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Why did this game fail?
Yamota
Member UncommonPosts: 6,593
I mean it brought alot of nice features to the MMORPG genre. Such as ability to viably level from level 1 to cap by doing just PvP, PQ, defensive and offensive targetting, interesting mechanics like that of the BW and Disciple of Khaine.
Yet it recently announced merging of yet another round of servers to a total of two or three, globally, and probably will shut down completely before the end of the year.
But why is that? I for one spent 400+ hours playing it so it isn't that bad. Reason I left was because the end-game was/is junk, maybe that is it?
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I can't speak for anyone else but I left because the major good city was sickeningly bland and the major bad city was something straight out of a horror movie.
The other thing for me was the animations were terrible. Also, the game didn't perform as well as it should have on my system.
That's all I can remember.
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For 7 years, proving that if you quote "fuck" you won't get banned.
Yeah I always thought, and still think (looking at you SW:TOR), that copying WoW is a misstake. I mean what are they thinking? I will take WoW and add some features and bling bling and then all the sudden WoW players will play their game instead?
Nevermind that WoW is/was already established and had a ton of content which a new game cannot possibly have.
The only one that can kill WoW is Blizzard and maybe with Kung Fu Panda they started that?
However I personally felt the RvR focus of WAR did separate it from the pack, but I guess it just wasnt well implemented.
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I thought the sieges were poorly done.
I had no plans to play this game but picked it up on a whim and found I was having more fun in scenarios and public quests than I had in a very long time.
Problem was, for me at least, I was expecting the sieges to be epic and a main part of this game. Instead I learned that the whole thing was about "flipping keeps".
There was no pride in ownership, no reason to take a keep other than to come back to it and take it again for more points.
the RvR part floundered as there didn't seem to be reasons to do it but people did flock to the scenarios which took away from the RvR.
Besides the fact that there were numerous bugs and issues.
The PvE was pretty lackluster.
I sometimes think devs are a bit clueless about things. I was talking to a developer at PAX who was not associated with Warhammer and we were talking about pvp and pve and the topic of Warhammer came up. I'm hoping he was just being diplomatic but when I said that they didn't do pve all that well and explained that I could pull a guard and the guard next to him who was talking wouldn't even noticed as the first guard came to attack me, he said "well, that's not what they do, not their thing".
My thougth was "really?" My girlfriend could see that was a flaw and she doesn't even play games.
It's a shame because they had a lot of areas where a lot of work went into them but that players rarely go to.
Godfred's Tomb Trailer: https://youtu.be/-nsXGddj_4w
Original Skyrim: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/109547
Serph toze kindly has started a walk-through. https://youtu.be/UIelCK-lldo
I too played WAR quite a lot in my day... The game is ok, but the launch had some pretty severe failures.
First off, the game didn't perform that well. It was laggy and buggy when it started. I had a friend who basically left due to that... Also, the PVE side of the game was really quite boring. It didn't feel that much like the world of Warhammer as I was expecting and that sucked. It was a generic world with Warhammer skin on it... It wasn't as dark and gritty as it should have been...
Basically the only really "Warhammer" moment I felt in the game was when I travelled down the wrong alley in Altdorf and got jumped by a bunch of Chaos cultists...
Warhammer really had some good ideas in it and newer games have taken those ideas into their designs, such as the whole PQ thing and all that.
In short, the game sucked from a technical point of view and lacked that "Warhammer" feel to keep people intrested in it... And killing greater deamons and such at rank 12 or so in PQs, really didn't feel right... Those things should just wipe the floor with the players there. As I said, too generic with Warhammer skin.
indd WAR was ultra hyped at the time it was developed and even it's own developers claimed that it would be WoW-killer.. unfortunately for me i have been playing for about 4 months and it wasnt long till it became boring to follow a train taking keeps and maybe sometime, letting the other side capture them, in order for us to recapture them cause there was nothing else to do. It was an all day farm of renown points and after some bugged main city sieges i was able to complete the 2nd best armor set in the game without even being able to wear it ,and there was no point to farm all that pvp levels. Maybe if it wasn't so over hyped it would have last longer, but instead they prefered the big bucks from the box sales and screwed their own game after, when players started to quit massively.
For me it was how boring the PVE was. Every mob did the same thing and seemed to be a carbon copy of every other mob minus their graphic skin. Public Quests were a great idea but the randomness of rewards for them and how far out of the way they were made people only focus on 1 or 2 in the whole zone.
The zone design, PVE wise was just extremely linear, there wasn't any true sense of exploration.
And to top it all off, I think the character feedback and combat weren't very good. Felt slow, clunky and heavy when moving about and fighting. Long cast times etc. that slowed the flow of combat down.
The PVP side of the game was the best part but it was marred by the combat system as well and the severe reliance, at least at launch, on having to grind scenarios over and over to rank up.
A difficult start with less offered than what was promised put off some people that I know. Plus the megaelephantsaurus called WoW retained them.
Personally, I think there should have been more PvE content and more than 2 factions. DAoC did a better job in both departments than WAR did, which is kinda strange, considering.Why?
1. Too linear
2. Bad end-game vs. very nice low-lvl experience
3. Horrible performance issues with big group vs. group pvp combat and sieges which was supposed to be major / one of major game features - obviously unacceptable and game breaking
4. Game was unfinished & bugged - Mythic was developing this game for very long time but either they had bad managment or lacked brains or and money to do it good.
Yes this surprises me too. DAoC was leaps and bounds better in PvP and supposedly the same guys developed WAR? Hard to believe, either it was another team or there was some corporate suits who forced their views on the dev. team.
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also for the public quests noone ever did them, i maybe had done 3-4 on the starting areas but later on i just ignored them there was no chance i could find even just one more person to do them.. it sounded like a cool feature but it never worked actually on the real game
Why it failed...
Simple it was a buggy mess and in essence not WoW nor DAoC... So it got slammed from every side. Add to that the balance issues and you had a game ripe for a fail.
It is sad... i still think it was a very very good game.
I am pretty sure the two faction thing came from GamesWorkshop... They invested a lot in the years before the release of WAR to have both their settings have two clear sides of conflict... Order vs Chaos... And while it is true that both settings have "neutral" armies most of them does not work all that good together... Heck lore wise it was pretty contrived why Chaos, Orcs and Dark Elves would work together.
Honestly tho... three factiones would not have saved it... In the end a way to thight budget and deadline is what killed the game. Not enough time was put in to the mechanics of the game.
This have been a good conversation
I only played for the free month but the two things that really turned me off about the game was that it played poorly on my PC at the time (BSODs and overheating issues I'd never had with any other game- even at the lowest possible graphics levels) and the population was just too spread out- I'd have to hop zone to zone to zone just to find enough people to party with (I don't play MMOs to solo) and even then I may have to wander slowly across half the zone just to get to them. Too much time searching for people to play with instead of just playing.
That's because there was only ever one popular PQ that everyone did. Often times that PQ was the first PQ people see because no one gave a care about going out and finding that one PQ off in some corner of the map or in a cave somewhere.
If you didn't go to the popular one then you had to try and solo everything else unless you had friends you could yell at to get over there to help you coop it.
The higher up you went the worse things got because the more massive things got with the number of PQs available. This is why tier 1 is still heralded as the most fun part of the game because the scale was just right. I understand the higher you go in an RPG things are supposed to get bigger and better but not at this price. The developers should have learned that from their previous MMORPG. Same thing happened with RvR. Massive scale RvR can be too massive to the point where it becomes like WoW Alterac Valley - a battleground where the goal is for everyone to just avoid each other and go directly towards the goal.
Once you reach Tier 3 there are three castles to take in every RvR Lake and there are three RvR Lakes (I should say 3 objectives, not 3 castles, because some of those 'castles' were more like a building with a flag in it). It basically becomes a hide and seek game at that point.
Add in the fact that PvP instance queues helped empty out the inhabitants of the game along with the fact that there were three different PvE areas with quests to go with the PQs.
Why are people talking about WAR in the past tense, the game is still live isn't it?
Instances.
Add to that the fact that you could level up in the BG's and you were left with an empty world and a heavily underutilized public quest system.
I was in Alpha, Beta, and left before launch as I saw it's inevitable demise. Here are the following reasons why Warhammer "failed".
-Mythic was given the IP by GamesWorkshop after realizing how DAOC was very similar to the Warhammer IP, and how LOVED DAOC was. HOWEVER, GamesWorkshop later told Mythic (2yrs into development) that they COULD NOT do a 3-realm RVR system, and that the "Lore Limitations" would force Mythic to do odd factional splits. HOWEVER, I've been told by thousands of fans now that, in fact, GamesWorkshop was full of crap and only wanted to feed off of WoW's success not realizing that Warhammer =/= WoW. A 3-Realm system WOULD have worked, but GamesWorkshop dropped the ball ON TOP OF MYTHIC'S FACE.
-EA acquired Mythic about a year or two into development, and subsequently forced Mythic, with GamesWorkshop's support, to go a more "traditional" WoW-clone gameplay type with HEAVY linear questing. Additionally, the "attachment" of EA onto Mythic's work caused a LOT of people to simply cancel their pre-orders because of the HUGE stigma revolving around EA's titles.
-6months from launch EA started funneling funds AWAY from Mythic's Warhammer development for an "unknown" title at the time. This left Mythic, in a CRUCIAL time in development & deployment, with fewer resources than they needed resulting in a VERY buggy launch. NOT TO MENTION that EA FORCED a "release date" on Mythic's developers for Warhammer Online. The end result was a highly buggy almost content-less product that people flocked away from in DROVES post-FreeMonth.
All in all, Mythic was completely destroyed by their accepting the Warhammer IP. GamesWorkshop ended up manhandling them at their two-year development mark, and THEN with the acquisition of Mythic under EA's banner it only got worse. Today, Mythic is a "shadow" of its former self with more than 70% of it's development team having been cannibalized for SWTOR, or they simply quit due to the environment they were thrust into. Sadly, we will NEVER see a DAOC II as EA would most assuredly screw that up completely.
Hope this helped,
-Faded
The Theory of Conservative Conservation of Ignorant Stupidity:
Having a different opinion must mean you're a troll.
well...its hair and nails are growing, but machines are beating its heart and doing its breathing.
its live but in coma.
Subjectively, an inflammatory joke at the game's expense except the game has very few fans on this forum so I wouldn't be afraid of a fanboy retaliation. Objectively, I would say it's because I don't play it any longer. If I still played I would be more prone to talk about it in present tense.
i left for these reasons:
- only 2 capitals
- insane lag in capital fight instance (unplayable)
- keep siege wasnt the fun i hoped it would be (playing and enjoying daoc right now)
There is nothing subjective about the game being reduced, from 40+ in its prime, to two in the West. The game IS dying, it is just a question about when EA pulls the plug. They are probably just squezing the last drop they can from it. I hate EA and other big money gaming publishers which cares about one metric, which is money.
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It's subjective for me because I thought it was a funny joke and my personal feelings actually did lead me to think the same thing. Nothing wrong with a little self-governing, eh?
Far too much blaming EA in this in my opinion.
Some things to remember:
* Without EA Mythic would've ran out of money before finishing the game
* After EA took over, they allowed and funded the extension of the game's release date by a *full year* (While Mythic at the start of the year was already continuously stating the game was 'pretty much done' and that the extension was to really polish it well. 'Polish' being the favorite keyword back then due to the WoW)
*Before EA took over the game and at least a while after that, the game was all about scenario's, not Open RvR. The design before and after release just screams it, not to mention that despite their 'reduction of the importance of scenario's' they still played a massive role on zone control. ORVR did not become a focus for WAR till the beta cry-out, when it became apparent that taking flags and having standoffs at warcamps wasn't quite that interesting when that's all there is.
Imo that lastpart is where it seriously went wrong. The beta was closed down and after it came back the focus has suddenly changed to ORvR and that was when finally the first mention ever came of actually having forts in the game ( the last year)
And they had to, because that's what everyone wanted and everyone expected. And why was that? Because they had made zero, zip, nada effort to reduce hype surrounding it that was touting it as the best RvR game to be for decades. Instead they went with it, and by the time it was getting to completion the hype was so strong that the game they had simply didn't fullfill that want at all.
Do I think the original design with high focus on scenario's would have been a WoW-killer or even a great game? Probably not. It would not have been what people wanted and it would have lost a lot of people based on that. However! I would have been a far better game, by design, than the game they ended up with. Because the scenario version had built in population control (max per scenario), while the ORvR version simply got crippled by it. Nothing's dumber than a two sided Tug--O-War design with no strength control between the two opponents.
For me was the horrible launch. The game was severely bugged, under-performed on my machine and it just took away the fun.
When i resubbed a couple of months later the game was in much better shape, and i actually had fun playing it. There were many things done well, but the ppor focus on PvE and the spiral around PvP changes, and changes again, and changes brought me to a spot where i could not continue to play the game.
Also, when i resubbed, the CE was selling for 19.90 euros at the same spot where i bought my pre-order for almost 70 euros...i always fail to shake that "i have been cheated" feeling in these situations. I bought a product that was not ready to be launched, as there is a storm of S"#i to ask for refunds, i had to eat my hat and wait for the devs to patch the game.
Even so, like i said in many others threads, i will always have this feeling that this game could had made the top ranks of subscription mmorpgs. It is really a world of its own, full of well designed ideas (and ofc not so good ones also) and the renown rank system is just something i would like to see in every mmorpg.
Ill be missing my white lion and swordmaster, but there is nothing that can be done to avoid the tumbling down the rabbit hole, to oblivion (not the game...).
I think it was a few reasons..
One being, when they said we would be able to sack the opposing factions capital city, i personaly wasn't expecting to be lighting trash barrels on fire (or some such) in instance number 1125. Invading a capital city was what i thought was going to be a highlight of the game, and it was probably the most deflatring thing i have ever seen in my gaming life.
Two, attacking keeps in this game was such a step backwards from DAoC, i can't even beging to fathom what they were thinking.
Three, class balance was pretty horrific at the start, bomb groups could really wreck havok on just about anything. Take those, and put them in premade vs. pug BGS, only compounded peoples lack of enjoyement.
Just a few of my thoughts, but there was a lot of reasons, a shame really.
Yeah it was a real shame because the game did innovate on many levels. It was far more innovative than for example SW:TOR but I guess it shows that innovation is not enough. You need proper execution as well as meeting expectations.
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