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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.
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.
Translation:
"Since we were assimilated, EA has separated our talented team and distributed them amongst several teams of numerous EA projects so that we can try and fix their problems. By the time we get back to working on OUR project, we'll be so burned out by EA politics, unrealistic timelines and 100 hour work weeks that what we have for Warhammer right now will be what we ship in 2008. We'll let the live product be the beta test and patch it every month, the EA way."
I hope the best for the Mythic buys, but according to history everything EA touches turns to crap.
Maybe, though this is fairly far fetched and borderline insane talk. The development team looked at what they did and looked at World of Warcraft and said 'You know, these things are really similar. I mean I know Warhammer has been around a lot longer than Warcraft, and technically they're ripping us off, but the majority of the population doesn't know that. You know.. Maybe we should just do something different. Why not Warhammer 40k? That'd be interesting'
I have nothing compelling to say
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.
Thunderclone: ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE! ONE MAN ENTERS! TWO MEN LEAVE!
Vanguard is bugged, deep but unfinished. WoW is shallow but polished.
But that is not what sets them apart. The biggest difference is the playerbase. In many ways it reminds me of the difference between Operation Flashpoint and Counterstrike. Both are military first person shooters with counterstrike clearly the more polished easier to get into version. Yet if you desire to play with people whose balls have actually descended your choice is clear.
I tried Vanguard (Sony is one of the few MMO companies willing to accomadate non-credit card owners. Blizzard thanks to its huge success is lucky that stores stock its gamecards) and was amazed to find that you did not need to join a RP-preffered server to be able to be in a world were the majority of players do not use numbers in their chat.
In fact, the majority of players in Vanguard use plain english, are polite and helpfull and even those who still got crap nicks like 'warlord' at least manage to spell it correctly.
If you ever played WoW, well. You know.
Pity then that the game is so fucking bugged. In between the bugs it is actualy fun, and has a lot to offer. I might even say that it is a ton of fun, compared to wow's 1 kilo of fun. Pity that vanguard also gives you two tons of bugs while WoW has by now reduced it to a few grams.
So why am I not playing WoW? Two reasons, the population but mostly the kill X till Y drops and X turns out to be a number just short of infinity. Vanguard improves on both counts but geez gods, FIX THE BUGS.
But what about LOTRO. Well, I am looking at it. Just that so far I can't see any class I like to play. I wonder what route it will take. For me the real killer thing I am looking for in a MMO is for it to be playable and for it to reserve a few servers with a queens english only policy and a naming policy that is enforced with permanent bans. Enter a stupid nick and BAM, banned. No warning, no suggestions, no arguing. Instant ban.
On the other hand, you could just make it an 18+ server. Make that 30+. Nobody born in the 80's or later allowed. And get OF MY LAWN!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
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
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
On the other hand, it's REALLY hard to come up with a good "endgame" to keep players forever.
The end result is that despite the fact that in general, MMOs are designed to keep players around for extended periods of time, burnout is frequent.
That's why I switched from DAoC to EVE. That's why after a year or so, I switched back to DAoC. (Admittedly with 2-4 months of "nothing but FPSes or outdoor activities" in between). After another two years, I'm back in EVE.
To be honest, I'm at the point where I'm burned out on both games and waiting for the next game that:
1) Appeals to me
2) Looks like it has a good endgame (DAoC's was great until the Trials of Atlantis expansion decimated the game's playerbase, which Mythic has been unable to recover from despite massive improvements over the past year and a half.)
3) Appeals to my friends (the only reason I'm still playing either game)
The fact is that even with frequent patches, expansions, and upgrades, games age. Fundamental aspects of their architecture and design become unworkable for a modern game, and/or the company makes a huge mistake that decimates their playerbase, making it impossible to attract "new blood" even after overhauling their game. (See SWG's NGE, or DAoC's Trials of Atlantis expansion for examples of "big mistakes", see DAoC's Catacombs expansion and many of the past year's "ToA Fix" patches for examples of great overhauls that just weren't enough)
EVE Online has the advantage of a more flexible architecture (which is one reason it has been growing steadily since inception), although it's main advantage is that it never had a huge launch and always has been more of a fringe game. Eventually EVE's devs will make the "Big Mistake" (They've come close with the BoD scandal and how they mishandled it) or it will age. (CCP has the good fortune of being the only MMO with even remotely similar gameplay - I suspect that another space-based MMO could easily give EVE a good run for its money, I know I would try it if it were from anyone other than SOE.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
THQ has been working on a Warhammer 40k MMO.
t ory=12947
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?s
Actually BC might well be a dagger to the back of WoW. I've seen a lot of my friends who're dedicated WoW players turn away from it because of BC. Not because the expansion is "too hard" or "too easy" or "too bad", but because they feel cheated. An example of what a friend told me yesterday.
He had some 2handed sword. THE best 2h sword in existance pre-BC. No idea what made it so good, but according to him it was just THE sword. Took him months to finally get it out of a raid of whateverhowmany people. Now, in BC, he hacks down the first dungeon and comes back out with a green drop that makes his old epic look like a rusted piece of junk.
He felt like a moron. He really felt cheated. Understandably so, if you ask me. I can see the motivation of Blizzard to do this, trying to attract people again that turned away and trying to lure them back with the promise of not having to go through 3 years of hacking to actually "use" the new content in BC, but the old players who were and are dedicated, spending countless hours to pull out their epic sets, they feel shafted. And I wouldn't deem it impossible that more than a few will react like my friend and dump the game because of it.
Until now it was "keep playing to stay on top or you'll have to catch up". But with BC, you get the message that you don't have to keep playing, you can drop the game and come back with the next expansion 'cause then you'll be just where all the people who stayed are. Play for a month, get 60, hack down the first expansion dungeon and you're where the guys are who have been here for 3 years.
I don't see the "fall" of WoW anytime soon, but I do think that BC could be quite negative for their subscriber numbers.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.