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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?
They know it's the game that counts, not some deadline.
It seems to me Warhammer is effectively castrating themselves.
TO which I say: "Good, I hate those bastards."
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Even though they say that EA is NOT behind this deal, I have to believe it is. This sounds too much like something EA would pressure them into doing. They were fine pressing back release dates BEFORE EA came on scene.
I am skeptical, to say the least.
Crackin' Wise - Blogging about whatever we want
Exclusion of the capital cities ruins the whole race vs race war aspect of the game; it turns something that could have been really deep into a WoW clone. Sigh. Hopefully it'll add back in later.
1984 was supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual.
While no MMORPG is ever complete, and thus never completed when released, releases like this in the past have caused major problems in getting people to accept the game in the past. Vanguard was released with major elements of the game incomplete, Pirates of the Burning Sea had similar problems (although it was mostly feature complete and the changes made after release were tweaking that could only be made after large enough populations were logging in).
The missing elements and poor gameplay in Vanguard resulted in a mass exodus of players after release, and a similar thing happened in POTBS (eventually resulting in a server merge that took the game from 12 servers down to 4 I believe). Its always important to make a good impression when selling a product, and its doubly so for MMORPGs I think.
Given that WAR is considered the next likely candidate to challenge the supremacy of Warcraft (a daunting prospect for the developers I am sure), I can't help but think that this is a very bad idea generally speaking. The game needs to be as complete and ready to play as possible in order to attract the required playerbase. Taking the game live in a partially developed manner is no longer a viable option I think. Prior to Warcraft this might have been possible - Dark Age of Camelot went live with many features missing, but what it had was enough to attract people away from Everquest (which was its only major competitor at the time), but with Warcraft being such a complete product and so well designed (I may dislike it but 8m+ people disagree with me), any game that comes out now needs to be able to put its full featureset into gameplay right from release or it risks losing the majority of players who are pretty jaded and expect *everything now*. The time for incomplete products has passed, thanks to Blizzard.
Not only that, but if its missing the Tankers on all sides specifically thats a very bad decision as well. This will undoubtedly slow PvE leveling and thats usually the focus of any MMORPG early in its history as players build up their characters in preparation for the end game (yes I know you can PvP at any level in WAR, but realistically people will want to race to the end levels first and likely avoid PvP as they do in so many other games, even though the game attempts to balance it at all levels).
Since Jacobs has stated this is nothing to do with EA, its most likely an internal decision based on lack of development time and a desire to make a November release date that is key to getting Christmas sales for the game. It may also be a reaction to the success of Age of Conan (which is doing well by reports, although I didn't keep my subscription going so I am out of touch), or to some other major release thats coming at the same time. MMORPGs and their expansions tend to be timed to coincide with releases from other companies and that often seems to shift dates.
Mythic had an extremely successful product with Dark Age of Camelot, although they blew it in the long run, overdeveloping the game in some areas and inconsistently designing it in many cases. I have high hopes they can produce an excellent game with WAR but we shall see.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
It is funny that everyone bitches when a company holds back a release *Forever* while the developers Duke it out over new technology, features, etc... Rather than Nuke a fer features in favor of a quick release. Yet when they trash a few features to make a release date, they get the same kind of flack.
Of course everyoen mentions Blizzard... I would be willing to bet that the difference is the marketing, I mean, Blizzard doesn't announce games untill they are good and ready... they don't need years of buzz. I would be willing to bet that they always have a good bit of feature chopping in every blizz game (in fact when you open and look at MPQ files, you could find lost character classes, never activated items, etc etc, it just happens BEFORE the marketing, rather than after.
The article seemed a bit misleading. It made it sound like the game was dependent on races having all class types available for RVR, when it's not. It would be like saying Alliance in WoW is in trouble because they removed the ability for Gnomes to be priests. In WAR there are two factions, Order and Destruction. Order has the Ironbreaker and the Swordmaster as tanks, the White Lion and the Witch Hunter as melee dps. Destruction has the Black Orc and Chosen as tanks, the Witch Elf and Marauder as melee dps. Just because particular races don't have tanks doesn't mean the faction doesn't have tanks for the RVR.
Looks like they're in a hurry to get to the "paid beta" stage asap. Whomever handles their finances is probably riding their ass because they're not cashing in already. Delaying the release would probably not hurt the general goodwill towards the game, but releasing it this early and they'll be the next major laughing stock since Vanguard.
...and not 40k?
Who thought we need yet another fantasy MMORPG with swordswinging, arrowshooting, fireball casting humans, orcs, dark/notsodark elves, undead etc etc etc?
They had access to the Warhammer franchise and chose this... I couldnt care less about their deadline, or if they ever make it at all.
Its not a Warhammer MMORPG for me, unless you give me a bolter and a power-armour.
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 :)
Everybody Panic!
You would think the slashdot crowd would be refreshed by a company doing a public disclosure of changes like this.
Seriously though, this is not a huge deal (unless you had your heart set on one of those classes at release). There are still 20 classes with a large amount of variety and a good mix of standard mmo and new-ish mechanics. That's a large number more than many MMO's. see: http://www.warhammeronline.com/armiesofWAR/index.php
As for the cities, yes it's a definite loss, but two strong cities will serve that facet of end-game content well to start. (Yes it's only one of many possible facets.)
Yes, I've been in beta since the beginning, and yes the game is much more polished than people are expecting. I really can't comment beyond that with the NDA, but feel free to browse the public info: http://www.warhammeronline.com/index.php
-ACupOfCoffee