you don't get to access til 20+ (dumb) and there was nothing exciting like "OOOOH X ability sounds awesome" or "Just one more piont til I get X ability!!" It was more like, wtf is this? it sounds like the last ability i got. Why do I have 3 of the same ability??
**Was there music in the game? I can barely remember. I know for a lot of people this isnt something they care about but interesting or well composed music for the area actually helps me quest.
**Tradeskills were interesting, I really have no major opinion on them except that in the beginning it was just too much. I wish I could see my outcome before I hit combine, maybe could have made the outcomes potency different by adding different crap from other tradeskills.
**FINALLY the book of Lore. This part is a huge failure too me. It could have been a perfectly amazing way of getting players out in the world getting experience and leveling with enjoyment if this had been implemented and worked with. Let me elaborate. We all know WOW pretty much stole their achievement system from WAR and Xbox. What if WARhammer would have actually made their book of Lore even more awesome, by giving more rewards for exploring, pvp'ing, questing, PQs, etc etc. Instead you have a million stupid titles, and pocket items?? Pocket items that don't even work 1/2 the time and when they do, they make farting noises if you even bother equipping them and then putting them on your hotbar. *rant off* Anyways, just saying the Lore book could have been a very creative outlet for how this game panned out.
Even with all my personal reasons I disliked the game, there is still something alluring about it still. I often think of retrying Warhammer but I have to remind myself that the changes they are making are to please the people who are in the game currently, and not the ones that actually have an interest in coming back.
I can't believe people actually think the classes were balanced in this game, even today. It is some of the worst balance I have ever seen in an MMO. Anyone rational that played this game early on and experienced the BW/Sorc bomb squads would agree.
Mystic blind sided everyone ( yes screwed them ) by giving too much exp to Scenarios ( battle grounds ) and close to nothing to RvR or open world quest. EVERYONE WAS BITCHING about battle grounds getting all the exp but they did nothing about it. It's kind of like giving us WoW and only giving exp to battle grounds, they may be fun, but for most it's just something for people to do when they only have 20 min to play.
Where do you RvR fanatics come up with this crap. There is almost nothing factual about your "FACT". First of all, why in the world would you even b*tch about xp in WAR, it was ridiculously easy to gain. Scenarios had more xp but RvR is where you got the renown, which is a bigger focus of the game.
The real fact is that WAR's scenarios is one of the game's best features. As a PvP/RvR game, it was great to be able to queue up for a 15 min scenario and gain renown, xp & badges from it. It allowed for casual play and a number of the scenarios were a ton of fun.
RvR was kinda weak and is best explained by RvDoor. It was mostly boring. Aside from that, it sometimes took hours to get anything significant to happen. The concept of RvR in War was better than the actual play.
What I will agree with is that WAR is a well built game that had a ton of potential. However, the three key reasons where Mythic dropped the ball have long been explored and were mentioned early on, especially in beta:
1) Game engine was not coded for actual large scale RvR Battles. Just such epic fail when you advertise your game as mass pvp
2) 2 factions. Just plain dumb when these guys built DaOC. You need 3 factions
3) Class imbalance with CC and AOE. Bright Wizard is all that needs to be said.
Other reasons have been beat to death. The PvE was lacking, aside from PQs, which were an awesome concept. War is a PvP game and some of us actually like simplistic PvE but it was an issue for many. The crafting system was quirky and insufficient, along with the auction house & market. Endgame for both PvE and PvP were weak, city sieges just blew goats.
Class balance had nothing to do with WARs failure.
And with regards to the bright wizard give it a rest. Destruction had the same class with more utility.
I topped the boards on my Wiz and I seen them topped by just about every class in game.
And crowd control...THERE WAS NOT ENOUGH CROWD CONTROL. Mythic caved into the crying they heard from daoc, did a 180, gave tanks the most CC instead of soft casters and there was nothing to stop a tank from getting to you.
I remember having the CC argument before the game was released and I still stand by my opinion. Crowd Control mixes up fights. Without crowd control fights break down to there most basic elements. I hit you, you hit me...wow this is fun isnt it?
An mmo based around pvp with limited or without crowd control is like those old boxing fights where the two guys take each others punches.
You obviously are a recent player and were not around when this game launched. Bright Wizards ruled Warhammer for many months and CC was so rampant that people were quitting over it when changes did not come. By the time they did, it was a bit late, the game has already "failed" as too many players just threw in the towel.
As a sidenote, there is a reason why BW was so powerful, it was due to a certain couple of BW users from beta who received extremely favorable treatment when it came to feedback. The class had the most powerful AOE, especially in combination, with a AoE stun morale ability. You needed 2 classes on the Destruction side to replicate that combination of attacks.
My number one reason for quitting this game was bright wizards. The tier 1 pvp was great and i was thinking the game would stay like that. But once you got into tier 2 everything fell apart. Every match ended up being like 3-4 bright wizards rooting and flaming everyone. The entire team would focus on them but one or two haelers could easily keep them up. The imbalance was so insane that i can't imagine how any game developer could have let that go on for more than a week let alone make it out of beta.
My secondary reasons ranged from crappy boring pve, to dull uninspired graphics.
The reality is that the failure of Warhammer wasn't the result of a small number of problems. Really, pick just about any aspect of the game and there will most likely be some problem with it. Not some small cosmetic problem, but something that ranges anywhere from extremely annoying to gamebreaking.
Just look at some of the issues brought up in this thread and how diverse the problems were.
Class balance all over the map
Huge crowd control issues
Huge area effect damage issues
Realm balance (or lack of)
Uninspired pve
Horrible mob AI
Overuse of the PQ system
Broken laggy unresponsive game engine and combat system
Server instability for the pinnacle features of the game
Poorly implemented lore
Poorly implemented incentives between PvP, RvR and PvE
Broken RvR control system (pve, pvp, rvr contributions)
Broken public quest contribution system
PvE endgame for a "RvR" pvp game.
Half finished crafting, auction hall and mail systems
A keep conquest system that was added at the 11th hour that conflicted with the direction the rest of the game was aiming for.
Etc, etc.
Great list there and I totally agree. You can't blame the WAR flop on one issue alone, it was all those reasons listed above and many more. Some parts of WAR were great. I still think the lvl 1-20 Open PvP is the most fun I've had in a game in years, but after that it all goes downhill.
Incredibly linear zone design, a locked in 2 faction (I blame the games Workshop retards for that decision) battle, absolutely s**t game engine (worked below okay in beta prior to the tome of knowledge..), shoddy & uninspiring & badly implimented "endgame" only 2 of 6 cities made it in are just a few of the big reasons.
Severe lack of PvE group content, the PvE that was there was really thin, heavy over-use of the PQ system (which worked to make it become a bore because players were spread too thinly).
The game required far too big a population to make the game enjoyable but the engine, servers, & systems just could not cope with the required numbers in the first place, hence the ridiculous amounts of crashing & glitching, lag & stutter, rubber-banding & crashing (so bad I had to say it twice).
They have tried to patch up the holes since but in my opinion they are wasting their time polishing a turd, the game is fundamentally flawed from the core outwards.
Should have expanded the classes a bit, made each race it's own faction & had in game events that paired up factions occasionally to move along the storyline as the content expanded.
Comments
is it too late to switch the game engine?
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
Disagree. Just because people get excited about a game doesnt mean it has a greater chance to fail.
Actual reasons the game didnt do well, there werent 3 realms but they called it RvR, bleh.
It should of been DAOC 2, it wasnt.
The same shitty coding that went int DAOCs engine was in WAR. more fail.
Sounds and abilities did not sync up.
Player collision did not make up for the lack of Crowd Control.
I could go on and on but I dont feel like it.
Game has been optimized and runs great ont he currnet engine .. But you suggest they should have used the Hero Engine which is untesteed in an RvR enviroment... As a matter a fact its untested in any sort of enviroment at all ....
Hopefully it performs well in SWToR the MSORPG...
The mSorpg
I like that.
I believe it is, it would involve a whole new game and design.
Most ppl have covered most of the problems in each area.
I agree with the OP in respect to immersion loss: The disconnected zones/maps and flightpathing personally hit a point where the game felt: Empty, disconnected and whole areas of content empty theme-park areas.
SO many reasons contribute to WAR failing. But my personal one is only 2-factions for RvR, destroyed the future of PvP when it was actually fun despite the Keep issues.
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014633/Classic-Game-Postmortem
WAR was a PvP game that didn't have good PvP. That is the reason it didn't meet expectations. The day WAR launched, WoW had better PvP, not to mention an infinitely more polished and deep PvE and crafting system. Why would anyone choose WAR?
Some other, more minor reasons:
Too many public quests requiring too many players - due to population shortages, you mostly had to skip these, which were supposed to be the game's main PvE focus.
Dungeons were few and far between and generally underwhelming.
Crafting was beyond terrible. WAR would have been better if it had been released without it.
Items and Itemization were lackluster. There was pretty much no economy.
Segmenting of population into three different maps, then leaving out the capital cities for the other two factions. Seriously, you have six racial factions on a not-to-big server, why would you split the questing into six different paths? Poor design.
Hey what rights to Mythic/Bioware have at changing things in the Game World, under GW licence?
By this I mean, what limits do the developer have at changing lore to fit a better MMO design?
Philosophy of MMO Game Design
Sorry I disagree. WAR's two biggest failings were the silly mechanics of the upper tier campaigns and the poor balance of the 30+ level classes. That and the population debacle.
I am pretty sure I could log on to the endless trial right now make a character and do some low level RvR and have alot of fun. I can't say that was ever true of the 30+ gane in WAR.
Messed up itemization goals, poor instances, quest grinds etc. All that stuff can be found in other games. Especially the old school games. In fact DAOC had many of the same problems.
But WAR lost its fun in the later game and then all these problems had nothign to balance them out. And certainly for me, I can completely 100% guarantee you that fast travel was not a problem. In fact in the overall design of the campaign the game would simply not have worked on release without some kind of zone fast travel. Perhaps this is indicative of a flawed campaign design. That is a much more complex issue.
But I believe the game could have done OK if they had simply devoted as much time and care to the upper game and made sure it was fun and balanced with sane campaign goals.
In addition to many of the reasons listed here I will add my own.
I loved DAOC and played it for a long time. Despite it's flaws, it had some, it kept me coming back for 2 reasons.
1. 3 Realms! This is so simple yet it really is what did WAR in. By having only 2 realms you were always going to have a pop balance problems and the realm ladder system was horrid with this. When one side gets railed on everyday they stop caring.
By having 3 realms there is always somebody to hit you in the back if you gain the upper hand. This is still true in DAOC today and one of the big reasons why it is still alive, sort of.
If anybody understands the WARHAMMER IP they will get this next part clearly. In Warhammer there are neutral parties that do their own thing and don't always fall into the ORDER and DESTRUCTION sides. There could have been a 3rd faction with Wood Elves, Lizardmen, and Bretonia. I think maybe one of the reasons that they didn't do this is Games Workshop themselves.
Even though these races are neutral most of the time, maybe not Bretonia, Games Workshop wants to have the good vs evil thing going on all the time. You probably couled have put drawf on NEUTRAL and Bretonia on Order I suppose. Mythic should have stuck to their guns and showed that 3 realms in a PvP based game was what made DAOC so great.
Games Workshop probably pointed to WOW and said "Hey, they do it with 2 realms. Beat them." It was not that easy and WOW is very different than what Warhammer was TRYING to become. I don't want to compare WOW and WAR but you get the idea.
2. The world design. DAOC had 3 whole different worlds. They didnt not interact with each other, except for gaining PvE things to help your realm. When you wanted to go PvP you would all go into a different PvP realm with castles and such. This way you could have the best of both worlds. When you wanted to PvP you went there.
When you wanted to PvE you went there. WAR shoudl have stuck to that and gotten more types of players to stay. PvPers run through ad dont understand why they cant attack the other side, or run through PQs and have to fight mobs. PvE people get their zone locked and hosed when the other realm takes it, they log off.
Even though I somewhat liked the semi-merge of PvP and PvE, in sigles zones, it killed off the extreme of moth PvPer and PvEs which make up most of the mmo players. I LOVED PQs and locking zones. I love the tome and reading all the WARHAMMER history
Even though I amd not a WAR fanboy I am a WARHAMME farnboy so I read everything I can about it. The average gamer doesn't care and they can't keep them there long enough to learn about the world, it seemed to work for World of Warcraft.
Just real quick on the technical problems at launch. WOW had many problems when they launched but people (me too) stuck with it because when it first came out it was a wonderful game and we didnt mind if the servers when down or there were bugs. We loved it and stayed to see it through. If WAR had been more solid in design and execution from the first day, people wouldn't even be talking about the bugs and crashing.
Even saying all this I am coming back to WAR with a few friends to see how things are going. I have been away from mmos for a while and I will drop on them here and there to see how they are.
I agree 100% with the OP as when I played Warhammer it didn't feel like a "virtual world" I had been used to in MMOs (been playing since EQ). It seemed like all the zones were very "Square and Retangular" and like the OP mentioned you couldn't get from one factions area to anothers without using teleportation with a loading screen.
I mean the whole reason WAR even sounded a tad bit interesting to me was because in my mind before WAR was even released I had imagined meaningful battles across this vast world where you would be battling for castles and keeps which would determine your advances in a persistant world towards the enemies capitals... something like Planetside but evolved.
Instead we got a bunch of disconnected minigames and everything felt half assed.
Where do you RvR fanatics come up with this crap. There is almost nothing factual about your "FACT". First of all, why in the world would you even b*tch about xp in WAR, it was ridiculously easy to gain. Scenarios had more xp but RvR is where you got the renown, which is a bigger focus of the game.
The real fact is that WAR's scenarios is one of the game's best features. As a PvP/RvR game, it was great to be able to queue up for a 15 min scenario and gain renown, xp & badges from it. It allowed for casual play and a number of the scenarios were a ton of fun.
RvR was kinda weak and is best explained by RvDoor. It was mostly boring. Aside from that, it sometimes took hours to get anything significant to happen. The concept of RvR in War was better than the actual play.
What I will agree with is that WAR is a well built game that had a ton of potential. However, the three key reasons where Mythic dropped the ball have long been explored and were mentioned early on, especially in beta:
1) Game engine was not coded for actual large scale RvR Battles. Just such epic fail when you advertise your game as mass pvp
2) 2 factions. Just plain dumb when these guys built DaOC. You need 3 factions
3) Class imbalance with CC and AOE. Bright Wizard is all that needs to be said.
Other reasons have been beat to death. The PvE was lacking, aside from PQs, which were an awesome concept. War is a PvP game and some of us actually like simplistic PvE but it was an issue for many. The crafting system was quirky and insufficient, along with the auction house & market. Endgame for both PvE and PvP were weak, city sieges just blew goats.
Playing: EvE, Warhammer free unlimited trial, Allods Online
Played: Anarchy Online, WoW, Warhammer, AoC, Ryzom. Aion
Strongly Recommend: Ryzom, EvE, Allods Online
I actually liked the free play, so I bought a month, and ended up canceling after 2 weeks. The reason was because t2 and t3 was more of the same, but with less action. And because there didnt seem to be any point to the PVP. You never really achieved anything but leveling up. And then going and playing any other game showed me how terrible the gfx were.
Class balance had nothing to do with WARs failure.
And with regards to the bright wizard give it a rest. Destruction had the same class with more utility.
I topped the boards on my Wiz and I seen them topped by just about every class in game.
And crowd control...THERE WAS NOT ENOUGH CROWD CONTROL. Mythic caved into the crying they heard from daoc, did a 180, gave tanks the most CC instead of soft casters and there was nothing to stop a tank from getting to you.
I remember having the CC argument before the game was released and I still stand by my opinion. Crowd Control mixes up fights. Without crowd control fights break down to there most basic elements. I hit you, you hit me...wow this is fun isnt it?
An mmo based around pvp with limited or without crowd control is like those old boxing fights where the two guys take each others punches.
My experience with WAR was one of..... Detachment. Take a decent world, then make it possible to jump to anywhere in the world through queues. (same thing that kills WoW immersion, btw). Add to that a glitchy chat system, and a scenario system that allows people to jump in and out of a group without any sense of dependance on each other, and you get a system where it really didn't matter what zone you were in, or what faction you played, it was just bland repetativeness. Plus nobody ever said anything, you get in a group, get your accomplishment, leave the group, and who cares about the other people? Yeah it may have been better if you got a guild and started to do max level PVP, if you could manage to find a guild, but there just didn't seem to be any reason to do so.
I think a major failure for WAR was the virtual world like the OP said. How that translates into a failure, in my opinion, was more than mechanics. I think it is inarguable that the customer base for WAR was littered with ex (and current) DAoC players. For those of you who played DAoC, it was not a small customer base.
DAoC was far from perfect. It had LOS issues, class balance issues, exploits... etc. So it wasn't flawless mechanics that engraved a loyal following to the game. It was an intamacy that evolved as a result of the aforementioned virtual world.
Small guilds and bands of friends flourished. Friday night would roll around, I would band together my my 15 or so guild mates and we'd go do something. You could zerg if you wanted to, or you could roam some distant part of the frontier in hopes of causing trouble. Or, if you wanted to explore the zones in PvE ville. you could do that too.
Who remembers the game when you had to wear the stupid necklace and get ported to the RVR zones. And, oh God, the mile walls?
It's 2010 and I still remember specific nights where we'd hole up in a tower (Before they could get destroyed) and see how long we could survive. More than once it evolved into a relic raid where someone else decided to use it as a diversion and raise a zerg. Speaking of zergs... the zerg was freaking cool in DAoC. Even if you didn't like that style of play, you had to respect the huge, sloshing mass of angry people like a kracken come to devour all in its path. You might wound it... but kill it? NO! Your little 8 man had to speed around it, away from it, or bite it in the backside and flee before its angry wrath could snare you!
Yes... the small community of a guild or 8 friends could have animpact in a world and never even associate with what was happening on the far side of the frontier. Yet, they could be tangents.
Not in WAR. No, no, no... you are a zerg. You run the 'ORVR' zones in a mechanical and obedient path and get into the opponents city in order to get a pair of pants you can put on after you've done the same stinking thing 200 times. My small guild was vanquished. Assimilated into a mass of people who I cared not group with in the first place.
Virtual world is defintely a factor.
regardless of whatever people say, for me anyways I canceled this game after the first month because the UI was laggy. I'm sorry but a game being released shouldn't have lag to do moves. When I went back to play the game a year later this was still a problem.
Is it really hard to make an mmo where you press the 1 button to do the move and have to wait 1-2 seconds for it to actually go?
If there is a thing that ALL mmo's should learn from WoW it's how to polish the damn game before you release it. Sure WoW had problems at release, but hitting a button and it INSTANTLY casting was thought of to be standard. Since WoW i've played all the AAA titles and only Aion has actually done this also.
Only in the mmo genre can this fact be over sighted for some reason.
The reality is that the failure of Warhammer wasn't the result of a small number of problems. Really, pick just about any aspect of the game and there will most likely be some problem with it. Not some small cosmetic problem, but something that ranges anywhere from extremely annoying to gamebreaking.
Just look at some of the issues brought up in this thread and how diverse the problems were.
Class balance all over the map
Huge crowd control issues
Huge area effect damage issues
Realm balance (or lack of)
Uninspired pve
Horrible mob AI
Overuse of the PQ system
Broken laggy unresponsive game engine and combat system
Server instability for the pinnacle features of the game
Poorly implemented lore
Poorly implemented incentives between PvP, RvR and PvE
Broken RvR control system (pve, pvp, rvr contributions)
Broken public quest contribution system
PvE endgame for a "RvR" pvp game.
Half finished crafting, auction hall and mail systems
A keep conquest system that was added at the 11th hour that conflicted with the direction the rest of the game was aiming for.
Etc, etc.
There was simply to much to overlook to make the game really enjoyable. Not even mentioning things that fall into player tastes like animations, zone/character art differences between the factions, lack of connection to the world/ownership of landmass that needed defending, etc. Deep down there is a good game waiting to get out from underneath all of those problems. Even though some of them are core issues that will never go away.
On top of that Mythic often made these problems worse when they attempted to fix them. Not only was the pace of the fixes slow, but often not well thought out and resulted in things like keep swapping.
Yes it did, many left over the poor class balance issues and the BW was one of the main concerns...BW vs Sorc, the BW AoE set up allowed for a wider area of effect, add to that all Order had to do at points (esp defensive fortress positions) was to gather and stack their AoE's and destruction couldn't get near ESP the sorcs to counter with their AoE's (they were squishy and healers couldn't keep up...hell the healers couldn't keep up with healing the tanks).
Mythic "eventually" started fixing some of these issues but many were either gone or leaving.
Another main issue was the servers Mythic hosted the game on, DAoC got moved to some old servers and they used the ones DAoC were on at the time instead of upgrading to the next gen servers that could have better handled the "WAR" part of the end game (since Mythic decided to make it a funnel system). This led to severe lag, server crashes and limited populace able to participate in the end game fortress seiges (pre city invasion).
The server crashes killed off most of the early populas, poor class balance killed off more...most of the other things were minor by comparison.
Mythic did a lot of great things with the game but poor execution was a nail in the coffin so to speak...
PIRATE LORDS
I enjoyed your post as it reminded me of good times had in daoc.
Nothing has come close in pvp in terms of excitement sine daoc. The night and day were actually dark and light. And the color of the gear mattered because it made you harder or easier to spot depending when you were fighting.
There was just something about taking that first steps into thid at night. My eyes were scanning in anticipation of scout classes picking me off without seeing who was shooting me....it was like being on a hunt. And the thrill when you did see someone that didnt see you!
Good times!
The only thing I found fun in WAR was the PQs and the Battlegrounds. I LOVE being able to just log in and jump right into a Battleground. Make a new character, jump into a battleground. Rinse. repeat. After level 10 though I just couldn't do it. A year or so ago I FORCED myself to level up doing quests and the occasional battleground. I got to level 22 and stopped playing.
Warhammer would have been amazing if...
**Instanced Battlegrounds were taken away (hear me out), and replaced with Public Quests like the pvp PQs in the Dwarf and Goblin area. In the end, the winner gets a chest, some items etc. This would have made each battleground scenario interesting with a storyline. RvR is just fine. I really liked all the little quests to do while your fighting to get your flag. I also found the cooldowns on the enemies flags sufficient. I personally cannot remember any time I thought, Sheesh order always has this tower.
**This may have been just me but the classes were for the most part, uninteresting. You have 3 trees that you don't get to access til 20+ (dumb) and there was nothing exciting like "OOOOH X ability sounds awesome" or "Just one more piont til I get X ability!!" It was more like, wtf is this? it sounds like the last ability i got. Why do I have 3 of the same ability??
**Was there music in the game? I can barely remember. I know for a lot of people this isnt something they care about but interesting or well composed music for the area actually helps me quest.
**Tradeskills were interesting, I really have no major opinion on them except that in the beginning it was just too much. I wish I could see my outcome before I hit combine, maybe could have made the outcomes potency different by adding different crap from other tradeskills.
**FINALLY the book of Lore. This part is a huge failure too me. It could have been a perfectly amazing way of getting players out in the world getting experience and leveling with enjoyment if this had been implemented and worked with. Let me elaborate. We all know WOW pretty much stole their achievement system from WAR and Xbox. What if WARhammer would have actually made their book of Lore even more awesome, by giving more rewards for exploring, pvp'ing, questing, PQs, etc etc. Instead you have a million stupid titles, and pocket items?? Pocket items that don't even work 1/2 the time and when they do, they make farting noises if you even bother equipping them and then putting them on your hotbar. *rant off* Anyways, just saying the Lore book could have been a very creative outlet for how this game panned out.
Even with all my personal reasons I disliked the game, there is still something alluring about it still. I often think of retrying Warhammer but I have to remind myself that the changes they are making are to please the people who are in the game currently, and not the ones that actually have an interest in coming back.
I can't believe people actually think the classes were balanced in this game, even today. It is some of the worst balance I have ever seen in an MMO. Anyone rational that played this game early on and experienced the BW/Sorc bomb squads would agree.
You obviously are a recent player and were not around when this game launched. Bright Wizards ruled Warhammer for many months and CC was so rampant that people were quitting over it when changes did not come. By the time they did, it was a bit late, the game has already "failed" as too many players just threw in the towel.
As a sidenote, there is a reason why BW was so powerful, it was due to a certain couple of BW users from beta who received extremely favorable treatment when it came to feedback. The class had the most powerful AOE, especially in combination, with a AoE stun morale ability. You needed 2 classes on the Destruction side to replicate that combination of attacks.
Playing: EvE, Warhammer free unlimited trial, Allods Online
Played: Anarchy Online, WoW, Warhammer, AoC, Ryzom. Aion
Strongly Recommend: Ryzom, EvE, Allods Online
My number one reason for quitting this game was bright wizards. The tier 1 pvp was great and i was thinking the game would stay like that. But once you got into tier 2 everything fell apart. Every match ended up being like 3-4 bright wizards rooting and flaming everyone. The entire team would focus on them but one or two haelers could easily keep them up. The imbalance was so insane that i can't imagine how any game developer could have let that go on for more than a week let alone make it out of beta.
My secondary reasons ranged from crappy boring pve, to dull uninspired graphics.
Great list there and I totally agree. You can't blame the WAR flop on one issue alone, it was all those reasons listed above and many more. Some parts of WAR were great. I still think the lvl 1-20 Open PvP is the most fun I've had in a game in years, but after that it all goes downhill.
Incredibly linear zone design, a locked in 2 faction (I blame the games Workshop retards for that decision) battle, absolutely s**t game engine (worked below okay in beta prior to the tome of knowledge..), shoddy & uninspiring & badly implimented "endgame" only 2 of 6 cities made it in are just a few of the big reasons.
Severe lack of PvE group content, the PvE that was there was really thin, heavy over-use of the PQ system (which worked to make it become a bore because players were spread too thinly).
The game required far too big a population to make the game enjoyable but the engine, servers, & systems just could not cope with the required numbers in the first place, hence the ridiculous amounts of crashing & glitching, lag & stutter, rubber-banding & crashing (so bad I had to say it twice).
They have tried to patch up the holes since but in my opinion they are wasting their time polishing a turd, the game is fundamentally flawed from the core outwards.
Should have expanded the classes a bit, made each race it's own faction & had in game events that paired up factions occasionally to move along the storyline as the content expanded.