Slashdot Mirror
Warhammer Online Sees Massive Content Removal To Make Launch
Zonk is reporting that the Warhammer Online team has decided to keep their launch deadline firm. Unfortunately, in order to do so, they are pulling quite a few things from the game. Four of the six capital cities are being removed, as well as four of the character classes (two of which were considered the primary "tanking" classes for their race). The team emphatically claims that this has nothing to do with EA. Does this hurt their chances for success more than simply delaying the launch date?
It's not just EA that is behind this, its the basic reality of the market. Wrath of the Lich King (the WoW expansion) is coming out next spring most likely, and if they try to release around the same time as that, they're pretty much guaranteed to fail at capturing any significant marketshare.
They pretty much have to release it this Fall or they're screwed.
BTW, I've been playing the closed beta, and I predict this game will be epic fail. The graphics are similar to 2004 era WoW graphics. Bugs and lack of content are everywhere. I love the Warhammer universe, since I grew up playing the tabletop games, and I had high hopes for this franchise, but the game simply fails to deliver. It might have been good if it came out 4 years ago, but people expect a game to have the same polished content upon release that WoW has taken 4 years to add. The market expects an unrealistically high level of polish and content, so pretty much any new challenger is guaranteed to fail unless it's made by Blizzard.
I've been having a lot of fun playing Age of Conan lately. Don't let the haters tell you it sucks. It really is a pretty good game, even though it has bugs. What MMO doesn't?
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal." - Richard M. Nixon
The summary is a bit misleading. 4 classes are out, but there are around 20 so it's not that big o a deal. And the capital cities aren't like that in EQ and WoW. You get to them later in the game for PvP purposes. So there will still be plenty to look forward to and have fun with in Warhammer :)
Hmm... it seems we're losing two "berserker-brawler[s]" [The Choppa and The Hammerer], one "heavy tank" [The Knight of the Blazing Sun], and (roughly) "a World of Warcraft Warrior" [The Blackguard].
(source)
There are still 20 of the original 24 promised classes, and there really wasn't an equivalent set of roles across all races anyway, so it may still work out.
Me, I'm still pissed about the lack of Skaven.
Misery loves company. Online misery loves unsuspecting random strangers.
I feel obliged to point out that they never actually announced a November release for Burning Crusade; everyone just assumed that (and they may have stated that they wanted to release it in 2006 but not with any specific date).
The original WoW was released without a couple of the features they wanted to add (obvious example: honor system), but this seems somewhat more drastic than the honor system (which turned out to be a bad idea in the end anyway).
This is my sig. There are many others like it, but this one is mine.
Additionally, DAOC was known to be a pretty damn good game. They have a lot of anticipation which could already have been measured by looking at their preorders.
This is just shooting their loyal customer base in the feet. EA has done this at least three times to them now. First by buying Mythic, second by saying that they have no intent to support Linux, and now by screwing over their loyal customers.
I honestly had pretty high hopes myself, but pulling of features? come on now.
Guess EA couldn't wait.
Even if he is correct, I don't feel like looking... Well it would make sense, Blizzard understands end game progression. You let the players learn the new stuff, let the gear dropped disperse unto the server's population, then add new content. It's a good system, keeps a good chunk of the server focused on a fewer areas and allows us all to get a taste before the content becomes boring for those players with progression in mind. Those same players are generally the backbone of any guild and there for it is important to keep everyone focused on the same thing.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
Well, there is a Warhammer 40K MMO under development.
I would assume that they didn't actually have access to 40K, since THQ develops all the 40K games.
Sadly, it's not an MMO.
From level 25 to 45 I encounter a single player... beside he was angry and cursing at me because I had just finished cutting a tree he was on his way to loot, so I killed him.. I guess I was the only one left afterward =)
DAOC WAS a pretty damn good game (well, maybe not that emphatic but it at least was decent.) Then they started nerfing content, dumbing down content, devaluing and making PvE content nearly pointless. And then releasing two "expansions" that as far as content goes were extremely content-light, and yet still charged an extra $20 for them. (Labyrith, their last, at least had more content then Darkness Rising, but still).
There were a number of mistakes Mythic made in their handling of that game as it went on. The biggest one I think was caving into the incessant whining of their player base and nerfing class after class. For all the whining over Trials of Atlantis, it actually increased the size of the playerbase, not the other way around, and got people playing longer. Then they started driving away anyone that wanted to play PvE content by turning it into a defacto PvP-only game. Of course they didn't take into account that the PvP players typically aren't the ones that are going to be sticking around for a while either. But I think the biggest mistake they made was never raising the level cap. They kind of tried to with Master Levels and Champion Levels, but it never quite worked well.
You're exactly right, I'm basing that entire post from a WoW player's perspective.
And sure, not everyone plays or has played WoW that will play AoC/Warhammer.
But if these are of any remotely correct value:
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart1.html
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart2.html
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart3.html
http://www.mmogchart.com/Chart5.html
Suddenly you can see why I based my post off of that. Nothing even compares, even a little bit.
Every other MMO that has been released or will be released in the near future has been hailed by one person or another as the "great WoW killer" and in that regard, they have all failed.
It's just my opinion that they will all continue to keep failing until we get a company willing to push the release dates back enough to get a decent game out.
There's really two branches of Warhammer, the Fantasy Battles (which WAR is targeting), and the 40,000 which takes 40,000 year in the future. "40k" as it is known, currently has a much better PC representation. Fantasy battles saw the release of some truly horrible ("Shadow of the Horned Rat") games on various platforms, and currently has no "go to" title in computer games. Both mythologies are similar, and equally rich and fleshed out.
:)
For 40k, you can grab "Dawn of War" and its expansions. They are extremely faithful to the source material and their campaigns are kind of fun. If you are a competitive RTS player, you can really get into it online, as DoW tends to be somewhat balanced.
Or you could go to a gaming story and buy some pewter figurines
I haven't seen this anywhere, but even if he isn't patched in on day one, they have stated from the beginning that it would take a whole raid full of 80s to take Arthas (you know him.. the Lich King.. undead guy on the frozen throne with Frostmourne). Considering the length of time it would take to gear up raids full of 80s, patching him later is a smart move. Besides... it is the SAME THING they did with Kael'thas Sunstrider in patch 2.4 when the introduced the Sunwell Plateau. You see... Blizzard has been really good about making content patches as well as bug patches, so anyone who has played WoW for more than a minute knows this.
Also, the instances/raids/zones of Dire Maul, various Battlegrounds, Blackwing Lair, Zul'Garub, Silithus, Ahn'Qiraj, Naxxramas, The Black Temple, Zul'Aman, and Sunwell were all released as free content patches (when other companies [i.e. Sony] would charge for them). This does not include all the 'fun' stuff like world events and changes to the environment.
Blizzard knows content is king, but they also know that you WoWheads will keep paying for their lame expansion packs.
Once again, your ignorance is showing. We are about to get the second expansion in the 4 years WoW has been around, if the rumored November release dates hold. Lets look at some of the other 'big' MMORPGS and see how they hold up.
Ultima Online Released 1997, Expansions released in 1998, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2007 with one another on the horizon. Peak subscribers - 250,000.
Everquest Released 1999. Expansion released two expansion packs in 2000, 2001, 2002, and two every year for 2003-2007. That's a $30.00 expansion pack every 6 months! Peak subscribers - 430,000
Everquest II Released 2004 (going directly head to head with WoW). Expansions in 2005, two in 2006, and 2007. There was also 3 'Adventure Packs' released in 2005 and 2006 that were paid for equivalents of WoW's content patches. Peak subscribers - 350,000
Which brings us too...
World of Warcraft Released 2004, Expansion in early 2007, with a second to be relased this year acording to rumor. It has also released numerous FREE content patches (see above) that would be considered expansion packs in other MMORPGS. Peak Subscribers - over 10 MILLION worldwide.
So you keep drinking the 'Hater-ade' and 'QQ Moor' about something you obviously know nothing about, or at the very least bothered to google before spouting off and showing you are way south of GWB (or moss covered rocks, for that matter) in the intellect scale.
Don't rush me, Sonny. You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles.
Jacobs gives some lengthy explanations about the changes here: About removing the classes: http://vnboards.ign.com/warhammer_online_age_of_reckoning_general_board/b22997/107897121/p1/?13 About removing the cities: http://vnboards.ign.com/warhammer_online_age_of_reckoning_general_board/b22997/107896043/p1/?55
Launching with incomplete content is not unusual for a MMO expansion. This goes back to the early days of Everquest.
The Planes of Power expansion did not have its final zone (Plane of Time) any where near complete. SoE actually made the final raid needed for access impossible to complete until Time was finished.
From TFA:
the capital cities for the Dark Elf, High Elf, Orc, and Dwarf factions will not be in the game at launch.
I didn't know Orcs even had a capital city. And isn't the Dwarven empire in ruins? High Elves have Ulthuan ofcourse, but nobody else ever goes there, and whatever the Dark Elf capital is is on the other side of the world, so who cares?
What I'd like to know is if Bretonnia, Marienburg and Kislev are in it.
Somehow I don't think it's going to be my kind of game...