Warhammer Online Delayed Until 2008

To the surprise of almost no one, EA Mythic has announced that Warhammer Online won't be out until next year. Eurogamer reports: "'Since our acquisition by EA, we have been afforded many wonderful development opportunities and we plan to take full advantage of everything that is available. This includes taking several additional months to make the best MMORPG possible,' Mythic's Mark Jacobs wrote in a community newsletter." They're going to use the extra time to go back over the Dwarven and Greenskin areas to implement new ideas they've had since working on the original content. With the successful launch of LOTRO this week, and the continuing crash and burn of Vanguard , MMOG developers seem to be wising up to the importance of a really good launch.

Comments

Sounds like a Blizzard

[CogDissident]

You know, Blizzard is infamous for releasing games when they deem them ready, and not shoving them out the door unprepaired. Remember starcraft's release date problems? Remember World of Warcraft's? I really wish more game companies would follow this trend, releasing finished and high quality games rather than shoving stuff out the door and hoping to patch it later.

Re:Sounds like a Blizzard

[happyemoticon]

There's that quote by Miyomoto: "A delayed game is eventually good; a bad game is bad forever." Some companies, I think, started to realize: "Hey, with patching capability on most consoles and PCs, we can release a game bad and make it good eventually!" The trouble is this never works the way they want it to. If the game is buggy when you ship it, people will always remember it as a buggy mess, and if it's bad, people will not give it a second chance.

Then there's another category of games: self-consciously shitty exploitation games. A lot of EA's brands fall into this category, for instance. They develop because the marketers say that there is no way Madden 08 cannot make a profit, and they ship because anyone muscleheaded enough to buy it will buy it bugs and all.

Re:Sounds like a Blizzard

[CowTipperGore]

They develop because the marketers say that there is no way Madden 08 cannot make a profit, and they ship because anyone muscleheaded enough to buy it will buy it bugs and all. They ship it because they make lots of money with little development. The engine has not changed significantly in years - their biggest cost is now the exclusive licenses they paid the NFL and NCAA to guarantee their monopoly in this market (deemed necessary because of real competition from the 2K series).

1. Recycle 95% of last year's game.
2. Update rosters.
3. Create commercials using prerendered movies instead of anything resembling actual game play.
4. Profit!

I'm a long-time EA Sport gamer, going back to Madden and Bill Walsh College Football on the Genesis, but I stopped buying the new games three or four years ago after several years of disappointment. It seemed stupid to spend another $50 or $60 each summer to get the new rosters, especially when I play dynasties and quickly have my own unique teams. Also consider that industry recognition of this process means that used games lose 60 - 75 percent of their value within nine months of release and are usually in the $5 bin after a year. I'm still playing EA's college game from 2005, which I bought used for less than $10.

Re:Is there a market for this?

[MeanderingMind]

I think the AMOUNT of total MMO players is about peaked...

I think you assume too much. If I recall, this same argument was used to note that WoW would not surpass EQ by much. The idea that there are a fixed amount of people who play MMOs is one that will likely fade in coming years.

If the Next Big Thing(TM) comes out tomorrow, we won't see Blizzard's subscriptions drop down to near nothing overnight. Drop perhaps, but not collapse. In fact, I could easily imagine Blizzard retaining even 75% of their current subscriptions while the Next Big Thing(TM) doubles what they have already.

In short, the userbase for MMORPGs is growing daily. New, excellent and appealing MMORPGs only serve to further this.

If only patching worked that way

[Moraelin]

Mostly I'll aggree with you, but just to nitpick: but you seem to operate under the impression that the game is only buggy at launch, that it will be patched right, and that it's only remembered as having been once buggy.

My experience is quite the opposite: most games which were launched buggy (read: most games), their patches introduced at _least_ 1 new bug for every 2 fixed (though in some cases it was 2 introduced for 1 fixed), and the publisher gave up long before it was anywhere near good quality.

Basically: what makes anyone think that what wasn't fixed in 2-3 years of making the game, surely is trivial stuff that will get fixed in 1-2 weeks after launch? No, seriously. Debugging is stuff that takes 90% of the programming time, and is the hardest to get right. Writing code is _easy_. Debugging it to work _right_ is what's hard and time consuming. A game which got shoved out the door as soon as it compiled and showed the start menu (in some cases, literally) can be anywhere between 6 months away from being really ready, and essentially a failed project which will _never_ work right.

I remember fondly such cases as Ultima Online: 2 years after launch, Origin was still busy issuing half-arsed patches that did more damage than good... and then some of them had to be rolled back to contain the damage. Or "Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption" which only had 1 patch, and it introduced a couple of worse bugs than those it removed. Or Daggerfall, where after half a year trying to solve such problems as falling into the void as soon as you moved or bumped into a wall, Bethesda gave up and built in cheat codes so you could teleport yourself out of the void and to the start of the dungeon. Or Fallout 2. My favourite game, mind you, but also one of the buggiest games ever. Half the problems were never fixed. And just so people don't think only ancient examples are available: Gothic 3. It's still a buggy POS. 'Nuff said. Etc.

The thing is, even _if_ patching it later worked (and mostly it doesn't), I want to play the game _now_. The day I bought it, not 6 months in the future when it's finally patched. It's not just a matter of remembering a wrong first impression, it can be a matter of the _whole_ experience I've had with that game. And remembering it damn right, in all its buggy non-fun glory. I might play a game for as little as a day, or as much as 1-2 weeks. It doesn't matter if 2-6 months later a patch became available that fixed everything. (Mostly it doesn't.) Anyone who bought the game at launch, or preordered it, has _already_ played the buggy unpatched version.

And that's not including the inconveniences often visited upon the player if they _do_ stick around until some patches hit. Stuff like, "oops, my saved games don't work any more, I have to abandon all those tens of hours of playing and start all over again." (See: Fallout 2.) Or, "oops, the mechanics changed so much that my carefully built empire is going to pieces... and China is conquering the Byzantine empire." (See: most Paradox games, but as a concrete example, Europa Universalis 3.) Or, in at least one pathologic case, "oops, the game has been turned into a whole different _genre_ and my character, in which I 'invested' months, can't even play that class/skill-combination/role any more." (See: Star Wars Galaxies.)

And another thing that people miss when talking about patches is, basically: quality doesn't only mean "it doesn't crash to desktop". There are things like balance, game system, learning/difficulty curves, AI, story, which are damn hard and work-intensive things on their own. And are things which, when a game is shoved out the door untested, are also untested and unfinished. Most patches fix stuff like memory leaks or crashes to desktop, but stuff like balance or the game system rarely are touched at all by a patch. If they were shoved out the door unfinished, at the very least those aspects will tend to stay unfinished. For ever.

The latter was a major part of Blizzard's secret sauce, so to spe