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"Live Expansion" Announced for Warhammer Online
Zonk brings word that Mythic has announced their plans to expand Warhammer Online in the coming months using a series of live events that will open up new careers, gear, and zones. The first event, planned for sometime in March, will allow access to the Dwarf Slayer and the Orc Choppa, as well as a new RvR scenario. Later, players will race to unlock a massive new zone, the Lands of the Dead. The expansion itself is titled "A Call to Arms," and it will be rolled out free of charge.
Its just content that was originally planned for release that got cut just so they could beat Blizzards Wrath Expansion out of the gate.
Don't rush me, Sonny. You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles.
Right, because Blizzard is gouging the hell out of us releasing a second paid expansion four years after release. They've added new quest hubs, battlegrounds, tradeskill stuff, whole zones, and of course many new dungeons and raids through free content patches.
"...and it will be rolled out free of charge. "
Translation: PLEASE COME BACK! We know millions of you tried our game when we launched but then Wrath of the Lich King came out and you all went back to WoW and dropped us but we'd REALLY like it if you came back. Please. Pretty please.
Ok, smartass comment out of the way, I feel bad for the Mythic crew. They had the best chance to take a substantial bite out of WoW's rather massive pie. But, in the end, they're playing in the same fantasy-genre sandbox and they just cannot compete with WoW. Yes, Warhammer may do some (or even many) things better than WoW but WoW also does many things better than Warhammer. More importantly, 11.5 million people play WoW. That's a MASSIVE player base and, given that the type of game is a massively multiplayer online game, that "massive" part is kind of important.
In my opinion, it will take a long time before another fantasy MMO comes out that has a similar real chance to take a substantial chunk of the market from WoW. If Warhammer couldn't do it, with all it's legacy behind it, it will require something truly spectacular to do it. Blizzard will need to screw things up at the same time that another company does a lot of things REALLY well with a hot IP (kinda like what WoW did to Everquest...). Warhammer had it's chance but missed the target. It'll be a while before another game has a shot. In my opinion.
I completely forgot, but Mythic has a bit of a history with "Live Expansions".
Typically their cycle in DAoC would be a free "Expansion" during the late spring/early summer timeframe, with a paid expansion in the late fall/early winter timeframe.
Examples of free "Summer" expansions would be Foundations (housing) and New Frontiers, and sometimes major game mechanics patches (such as spellcrafting the year before Foundations). There were fewer of these than paid expansions.
The paid expansions were typically yearly up until the past year (or was it two years ago they stopped?), when instead of another DAoC expansion, WAR was released. The paid expansions were Shrouded Isles, Trials of Atlantis (which led to DAoC's demise), Catacombs, , and Labyrinth of the Minotaur.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
In the TBC cycle, off the top of my head, the following was added for "casuals":
- Netherwing quest hub
- Shatari Skyguard quest hub
- Ogri'la quest hub
- Zul'Aman 10-man raid and associated quests
- Sunwell Isle, including multiple quest hubs and a new 5-man instance
- Added a new quest hub in Dustwallow Marsh for people leveling new characters
They also progressively nerfed the crap out of the raid content to make it more accessible for casual players.
On top of that the vast majority of content in the TBC and WLK expansions is for "casuals". Look at the amount of quest content, the number of 5-man dungeons, new battlegrounds, etc. as compared to the amount of raid content.
If anything Blizzard is completely catering to the casual player.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
Yeah, and you can pick up a copy of Dos 6.11 for fifty cents and spend TEN years writing batch files, and it comes out to like a billionth of a cent per hour!!!1! The problem with your reasoning is you are assuming that "Playing WoW" is equivalent to "Playing a wide variety of story-driven self-contained RPGs." It's like saying that since an unabridged dictionary/thesaurus is cheaper per-page than 20 sci-fi books it makes for better reading.