Slashdot Mirror
Warhammer Team Hit By Layoffs
Zonk notes that Mythic Entertainment, developer of Warhammer Online, is being hit by another round of layoffs. The report estimates that between 60 and 130 staff were let go as part of Electronic Arts' reduction of its workforce. This comes alongside news that the number of Warhammer subscribers has settled to around 300,000. Mythic's Mark Jacobs was quick to affirm that while they were "resizing the team," their plans and schedule are unchanged, citing lower demands on QA now that the launch period has passed. Hopefully this means that their upcoming "live expansion," A Call to Arms, will not be affected by the layoffs.
QA? What QA? That game was released as a festering pile of dungheap barely deserving the name alpha quality. It is patently obvious it is another AoC in the making.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Anyone know what was their target subscriber pool? I heard rumors of 1 million. I'm sure they wanted more than 300k.
Disclaimer:I'm a mmo pvp die-hard, which is why I stayed away from that game.
Lower demands on QA now that the launch period has passed...
Kinda like the doctor who says:
I have good news and bad news.
The bad news is you've lost a lot of blood.
The good news is you lost an arm and a leg too, so you don't need as much of it.
but when i was playing warhammer, the controls felt like they where from a rpg on the sega master system. it looked ok, but the controls and responses weren't, and it made everything feel clumsy to me.
And I love people like you, who are so eager to blame the producer (or anyone else) for not giving a team infinite funds and time.
The facts are:
1. The producer isn't some mysterious bogeyman who does nothing but set arbitrary deadlines and stop you from finishing QA. The producer is the guy who pays for the whole development _and_ QA, and each extra month is a month he'll be paying for.
2. I don't know how you imagine things to be, but any project involves some negotiations. Basically those devs said at some point, "yes, we can do it before date X and with Y million dollars." I'm not aware of any game which was pushed out before the date the devs agreed on. In fact, most blow the deadline and the budget. Some outright lie to get the contract, or are apparently unable to learn from past bad estimates.
Warhammer Online has been in development longer than WoW IIRC, and it looked so often that it was going nowhere that it was cancelled and then continued after all a couple of times. The first cancelling I remember was in _2004_ FFS. And that's not the _start_ date, it's one of the dates when it wasn't going anwhere.
And while I have no clue about how it went with the deadlines and budget in the final round, but at the very least, the team delivered less than they promised. See all that cut out content. That's stuff they hadn't just promised their fans, it's stuff they had promised the publisher for that money too. They effectively delivered maybe half the game they had been paid for, or maybe even less.
3. Most games actually don't even break even as it is. E.g., EA actually subsidizes a heck of a lot of games out of the profits of their sports games and such. I.e., statistically the expectation for any of those games is that it will be yet another hole to throw money down. And digging a bigger hole isn't exactly going to help.
So, yes, from where I stand it looks to me entirely fair to blame the devs. What do _you_ propose? That the publisher keeps throwing money down a rat hole until the end of times?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The Warcraft line of game was initially intended to be a Warhammer game, but they didn't get the IP. Those guys were around a long time before Blizzard existed. Blizzard's so famous IP is a Warhammer clone.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/4/10/
And to be honest it does reek of unfinished. The graphics are sub-par, the animations are buggy and jerky at times. There are places you can get stuck and unable to move on certain prolifically-placed doodads - and the /stuck command requires you to wait 30 seconds while it logs you out (which btw is another annoyance, you can't even select 'exit now' when you want to quit game and HAVE to wait 30s before it closes)
There is no antroscopic filtering (As far as I can find, the advanced graphics settings are laughably minimal) and thus all the repeated paths and textures look gritty and pixellated even on a half-decent rig (4Gb Ram, 2.4Ghz Quad core, Nvidia 8800 GT - pretty average now). There are animation issues on Characters about 10m away, where it begins to look like a stop-motion effect. When in a dungeon full of skeletons it's like being in Jason and the Argonauts.
The interface is a bit crap too, my Chat window is obscured by something called a 'tactics bar' which I can't seem to move or hide, and while I can read the chat, I can't actually see what i'm typing until I hit enter and say it.
The game itself does quite well in blurring the lines between Player vs Player and Player vs Environment with experience gained through questing and PvP, and the idea of two targets (one enemy, one friendly) is interesting - it does lead to situations where I leave a town having got my quests, go into combat and attempt to heal myself, but instead try and heal the NPC I just got the quest from (despite being no-where near the town anymore)
The gameplay is really just bog-standard MMO, with a focus on PvP and an over-all goal for players at high level (with low-level goals contributing to the top level ones) - however, world RvR goals (atleast on the server I was on) tend to be on a round-robin rotation. Destruction's army takes site 1, Order takes 2, 3 is left open, Destruction moves to 2, Order to 3, etc, then Destruction to 3, Order to 1 and so on. Each massive army seeing no actual Combat, except against the meagre force of enemy NPCs guarding the checkpoints, and all they're really doing is farming renown, XP and Influence.
it's just another MMO - one with alot of teething troubles that has come out at the same time as a plethora of other MMO's, including the WoW Expansion.
I hope the coming content patch makes up for it's lack of polish, otherwise it's heading for the same fate as Tabula Rasa
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.
Just to nitpick, the first two complaints you mention are things that happens in WoW to this day. Though not as frequently. Suprise, they don't happen nearly as often in WAR now either. I will concede that pet pathing was atleast six kinds of insane though. As for a perceived lack of variety, I don't understand what you're trying to say. Questing sucks fairly equally in both in my opinion, but the fact that you could choose to level by traditional grinding/groups(PQs, Kill Collectors,ect), through questing(zzz), or through PVP gives WAR the edge in that respect atleast. Speaking of PVP, in the years WoW has been we've been given what? Five BGs? Arenas? lol.
True, I remember the original story of how Warcraft 1 was suppose to be Warhammer. But since then, Warcraft 3's game engine was incredible change from 1's. And Warcraft Online DID come out before Warhammer Online.
Warcraft developed their own lore, if anything Warcraft ripped off it's game mechanics from every other game that came before it, but that's common place in the game industry.
So the only IP you're referring to is the concept of Orcs, humans, elves, and the likes fighting in battles? There's prior art that Games Workshop would never have the IP to it, and Blizzard is even less likely.
So I would not say GW ripped off Blizzard, but I would also not say Blizzard ripped off GW. They neither were very original except the lore, and even then, it's stretching it, since lore is basically fantasy books, and there's not that much originality in that field either. Don't get me wrong, I love fantasy books.
A Night of Murder.
:S
Their management timed the announcement just right then, I see.
... but I cancelled a few days ago.
It wasn't that the game was bad - I liked it and kept my subscription up since release even though I only played it a few times.
It was that rebooting my MacBook Pro from OS X into Vista became too high a bar for entry. It was just easier to load up WoW than to reboot and play WAR. When you use OS X for everything, and you have to quit all the apps and reboot for a game...
I wanted to love it. I bought a copy for myself (collector's edition) and a copy for my wife. We played for a few hours in total (I hit level 10!), but in the end, the game did not fit our need for casual gaming.
We didn't want an easy game or everything handed to us. We just wanted a game that was accessible. Booting to another OS sounds simple (and is) but after a while it becomes too much.
I'm ready to re-subscribe one day... I did like the game.
Actually, the most idiotic problems I experienced myself were the mobs running away at olympic sprinter levels when on low health, the insanely high respawn rates and the fact that abilities were laggy as hell.
Mostly though, i stopped playing because the immersion was just not all that fantastic.
Decent enough game, great concepts, but not so great execution.
Make a man a fire and he will be warm for a day, set a man on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life
Troll or ignorance?
The Warcraft line of game was initially intended to be a Warhammer game, but they didn't get the IP. Those guys were around a long time before Blizzard existed. Blizzard's so famous IP is a Warhammer clone.
Games Workshop so famous IP is a LOTR rip off. So what? People have been borrowing ideas from those that came before them for more years then you've been alive.
WoW should serve as an example of how cutting edge graphics do not rule the MMO landscape the way they do in other games. It would be nice if other developers took note that WoW has initiated millions into the MMO market. Despite all their collective faults, actual or perceived, the WoW subscribers have more appreciation now regarding issues like PvP/PvE balance, bots, grouping, crafting, housing, etc. Old MMOs when in development found their forums flooded with questions about screenshots/movies. Now go look at the new Star Wars MMO in development and you have daily questions about will it be released with a native Mac client or how will it handle PvP/RvR or crafting vs looting gear. The consumers have gotten over the glitz factor being the number one selling point with MMOs and are now showing interest in gameplay aspects that before they didn't even have the vocabulary to discuss. Now we just need some developers to spend more time on the rules engine as they do on the graphics engine.
COH just added a Mac client, and is fairly playable if you meet the requirements. I am certainly having only minor problems which I expect will be cleaned up down the road.
http://www.cityofheroes.com/
The game is still quite playable, there are people playing at all levels so its not difficult to get a group, and its the sort of game that you can log into, do a mission or two in half an hour to an hour and feel like you accomplished something.
It also has the best combat system mechanics and character creation system of any MMO I have played. Sure you need to like comic book superheroes or villains to have a feel for the niche the game occupies but when I first tried it I hadn't read a comic in over 30 years and I enjoyed the game immensely from day one.
Once you have experienced the Flight travel power in this game, every other MMO travel power will seem quite lame :P
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Let me repeat the bug: "f you kept beating on an NPC, at some point it said it runs away in fear. Except it didn't, it stood there like an idiot doing nothing. Then if he survived a few seconds in that state (quite easy for major bosses) it would suddenly heal back to full helt."
I don't mean if it's stuck or inaccessible. I mean every single fucking enemy, in every single fucking fight, even if you're in melee with it and it had no problems fighting back until then.
I'm sorry, but WoW's occasional stuck enemy being unreachable isn't even vaguely similar to this epic fuck-up.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Maybe a few people felt that way, but I am sure not a majority. A lot of people would love to find a new MMO...it is just Warhammer wasn't it. I played it...it was fun. PvP was much more accessible and enjoyable. But there was very little social interaction. People were always busy. And when WotLK came out...there was no comparison on what game is the more polished. WotLK improved upon an already stellar game. The grinds were less grindy. The quests were grouped better and more interesting. The instances were streamlined and made to be run in a reasonable amount of time. I think that is what drew people away from WAR back to WoW. Warhammer's PvP is better. But it lacks in every other aspect.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
Actually, the most idiotic problems I experienced myself were the mobs running away at olympic sprinter levels when on low health, the insanely high respawn rates and the fact that abilities were laggy as hell.
Mostly though, i stopped playing because the immersion was just not all that fantastic.
Decent enough game, great concepts, but not so great execution.
Are you talking about WAR or WoW?
I've played WoW for 3 weeks, the Evade bug, monsters that scale vertical walls (which you can't), etc. are all still present. I've been killed by mobs respawning before I've finished looting the corpses, as little as 30 seconds after AoEing them.
It espcially sucks to get killed by things which con grey and are worth 0 xp, since they are "no challenge" :p
WoW crafting is extensive, but I wouldn't call it rich. It's make 10 of w, which requires 100 of x, which requires in total 1000 y, which requires...
I gave up on it and went gatherer instead. The Auction House is a fun way to play commodities trader though. I manipulated the Copper market on Cenarius, bought out all the cheap copper and replaced it with higher priced listing. Made about 400g (which is a lot for an untwinked L37), but after about a week and a half, lots of little miners popped up and corrected it. Good place to write some small/emerging markets papers too. But for crafters? A nightmarish treadmill.
And don't get me started on missing quest items. How the hell is a gnoll swing a sword at you if it has no paws? :p
I picked up WAR and LOTR and will check those out once my month of WoW runs out.
Just swap the noun and verb file from technobabble to magicobabble and fire it up.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
http://www.warhammeralliance.com/forums/showpost.php?p=3378401&postcount=5
This is from their super big announcement. If you go and read the original thread, and talk to any actual Warhammer player, you'll see that all we care about is FIXING THE EXISTING GAME. There are bugs that have been reported since beta that are still in place. Classes that were revamped just before release and don't really work all that well. /fixes/ and /tweaks/ to make the existing content /work/.
The entire player community was waiting with baited breath for
The above post illustrates the total fail that is coming to Warhammer.
More content == More/New bugs + old bugs + less QA == FAIL.
I enjoyed CoV/CoH, and was really thinking about reactivating my account when I heard that there was to be an OS X client. Then I downloaded it and found it was Intel-only :-(.
My own experiences are 100% the same as yours regarding comics, character creation, flight, etc.
Although not the worst MMO I've ever played, I tired of WAR pretty quickly. Kept my subscription going for 1 month after the free one and found that I logged in only twice that month. I think I just got burned out on MMO's, went from WoW in 2004 to LoTRO, to EVE, to AOC and finally to WAR.
What killed the game for me were a few factors:
1) Everyone who came into the game came with at least a couple of friends/family, who then proceeded to grind quests and mobs at lightning pace all the while ignoring my attempts to join their group. A rude, flat answer I often got was: "This is a closed group". These people wouldn't even join a Public group if I started one and begged everyone on that PQ to join.
2) Pathetic communication, the chat system sucked pretty bad. Dunno if they have redone it but it was really bad compared to WoW's functionality and ease of use.
3) Major slowdown in experience at around level 13. Unable to find any open groups, I was forced to level solo in most areas and when I hit level 13 it slowed down to a crawl.
4) The influence grind, when I played WAR influence was the best way to get blue weapons and armor. The worst part about it was that every influence mob from level 1 to 40 gave 100 inf. on a kill but the influence requirements in each zone increased with level drastically. The infl. reward should have scaled with the requirement.
5) Near zero PvP outside scenarios. As someone stated earlier, open world RvR has objectives spread out over a large area and it does work cyclically. Order takes 1, destruction moves to 2.. rinse repeat. Anytime an encounter happened it was invariably skewed in numbers to favor one side. An exception was the Festenplatz thingie.. humans and chaos clashing. I had a lot of fun with the constant action, push backs, chases etc. there. That area had a very close spawn point for both parties and objectives were not too far, the rest of Open RvR should have been more like this one.
6) Fortress elite mobs can pretty much one shot you over weird angles that too. I managed to join two different attack groups but both ended pretty much the same way, somehow the mobs get drawn to the lip of the stairwell(they never come downstairs) and aoe the crap out of any group. Plus the lag, even with graphics turned down
7) Some classes are near invincible at certain levels. Tanks and healers, tanks especially take an insane amount of time to die and worse off they can finish you in 4-5 blows. I've held off a group of 6-7 order folks for a solid 10 mins at Ekrund as a black orc with a tiny shaman hiding and healing.
All in all, I couldn't really connect with the game at all, it got boring really fast.
The similarities between Warcraft and Warhammer are a bit more than "they both have orcs." The visual styles are rather distinctive and similar; it's more like, "they both have ferocious orcs wearing big shoulder armor fighting against the 'forces of good' lead by humans."
Blizzard's secret sauce has almost always been to take existing gameplay and setting concepts, file off the serial numbers, then polish them to a lustrous shine. The original Diablo was a simplified Moria (or Nethack without the puzzles, if you prefer) in real-time, for example. Not to say that Blizzard doesn't do great games or doesn't put some original touches on their games after the initial game of the series, but their biggest hits have cribbed pretty heavily from other sources.
That's one reason why people bring up the Warhammer/Warcraft comparison so often, in my opinion. All creative types "borrow" from others to some extent, but few succeed with that strategy on the grand scale Blizzard has.
Brian "Psychochild" Green
MMO developer's blog