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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.
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.
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.
Huh? WAR had PvP in it, especially if you play on the PVP servers. What was the PVP problem with it exactly? What do you play instead that has better PVP?
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/
... 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.
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.
You are playing on the wrong server.
Play on Dark Crag.
Yes, it is open and there is a lot newbie ganking on T1, but in T4 there are massive battles because it is the highest pop server.
Like 200vs300 battles... It helps to be in a guild like Ruin which basically has 1000+ members on its Roster so that you know where the action is.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
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.