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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.
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.
This was nowhere near alpha or AoC quality. This was definitely a poor game (in the abstract). It is a weak guild wars clone, but most of the assets and the mechanics worked correctly from release. PvP (for the borefest it is) worked from the start and most of the game mechanics worked perfectly (level scaling, keeps worked correctly when the instance wasn't pwnd, quests, crafting, etc).
Q. What's worse than DAOC mez?
A. WAR knockback.
This didn't make the game fun and it was obviously unfinished in a couple areas (crafting still is, lolleriffic), which is not the same as saying "partly broken". The balance problems seemed horrendous, but that's not really a pure development problem. Some things you just aren't going to see clearly until production (like how many of the "features" are aggravating, not fun, how many people gravitate toward what % classing). All in all, there's nothing alpha about it. It was just overhyped. How many people like FusionFall? Is that alpha because it doesn't span a huge demographic? I think FusionFall is a better game than WAR, but not necessarily for the WOW demographic either.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
I completely agree. I played the game at release and the only way I could play it on my system was with a mod (the one that reduced the graphics updating when spellcasting I believe, can't remember exactly), which a later update rendered useless, at which point I stopped playing.
I find it amusing that someone can develop a small mod which doesnt change the looks of the game at all, but allows you to play it on virtually any system, whereas the developers cannot implement this functionality themselves but instead release an update that break a mod that thousands of people (looking at download numbers on curse gaming) require in order to play it.
Really? What sort of problems did you encounter exactly?
Apart from some of the cut content the game seemed pretty polished to me and was good fun.
I didn't encounter anything that would suggest this was a game not fit for release.
I think they should've just held off on release and finished off the content, that was all that was missing. They tried to do in 2 years what took Blizzard over 6 years and did a damn good job, the codebase was clearly solid- never encountered any instability issues either client or server side. The graphics weren't groundbreaking but I think the goal there was to make sure it was accessible to as many people as possible.
Most importantly, as far as MMOs go it was actually fun unlike many others, but the reason I quit is because MMOs aren't exactly high on the fun scale anyway. I'd rather play non-MMO games because I feel I'm getting more enjoyment for the time put in to them.
This was always going to happen, why? GOA.
GOA were the worst MMO company I've ever used when I played the English version of DAoC, everything from having their servers hacked, to having an overheating processor lead to database corruption through to continuing to charge people for subscriptions who had cancelled their accounts.
I have no idea why Mythic chose GOA for Warhammer, I think it's cos they'd been picked up by EA afterwards and couldn't run the Euro show on their own so the contract was already signed, but the important thing to take away from this is that the quality issue isn't Mythic's fault directly (only indirectly for choosing GOA again), if you play the US servers the quality is vastly superior, support is much better and so on.
Shame on Mythic for letting GOA host Euro when they already knew every single European customer hated them when they ran DAoC, but can't criticise them for the way they run their show. I specifically imported US DAoC and US WAR in the end to the UK so I didn't have to deal with GOA. Perhaps this is why I'm sat puzzled as to why there are complaints here about QA- certainly that didn't seem the case on Mythic's own US servers.
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.
I can think of several things, but as random blatant examples, as launched:
- if 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. How _that_ got through QA, I can't even imagine.
- enemies stuck in terrain, e.g., in the cave with the squigs in the greenskin starting quests.
- retarded pet AI. In WoW if your pet can't reach an enemy, it stays with you. In WAR it ran in some retarded direction and down some corridor, and only eventually it would figure out to come back to you.
And so on and so forth.
It was fun if you were one-track-minded about PvP. It was a one-trick pony with that being its only trick. Everything else was a half-arsed affair, if present at all. There was not much exploring to do. (What with the areas being so squashed that sometimes you didn't even have to move from the quest giver to shoot the critters you had to kill. E.g., in the elf starting area.) Crafting was a sad joke. Quests were a boring monotonous affair, where everything was a rehash of the same "go there and kill everyone" thing. Etc.
If you look at WoW or any other game, they allow for a variety of playstyles and whenever you're not in the mood for doing X, there are things Y and Z to do instead. That fact seems to have gone right over Mythic's head.
And again that applies to quests too. While Mythic and their retarded fanboys bleated about how they don't need no stinking "kill rabbits" quests, the truth is that those quests created variety in WoW. There were more activities and more bits of story in your daily routine than "it's a big war, now go kill someone again." There was a whole (uber-simplified) economy to discover, the (uber-simplified carricature of) the NPCs daily lives, there were areas to explore, etc. It doesn't sound heroic and it wasn't heroic, but it was more interesting than doing the same damned thing over and over again.
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.
- if 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. How _that_ got through QA, I can't even imagine.
- enemies stuck in terrain, e.g., in the cave with the squigs in the greenskin starting quests.
- retarded pet AI. In WoW if your pet can't reach an enemy, it stays with you. In WAR it ran in some retarded direction and down some corridor, and only eventually it would figure out to come back to you.
There were similar major bugs in WoW at some point in time also. The difference is that Blizzard mostly fixed these bugs a while ago but then again they've had several years to do so. Even then some of the bugs were long-standing like the evasion bug where if you stood in just the wrong spot and the pathing algorithm had trouble getting a clear path from the enemy to a person who had threat on the enemy then the enemy would heal to full. This happened quite a bit, especially in large raids where there were 40 people with threat on the enemy and all it took was for one person to have this bug happen. Fortunatley it has been (mostly) fixed.
I haven't played Warhammer Online but I've played a ton of World of Warcraft and I think what keeps people in WoW is how easy it is to fiddle around and not realize you've just spent a couple of hours playing. Of course, eventually even doing little quests, farming for stuff, interacting with people starts to wear at you but with WoW the immersion is pretty complete and so it takes a while before most people get bored of the game. Another good thing is that although there have been and still are bugs in the game most of them aren't so serious that the entire game becomes pointless, they are mostly just annoyances that you can mostly work around.
Sapere aude!
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.
... 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
But I never found anything inherently wrong with WAR that wasn't also a problem in every other MMO ever developed (i.e. the grind!). I was primarily responding to the comments made by the person I replied to regarding translation and that IS GOA's area and GOA's fault.
Yup, the original complainer's first bug listed sounded just like the WoW evade bug, which is still pretty common. I guess less so on raid bosses (squeaky wheel gets the oil...) but plenty still occur in normal PvE, especially in Northrend.
That said, I eventually dropped WAR for WoW - the realm balance was the killer in the end.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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
I have to say, I had a vastly different experience.
- I didn't experience the NPC character resetting its health. Mind you, I didn't kill major bosses, but I did kill a few minor ones. None of them had that problem.
- Areas were huge - covering them on foot was often a chore. I'm an avid explorer, and I found some of the early areas to be too big.
- Can't say anything about crafting, as I didn't try it
- Quests were quite often kill or collect quests. Same thing as wow, which only recently introduced anything other than those.
I suggest you try version 1.0 of WoW for kicks one day. It was abysmal compared to today's version.
Warhammer's problem is that it has to compete with today's WoW without ever having had the revenue that comes from 10million people paying about 10 bucks a month.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
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.
Additionally, I played Wow since day one, so I remember well the big issues. On day one, anytime you looted an item for the first time, there was a huge delay. But major game issues like that were fixed early on. Yeah, I continued to have issues casting arcane missiles a year after WoW came out, but those bugs were the exceptions and not the rules. In WoW 1.0.x, there was easily enough of a working game to keep players interested until the next patch.
Also, you mention that WoW only recently introduced quests other than "Kill X" or "Collect Y", but in Wow 1.0.x there were definitely quests like "Escort X", "Explore Y", and "Use item Z at location". I did not do every quest in Warhammer, but I did play two or three classes in both Order and Destruction up to the mid-to-late 20s and I don't recall any quests other than Kill X/Collect Y/Deliver Z. The Public Quests were supposed to be one of the reasons PvE in Warhammer was better than WoW, but they screwed that up because the "contribution bonus" was fraudulent, didn't represent your contribution and, worst of all, persisted after the PQ ended. Add to that a lack of ability to "pass". A single character could (and did) amass all of the gear whether they needed it or not while the rest of the group would get the shaft.
Biggest WoW bugs at release were
Loot Lag
Mailbox Lag
Bank Lag
Equiping Gear Lag
Mob not dieing after you got him to 0%
Quest NPCs not giving you rewards for a quest but completing the quest still.
Stats setting back to their naked values
Many many many server crashes
Patches that made things worse to fix some exploit
Lots of dupe exploits
Mobs getting stuck underground where they could hit you and you couldn't hit back
Getting stuck "looting" and having to restart the game to get out of it.
Game crashes
All this complaining about WAR's release. It really was one of the smoothest. I think DAoC may have been smoother but they cut a lot of content to get there. WAR's was easily smoother than WoW's. SWG was pretty rough, Planetside wasn't bad. EQ was kinda nasty. FFXI was smooth but it had already been running for awhile in JP. For the worst release just grab anything done by Funcom.
I played both games at release and your list is a bit off: :D
Four kinds of lag - yes, I will definitely give you that, there was all kinds of lag at various times during the first few months and then again after major content releases. I gave (and still give) Blizzard slack there because the popularity of WoW blew everything previous out of the water, and they were Not Prepared(TM)
Mob not dying after you got him to 0%, Quests completing without granting rewards, Stats setting back to their naked values - I've never had any of these happen to me in 6 months of beta WoW and 3 years of retail WoW, nor have I heard of it. Perhaps you are thinking of a different game
Many many many server crashes - I believe you covered lag already
Game crashes - Yes, there have been issues like this throughout WoW's life even thru BC (I quit long before WotLK but I'd be surprised if this didn't continue). It seems game crashes are a fact of life for games these days. Many users have zero problems but there's always that 0.5-1.0% that have a glitchy graphics driver or something. Warhammer Online and every other modern game have this same problem
Lots of dupe exploits - I never encountered an item dupe exploit, though I did encounter a random gold dupe once when looting a mob would give you the gold twice. I also remember when Dire Maul released the farmers were using exploits to farm gold and shards off the bosses (and class books!) but that isn't really a dupe exploit.
Getting stuck "looting" - This thing has plagued WoW forever, I don't even know if it is "fully" fixed yet
Well, with all that said, I agree with you that WAR had a reasonably smooth release. It was smoother than WoW's in terms of server performance and availability, but it is also much, much less popular than WoW was at release. In terms of the game being "ready" for release, I still feel WoW outclassed WAR there.
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.
Mob not dying after you got him to 0%, Quests completing without granting rewards, Stats setting back to their naked values - I've never had any of these happen to me in 6 months of beta WoW and 3 years of retail WoW, nor have I heard of it. Perhaps you are thinking of a different game
I've never seen or heard of the stat reset bug but the other two were usually related to some sort of lag. My favorite bug was the multiple reward bug where you could turn in a quest, force-quit the game, and then turn in the quest a second time when you logged back in and get double the xp and rewards. It was tough to do but at one point you could do it reliably with a little practice.
There was also the shaman negative agility bug that was fun, over 100% crit and dodge and tons of armor - it made shaman killing machines until it was fixed.
Sapere aude!
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
Well, I found the game to work fine from release with a couple minor things. The occasional crash when changing zones, the crafting is difficult to get interested in. Other than that, it worked pretty good on my mac playing 1680x1050 with everthing at full in dual booted windows. I played World of Warcraft from closed beta, to open beta, up until about 6 months ago when I finally tired completely and I can tell you, that game was far worse at release than Warhammer. Things like the loot-lock bug come to mind? Everytime you tried to loot something you would lock in the knealt down position and be stuck like that indefinitely, as well as unable to loot anything. Remember the servers down? For the first year? I do. For the whole first year wow was a ? as to wether I was going to be able to play on a given night. Just goes to show, probably 50% of the people whining are uninformed me too wannabees that haunt the internet like no other venue on the planet claiming to have played wow when it first went retail. When wow first came out, there wasn't nearly as many as Warhammer. Let's see how Warhammer looks in 5 years.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
I played from release until days before the Shattered Sun Offensive (or whatever) nonsense came out. I remember the loot lock now. Classic.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
Like Frigga's Ring, I did play WoW 1.0, I don't remember it being anywhere near as poor quality as WAR. Yes, it had its issues, but by and large it worked and was fun to play. And the quests were largely the same as today in the pre-BC areas so I'm not sure wtf you've been smoking if you think only recently they added anything more than "kill X" and "collect Y". Repeat after me: other than a few moved NPCs, and very few Draenei and Blood Elves added which give 1-2 quests each, the quests in the "old world" of WoW are the same now as they were in 1.0. You can go through any area of your choice and over 90% of the quests there will be the same that existed since day 1.
Guess what? WoW didn't start with 11 million players either. In fact, they expected few enough to fit on a couple of servers (hence the resulting queues when 100 times more people wanted to play the game.) They started from zero too, and nevertheless delivered an 1.0 game which blew all expectations and records.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.