It always puzzles me that people say this game failed for being buggy; in 18 months I can only recall the odd crash.
It had a lot of lovely features, which did get better with time too.
Public quest, mirror classes, various options for leveling; PvP lakes, level tiers, good stealth implimentation; great battlegrounds. Excellent lore and backstory implimentation from GW. Maps and quests, which rarely got you stuck hunting for NCP etc. and a nice dash of humour in places too. Loved the dwarfs in barrels - and the quest to stuff drunk dwarfs in barrels. The Tomb of Knowledge was also a great feature.
Many viable builds of careers, and not bad selection of class (to start with). Generally the balance between damage and duration of fight was excellent. The game responded to tacits, but you could still have a blast just charging around.
Ok, so where did it all go wrong?
Well they didn't learn the fundamental lesson from DAoC = THREE REALMS! Well I would have gone further and had the full eight, plus mercenaries. Much better implimenation of the lore, and something new.
Level 1-11, the best. Then downhill, funamentally they needs a bit more time to make higher levels more addictive; and the zone control and capital city take down just didn't work (in fairness, I think this was uncharted terrority really). Compaired to DAoC realm pride, it just never happened.
Graphics and performance were not bad, but nothing to write home about.
While it was understandable that EA were not into spending more money on the game, it needed alot more development to get it to something addictive, more realms, more content, more classes and more armies.
Ironically, the attempt to develop three pairs of "realms" diluted the experience and rather than produce more gameplay, jsut appear to restrict it. Empire for humans (order) and Greenskins (for distruction) were only the realms to play that had lasting appeal.
But to conclude, the fundamental flaw was the stupid decision to make it a two way fight - simple.
Warhammer lore has a lot more than 3 factions in it. There's many armies to choose from that are not aligned under some certain "faction" like Order or Chaos, not in the long term at least.
Agreed, instead of decreasing numbers of sides Mythic should have increased it to 5 sides.
1. Class Imbalance - Bright Wizards anyone? Even though the classes were heavily mirrored across factions, there were still long lasting imbalances both between mirrored classes as well as between class archtypes. For example, White Lions and Marauders were underpowered for a long time.
2. Lacklustre PvE - Instances and raids were bugged and lacked general polish. In addition, the game provided almost no direction in terms of locating dungeons and finding groups.
3. Improperly designed RvR (aka world PvP) - Keep gate bottlenecks, objective trading, improperly distributed looted, etc made sure that the best content in the game was also incredibly frustrating or boring at times.
4. Excesive CC and AoE - By max level group fights were just fields of AoE damage, AoE heals and AoE CC.
5. Disjointed zones - a lot of the zone layout didn't make sense and the 3 different battlefronts destroyed the feeling that this was actually a world.
6. Faction imbalance - Since capital sieges were the only way of getting the best loot in the game, one faction being steamroleld by the other constantly quickly destroyed player morale.
7. Unfinished content - The game released missing 4 capital cities (which were later completely cut) and 4 classes which were added only months after release.
Overall, the game was simply unfinished. I still believe the game had more time it could have been a very, very good game; the fact is that even with it's multitude of problems I had an incredible amount of fun during sieges and in scenarios (battlegrounds). WAR could have been a PvP'ers heaven had it been executed properly.
Comments
It always puzzles me that people say this game failed for being buggy; in 18 months I can only recall the odd crash.
It had a lot of lovely features, which did get better with time too.
Public quest, mirror classes, various options for leveling; PvP lakes, level tiers, good stealth implimentation; great battlegrounds. Excellent lore and backstory implimentation from GW. Maps and quests, which rarely got you stuck hunting for NCP etc. and a nice dash of humour in places too. Loved the dwarfs in barrels - and the quest to stuff drunk dwarfs in barrels. The Tomb of Knowledge was also a great feature.
Many viable builds of careers, and not bad selection of class (to start with). Generally the balance between damage and duration of fight was excellent. The game responded to tacits, but you could still have a blast just charging around.
Ok, so where did it all go wrong?
Well they didn't learn the fundamental lesson from DAoC = THREE REALMS! Well I would have gone further and had the full eight, plus mercenaries. Much better implimenation of the lore, and something new.
Level 1-11, the best. Then downhill, funamentally they needs a bit more time to make higher levels more addictive; and the zone control and capital city take down just didn't work (in fairness, I think this was uncharted terrority really). Compaired to DAoC realm pride, it just never happened.
Graphics and performance were not bad, but nothing to write home about.
While it was understandable that EA were not into spending more money on the game, it needed alot more development to get it to something addictive, more realms, more content, more classes and more armies.
Ironically, the attempt to develop three pairs of "realms" diluted the experience and rather than produce more gameplay, jsut appear to restrict it. Empire for humans (order) and Greenskins (for distruction) were only the realms to play that had lasting appeal.
But to conclude, the fundamental flaw was the stupid decision to make it a two way fight - simple.
That could have been very cool
Why did Warhammer Online fail? Where to start...
1. Class Imbalance - Bright Wizards anyone? Even though the classes were heavily mirrored across factions, there were still long lasting imbalances both between mirrored classes as well as between class archtypes. For example, White Lions and Marauders were underpowered for a long time.
2. Lacklustre PvE - Instances and raids were bugged and lacked general polish. In addition, the game provided almost no direction in terms of locating dungeons and finding groups.
3. Improperly designed RvR (aka world PvP) - Keep gate bottlenecks, objective trading, improperly distributed looted, etc made sure that the best content in the game was also incredibly frustrating or boring at times.
4. Excesive CC and AoE - By max level group fights were just fields of AoE damage, AoE heals and AoE CC.
5. Disjointed zones - a lot of the zone layout didn't make sense and the 3 different battlefronts destroyed the feeling that this was actually a world.
6. Faction imbalance - Since capital sieges were the only way of getting the best loot in the game, one faction being steamroleld by the other constantly quickly destroyed player morale.
7. Unfinished content - The game released missing 4 capital cities (which were later completely cut) and 4 classes which were added only months after release.
Overall, the game was simply unfinished. I still believe the game had more time it could have been a very, very good game; the fact is that even with it's multitude of problems I had an incredible amount of fun during sieges and in scenarios (battlegrounds). WAR could have been a PvP'ers heaven had it been executed properly.