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Why Warhammer Online Failed — an Insider Story
sinij writes "An EA insider has aired dirty laundry over what went wrong with Warhammer and what could this mean for the upcoming Bioware Star Wars MMORPG. Quoting: 'We shouldn't have released when we did, everyone knows it. The game wasn't done, but EA gave us a deadline and threatened the leaders of Mythic with pink slips. We slipped so many times, it had to go out. We sold more than a million boxes, and only had 300k subs a month later. Going down ever since. It's 'stable' now, but guess what? Even Dark Age and Ultima have more subs than we have. How great is that? Games almost a decade [old] make more money than our biggest project."
The (unverified) insider, who calls himself EA Louse (named after the EA Spouse who brought to light the company's excessive crunchtime practices) says similar trouble is ahead for the development of Star Wars: The Old Republic. EA has not commented yet. God of War creator David Jaffe has criticized the insider for having unrealistic expectations of working in the games industry.
So what is new?
Since when was hoping your boss an unreasonable expectation? Jesus. Makes me question his competency.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
Honestly I think it's part of the life-cycle of corporations. The people with the authority to promote tend to lose their objective view of their subordinates, and end up promoting people that they LIKE rather than the people most suited for the job. Repeat this for a few cycles and you end up with the "good old boys/girls" club at the top, who are all best buddies but who are far less competent than their jobs demand. This reinforces apathy down below, since what's the point in busting your butt for a dumb-ass? Initiative and effort don't get rewarded (or worse, get penalized by jealous managers), and the rot sets in.
This is why large corporations can lose money, lose focus, engage in some amazingly ridiculous ventures and go bankrupt. I guess it's only human nature, but nothing lasts forever.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I guess they did not learn anything from Age of Conan.
Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
We shouldn't have released when we did, everyone knows it. The game wasn't done, but EA gave us a deadline and threatened the leaders of Mythic with pink slips. We slipped so many times
Just reading the summary, you'd think it says "we shipped too early". Only the few words I emphasized mentions the main point of the article, which is that the project was horribly mismanaged, had slipped many deadline and that more time would not have helped at all. It wasn't done but it was never going to get done, EA simply cut their losses and decided to stop throwing good money after bad. The rest is just seeing what could be salvaged...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The problem is that PC gaming is dying as online console gaming gains ground.
I've argued this before, and I will argue it again:
PC games will never die. Simply because the "barrier to entry" for PC game development is so low. No specialized equipment is needed. No specialized software either (you can download a free version of Visual Studio directly from Microsoft). All you need is a basic knowledge of programming, and the desire to build a game.
So while the big studios try to lock up the market on proprietary consoles, or charge huge up-front fees for "Software Development Kits", and buy out any upstart before he ever gets a chance to publish; the creative talent, the innovation, the new ways of doing things - will always be seen first on a PC.
While sure, some guy on a PC can never code the same eye-candy as a $50 million team or compete with version 5 of a highly successful franchise, the PC is destined to be the platform for new concepts not seen before in the game industry. And as we've seen before with games like Doom, Darwinia, etc, you can go from no-name to best seller in a matter of months, thanks to the internet. Frankly, I'm not worried.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Yet EA is still - overall - making buckloads of money. Many of the best shops have been bought out by them, trashed (as seems to be this case), put to cranking out rapid-fire shit, and then eventually canned.
Look at what happened to the C&C series. They ripped out some of the most fun parts, and the initial release of - for example - Tiberium Wars was a huge buggy piece of shit. I can't count how many times the thing de-synced and crashed during online play within the first 6 months of patch-cycles, not to mention the bugs that often left single-player missions somehow unfinishable.
It's all push push push to release a product, which means a shitty product, which ends up killing the once-good franchises they've bought out.
EA were also the ones to start pushing the locked-to-an-account model. Sadly, the competition has smell money like sharks smell blood in the water. So now we have other companies like Blizzard adopting the same shit.
Myself included, even if we had no intention of investing the time required to play an MMO anymore.
Warhammer's real problem was that it learnt all the wrong lessons from WoW, and tossed out the superior RvR design from DAoC. The silly instanced RvR bled off too many people from the in world zones because it was easy to just jump into. Rather than the back and forth of DAoC's RvR where you'd sometimes be outnumbered and have to mount a last stand at an important keep, there was bland, perfectly balanced by numbers twitch RvR.
Of course, even numbers doesn't mean balanced. If your pick up group got matched with an opposing guild group, you had no real chance.
Still, I might play from time to time if they made it f2p.
The problem is that PC gaming is dying as online console gaming gains ground.
Most new exciting games are being released for consoles. There are only a few really hot titles for the PC.
I'm only 31, and this is the second decade in which I've heard this claimed.
It's not that the PC is dying as a game system, it's that the PC is dying, full stop.
People are more and more moving to iDevices and other portables. In a few years, your pocketable cell phone will be able to wirelessly display thing on a large monitor, if you're near one, and use a keyboard wirelessly if you're near one of those, but it will BE your computer. People no longer want to be tied down to a single desktop or even laptop system.
Yeah, yeah, someone will point out that some high end CAD tasks or whatever will always demand a desktop PC, and this is true, but it misses the point: the masses are moving off the PC platform and onto (a) portables and (b) game consoles, and gaming will follow them to those two platforms.
We've seen previous head-in-the-sand behavior from, say, the Unix workstation people as PCs ate *their* lunch. This is no different, and anyone who is very smart is looking to this future and preparing for the time, not so long from now, where the PC is no longer a significant platform.
Mod parent up. :-)
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
wouldn't be the first game that got "killed" by EA's moneymiling....
that's why i stopped buying games published by EA.
Tom says:
October 13, 2010 at 12:24 pm
I worked for mythic for about 8 months. I had to leave because I felt very uncomfortable when I used the restroom. Rob Denton used to follow me in to the Men's room and watch me pee. When i confronted him about it he just said that he took an interest in all aspects of his employees lives as any good employer does.
Reference: http://ealouse.wordpress.com/
I don't think I'll be able to buy a video game again, knowing that I would be exploiting the repression of game developers by doing so.
Shutting your eyes to the tide won't make it ebb of flow to your liking.
Internet connectivity is, as it was for the PC, a true game (natch) changer.
2001 called, it wants its market prediction back.
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
I want to play this game but if its sucks I'm not subscribing.. I would rather wait till the game is amazing before its released...
It may not have the same namepower as Starcraft, but it still sold 1+ million copies. So that's namepower enough.
Their problem is they didn't retain enough subscribers.
If you want to know why it failed, ask the subscribers why they left, and then pick out the common points.
but then I read articles like this one that made me realize that I had just idealized this job as somehow different from the rest of the cubicle farms...
I can't exactly say I got statistics to back it up, but I don't know of many I'd consider stupid and very high on the corporate ladder. I think the biggest downside to being huge is that you spend a lot of time streamlining the process of what you are doing, which tends to cement the process to do exactly and only what you do today. Often you keep thinking the good old days will return so you keep on pushing ahead thinking this is only a dip in the market when it's really disappearing.
The other is that like a person that got really fat then went on a big diet will not be as lean as the person that stayed slim the whole time, companies often expand but as they downsize they don't lose all of it. Broken bones that didn't set quite right won't fix themselves, you'd have to operate to make it right. That kind of introspection is hard, it's a lot easier to manage growth where you have to have a really good business case than it is to manage slack and redundancy. It's a lot easier to limit raises than it is to do pay cuts. It's a lot easier to evaluate purchasing decisions than to replace old and overly expensive systems. Particularly systems that have served a large purpose, but for various reasons is now used for much less and isn't cost justified anymore.
Finally, and this is also a big one: It's a lot easier for a small company to find a new niche than it is for a huge company to find a new cash cow. Huge also means huge expenses, if your main market is heading for the brick wall, then you can't squeeze a 100,000 employee company into a 10,000 employee niche and going in ten different directions to make up the total is probably also not going to work. Even if you got good ideas and a healthy business as such the existing cost structure will just overwhelm you.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I'm working in the games industry for quite a few years now, meanwhile as a project manager (just for a small, independent studio) and those are some of the lessons that I have learnt so far:
- Have a plan and and be ambitious - but have realistic expectations.
- Ship it when it's done.
- Stop it when you see you will never reach your goal.
- Don't release crappy software, it will hurt you in the long term.
- Be honest to yourself and the people around you (in that order!)
So stuff like Warhammer, Age of Conan, Hellgate London, etc. should have never been released the way they got released.
On which platform do newer developers have a much easier time gaining entry into the market? For now, at least, one has a significantly better shot at making a name for oneself out of nothing by creating games for the general-purpose computers, rather than for consoles which require paid-for SDKs and physical media. That said, digital distribution and creative pricing may ruin even this.
And yet, I'm still going spend my time and money on products to be used outside those saccharine ghettos of gaming which the newer consoles have created, and I'm hoping that there will be enough devs who avoid it as as their exclusive (primary) platform too.
I'm sure there is some truth in there. Most people don't just make shit completely up. I mean he's right in that Warhammer wasn't all that good of a game. However there's a ton of bitterness there. That is going to cloud judgment and the truth. I'm going to guess the people aren't quite as incompetent as he pretends. I've rarely found it to be true when someone just goes off on their boss as being worthless. Not saying there aren't bad managers, but they aren't the abysmal problems many people pretend.
Also it does really smack of what Jaffe said: The guy thinks his opinion is more valuable and everyone should be listening to him. No not necessarily. For damn sure the problem with Warhammer wasn't one of not having dancing. It was mostly a balance issue, and also one of the leveling system being too grindy and not interesting enough. Warhammer was not a horrible MMO, it just wasn't all that great and had some issues. However that is hard to pull off when you've got WoW as competition, and even Mythic's own DAoC. These days with an MMO, you are mostly stealing players from another MMO, usually WoW. Means that your game has to compete favourably to that, and WoW is pretty good. So you might be ok, but ok doesn't cut it.
At any rate, way too much hate in there for that to be at all objective. He lost his job and he's furious, so he's lashing out. I just can't take what is said in a situation like that seriously.
Free to level 10 is an evening or two of play. It's more of a more rational demo strategy.
http://pc.ign.com/articles/820/820692p1.html
PC gaming only constitutes a third of the total gaming market. Consoles constitute the rest.
That's not a prediction, that's just a fact.
The game was actually really fun up to a point. They did a great job with the low level experience. Once the game got to the high end, and especially once keep runs or city seiges were the norm, the game became as much fun as actually pursuing an extended siege on a castle. Not so much RvR as RvDoor. I think most of their gameplay systems were great -- expanding tactics slots, passive vs. active talent points, etc. The problem was with the content, largely devoid of alternatives to RvR at the high end, repetitive PQs and their strange and arcane reward systems which turned into a grind for gear that ended up being just really bad compared to stuff you could get just as easily from other places. In the end, once they started flailing wildly in patch after patch to try and make their content fun, I knew it was probably over.
I agree, but for the most part the game market works similarly with the book market. Games and game ideas are shopped around to various publishers in the hopes that someone provides some financial backing.
The concept of a couple developers pounding out code in a garage is certainly romantic, but it doesn't reflect anything but the least adept and amateurish "game programmers" out there.
For what it's worth, I worked at EA briefly after high school in phone support. Not long after starting, I think it was observed that I was of higher skill than most of the other employees and was given new opportunities to grow that were outside my then current role. I am certainly not an ass-kisser; I just did my job and did it well. You can bet your ass this caused some jealousy among coworkers.
Now, I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, I'm just stating that from personal experience, EA does in fact (or did, it's been some time) promote quality employees. Maybe I should have stuck around, but the Bay Area commute eventually got to me and I decided it was time to leave California and move somewhere with a higher quality of life.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
This is pretty much complete BS.
Netbooks, tablets, iDevices, etc *are* taking a lot of people's computing time and interest away from the PC. However, there remain a huge number of tasks- any sort of content creation whatsoever, really, some few app examples notwithstanding- that simply are not suited to that sort of form fact. People's computing will always have, in the background, some sort of general purpose device.
Now, you may say that portables, tablets, etc will evolve to the point that this is no longer true. But if that happens, then it actually proves my point, because such devices will have *become* general purpose computing devices, and therefore the "PC" and its associated games will still be around.
If and when the tablets "win", it will only be because they have become what they defeated.
The ringing of the division bell has begun... -PF
I'm only 31, and this is the second decade in which I've heard this claimed.
That's because Linux has poor game support and it's the Year Of The Linux Desktop.
I'd be suspicious that that's not the case at all. To be honest, this guy seems like someone who got far to into office politics and not enough into just making a bloody game. He seems to declare decissions to be bad, simply because he dislikes the people who made them, and gives no objective view on exactly which decissions were bad, and why.
It may well be that EA breeds this sort of office politics by making it a very dog-eat-dog world, but ultimately, it sounds like the project failed, because everyone was concentrating on their personal success, rather than the game's.
... at least for me. Here a few things i didn't like about WAR:
- No consistent gaming world
- Open-PvP is boring
- HighEnd PvE content instead of more PvP or RvR content
- Some severe balancing issues ( I know there will never be a perfect balanced game, but at least they could try)
- Some leveling holes ("what to do next?"-moments)
- No crafting (Ok maybe some, but that was pointless)
an im saying this as someone who jumped rather late on the WAR-Bandwagon. The game itself was rather stable and the Battlefields were
fun but you can't base a whole mmorpg on that.
The problem is that PC gaming is dying as online console gaming gains ground.
It's funny, but didn't MineCraft make 10,000 smackers a day on average?
Isn't that a PC game? And yes, while it's an outlier, and that's not sustained income... isn't it interesting that a "dying" field can still make money for one person?
Crazy, huh?
SoE(sony online entertainment) ruined Star Wars galaxies
I grew up with video games and building puters... always getting outdated and the microsoft tredmill of upgrades.
I am tired of that, PC gaming is virtually nill for me now.
I do have my gaming consoles... much much easier on the pocket book
Online games I have played: Mr Muds/Merc/Diku muds, Dark Sun online, Drakkar, Everquest, Ultima online/beta, Dark Age of Camelot, Shadowbane, Eve online/beta,
Star Wars galaxies, World of Warcraft, City of Heroes, Conan online, Warhammer online, Champions online, Tabulsa Rasa.... im sure I am forgetting some...
Jeff Vogel does pretty well for himself.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
"And you know what they’re most proud of? This is the kicker. They are most proud of the sound. No seriously. Something like a 20Gig installation, and most of it is voiceover work."
Maybe I'm shallow, but this is one of the biggest reasons I'm interested in The Old Republic. Full voiceovers on an MMORPG implies someone was actually interested in the plot and user experience, and is trying to deliver something on par with a single player game.
And 20 gigs of space? C'mon now. That's not much these days. Hell, I remember when I have a 100 meg hard drive, and my full install of Warcraft 2 was 80 of that. I've dealt with worse.
Except that if you look at the total gaming market, there are four main platforms: x360, PS3, Wii and PC.
Having one of those platforms (PC) constitute a third of the market is hardly a sign it's dying as a platform.
Naw, it's really timing. He's right that it shipped too soon. It had a huge "omg, this will finally be the WoW killer" vibe going (just like the star wars one has), and a month later it was "omg, this game sux". It has nothing to do with being a PC game.
Problem is, these games are massively expensive to make. And so the investors and producers are pressuring to ship while they think they can still make a profit. This problem has hit a lot of the MMOs that people predicted would be great. You can't just backfill the content later and hope players will accept it.
I already did not expect anything else. Look at Dragon Age. Good game, but bugfest galore when it comes to DLC. And who'd you think is primarily concerned with that specific part: Bioware or EA? And do you think EA even cares, or even puts up half able people at their service desk?
More recent then: Dragon Age: Awakenings, expansion of the aforementioned game. I have never played a game which was more blatantly unfinished. Characters were rushed in, options were butchered-out. How do you know? Well, because they didn't even have the time to properly remove all traces. I realise this has been getting the norm for more and more games nowadays. But it's affecting more and more potentially really good games. Civilisation 5 anyone? Or Neverwinter Nights 2 back in the day?
My only hope is on consumer power. I will not buy any product, specifically EA products, before I *know* it is proper. I will not buy at launch. I will sit and wait until the bugs have been fixed, or until I forget about it. I hope many will do the same and companies will again produce only products which are *finished*, and developers regain their pride and tell publishers to sod off when they have to.
But thanks to the insider speaking out, confirming once again rushing is the norm nowadays.
The problem is that PC gaming is dying as online console gaming gains ground.
Most new exciting games are being released for consoles. There are only a few really hot titles for the PC.
I'm going to start from the assumption that you know very little about modern PC gaming and work my way back.
If you were to say: "major titles being PC exclusives" I'd agree with you. That is relatively true. A combination of a large console market with the fact that most major titles are released on the PC as ports has a lot to do with it. A big part of the reason for this is that PC games are pirated so often that developers don't seem to put much effort into creating a unique PC experience anymore. Consoles are squarely in the spotlight here.
I'd only say PC gaming loses out to console gaming in this one area. Consoles get all the "big" titles. PC gaming, on the other hand, gets all the user-made content (modding), the community, MMOs (very few on consoles) and most developers who will one day make games for consoles start out on the PC. I guess a valid analogy would be between Hollywood blockbusters and independent/Cannes films. If the consoles get all of the former then the PCs get most of the latter.
PC gaming has only lost out to console gaming in the sense that it doesn't generate nearly as much revenue. Creativity wise, PC gaming kicks console gaming's ass.
Also, take a trip to Korea or China. Notice how those countries produce a ton of PC games for the domestic market and in both countries, consoles have hardly made a dent. PC gaming is far from dead, it's just adapting.
The people with the authority to promote tend to lose their objective view of their subordinates, and end up promoting people that they LIKE rather than the people most suited for the job.
In fairness, it not easy to always choose the person most suited for the job. Which is probably why it degenerates like that so often.
Qxe4
I bought warhammer as a digital download and though I felt it had a lot of promise, I was really disappointed that I had bought something that just "needed more time in the oven". Compared to WoW, it used twice as much ram, and I couldn't alt-tab in and out quickly at all like I could with WoW when consulting online references. There were never enough players around for the group quests, which were a cool idea but a COMPLETE waste of time because finishing one was obviously not going to happen for me. Some of the game concepts were not well explained, and I felt like I had passed up some important stuff early because there was no clear way to know about it. I didn't even play out the month that came with the game purchase it was that bad. I figured I'd come back to it at some point after it had time to mature, but the interest has long since faded. Oh, and I vaguely recall something about one of the classes not being available yet. Don't really remember what it was by now.
So yeah, I pretty much agree with the article summary as one who got in early then dropped off.
You mean there's a phase where they don't do that?
Personally I don't see why, but it seems no console wants to take up the fight with the keyboard/mouse. You have buttons and sticks and motion sensors but nothing comes remotely close to the accuracy of the mouse allowing you to pinpoint targets a few pixels big in no time and the vast number of hotkeys on the keyboard. Obviously the downside is that you need a desk or table to use it well, I guess it just doesn't fit the "use case" of the box being hooked up to the TV and people using a lounge chair with the controller in hand.
The lead computers have had in graphics took a huge step up going from NTSC/PAL to 720p. Yes, I know computers had this resolution in the 1980s. The point is that the next generation is likely to be full HD, and 1920x1080 is very close to the maximum "normal" people have today as 95%+ of all gamers play at 1920x1200 or below and 16:10 monitors seem to be disappearing from the market. Sound? I expect full 7.1 with bitstreaming to be supported on the next generation, as all the latest generation graphics cards support it. The PS3 BluRay is already bigger than most DVD games for PC.
In short, I don't think hardware-wise the next generation consoles will in any meaningful way be performance limited. The biggest question is if someone wants to pick up the glove and really push FPS, RTS and MMORPG games for consoles using keyboard/mouse. Imagine for example if one of them managed to secure an exclusive console license for WoW then that would be a huge, huge seller. I don't know why it's not happening, I think the consoles have spent so much time selling themselves as not a PC that they can't imagine themselves being the PC.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
FTFY. For instance, Minecraft.
Absolutely - people will always need to do [stuff], and will always need devices that support [stuff] applications, ie personal computers.
Christ, I'm so sick of hearing the GP's argument (maybe I should get off /.) It only ever makes sense to people who think of these things in terms of "devices" and their inherent capabilities, rather than "functions" and their supporting devices.
...which pretty much defines most console fanatics.
Meta will eat itself
Can I refer to your post as The Law of Dunbal? It seems to hold not only for most large corporations, but also for government, politics, small companies, non profit organisations, heck almost any kind of structored organisation I know. If you like, I will appoint you for the Nobel prize
Last I checked, Minecraft is on PC, Mac and Linux only.
When people talk about the "death" of PC Gaming, they're talking about the major game publishers pulling out of the platform. Honestly, I can't wait.
The lack of big name heavy-hitters with huge advertising budgets is creating a vacuum that's being filled by innovative Indie developers who would've never had a chance at mainstream commercial success in a "strong" PC gaming market.
It's not the death of a platform, it's a changing of the guard that has the potential to help normalize the gaming industry as a whole. I wait anxiously for more and more Minecrafts, Dwarf Fortresses, Amnesias and World of Goos as the EAs of the industry find the PC platform more and more unsuitable for their $150 million summer blockbusters.
This isn't me saying that big companies always make bad games or telling major publishers to gtfo, this is me saying that we have an opportunity to deflate and normalize the video game industry before a repeat of the Crash of 83.
Scratches head. Gazes into the distance.
Is it because it was a pile of fucking shite?
To be fair, the first decade was just last year.
EA screwed up a game? No way!
The problem is that PC gaming is dying as online console gaming gains ground.
I've argued this before, and I will argue it again:
thx for you have mentioned that!
Then all we need is something like Visual Studio for Linux and there will be a shitload of games for Linux. Right?
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The problem is that PC gaming is dying as online console gaming gains ground.
Most new exciting games are being released for consoles. There are only a few really hot titles for the PC.
I'm only 31, and this is the second decade in which I've heard this claimed.
Indeed. I'm younger (28), and I recall it being said in the '90s, repeated ad nauseam this decade ('00s), and I'm sure someone will repeat it next year making it three decades I've heard it in before I'm even 30.
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
That, coupled with the fact that the size of the market today is huge compared to what it was even ten years, and certainly twenty years ago. Not to mention the barrier for entry for the alternatives is so low in comparison to the desktop PC (it used to be a big deal to a family laying down a couple hundred quid on a console, now it's pretty normal for families to own two or even all three of the current generation consoles, and maybe even a portable or two) - the very fact that, in the face of such competition, it can still make up a third of the market is pretty impressive.
I'll take the argument that the mouse is still the best device we have for pointing and clicking on things, sure. But I still fail to see how spreading three of my fingers across four movement buttons on a keyboard is a better experience than moving an analogue pad with my thumb for most things. They're really only any use if you've designed your RTS to require umpty-thrumpty buttons, rather than a more streamlined experience.
Fundamentally, though, outside the rhythm-action genre developers are rightly terrified of releasing a game that DEMANDS a non-standard controller, because unless you ship it in the box it massively restricts your audience.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
I can't exactly say I got statistics to back it up, but I don't know of many I'd consider stupid and very high on the corporate ladder. I think the biggest downside to being huge is that you spend a lot of time streamlining the process of what you are doing, which tends to cement the process to do exactly and only what you do today.
True, large corporations rarely are very nimble. The problem might be a different one though; I haven't come across a lot of truly stupid top managers in large corporations, but I did often find them very myopic when it came to making business decisions.
Many managers run their companies by the numbers... the numbers in the quarterlies, that is, and the pretty red, yellow and green "dashboard" spreadsheets that are sent up from the departments down below. These sheets rarely tell the whole story, but they do give the manager a false sense of being informed, and so they will make decisions instead of delegating the decision or asking for advice. And more importantly, once that decision has been made, it is set in stone. No matter how wrong it turns out to be later. In other words, many managers are actually very poor decision-makers.
In the case of Warhammer, perhaps it is just the simple mistake of blindly applying a tried-and-true project management tool to a project that was running late: timeboxing (or sticking to the deadline). It's often a good way to manage delayed projects and ensure you still get something within budget and on time, after which you can decide what to add in updates and at what cost. However in case of MMOs, having a feature-poor or buggy launch is an extremely dangerous thing to do in today's market with plenty of competitors, especially if you count on your customers to pay you each month for the privilege to play. Once you disappoint an MMO player with a buggy or boring game, it is extremely hard to win them back.
But the megacorp that is EA is not alone in this; Age of Conan suffered from the same rushed release... when the game launched, the bank/auction NPC didn't even work! Funcom sold a million copies IIRC and the game got rave reviews, but they were forced to spend the subsequent 2-3 quarters fixing bugs instead of working on new content. By that time, many people had left due to frequent crashes, buggy quests, etc.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
On the other hand, big studios do sometimes put out good games, as well. Mass Effect springs to mind as a well-done game, with a better-done sequel, and DLC I'd actually pay for. Plus, you can't hire that many voice actors of that caliber on an indie developer's budget.
I guess I'm saying that while the "CHURN OUT SEQUELS FOR MONEY BAIL ON RISKY GAMES" isn't helping the industry, there are certainly excellent titles that have come out of that same system.
Never underestimate the stupidity inherent in all human beings.
It's not the bottom ranks that's the problem in larger corporations. As the crowd thins towards the top and the roles are primarily managerial, the temptation to promote those you like becomes more prevalent.
Down the bottom, the people are still relatively new and actual performance and capabilities are easier to gauge. Promotion generally comes in the form of more challenging roles, possibly with the opportunity to assist and supervise less skilled hires. Again, due to the shear numbers of transients at the bottom layers, skill is safer to reward than random short lived friendships.
This rant would have been entertaining if it actually contained any substance or analysis.
Full disclosure: I was one of the UO design leads during Warhammer's later development years, and everything I'm about to say is tinted by a) not working directly on the product, b) my professional opinion having played it, c) and that I have a contract similar to Sanya Weathers' (who is quoted in the EA Louse comments several times) and will not engage in disparagement.
EA Louse completely ignores actual game design reasons that the product failed, instead focusing on company culture and his/her managers' failings. I won't comment on that, but I will point out the following things that went rather horribly wrong with Warhammer:
* Incomplete content: past level 20 most zones were barely there, let alone fully populated with content.
* Broken systems: the economy, craftinig, Tier 4, and the actual zoning and load balancing code couldn't keep up
* Unbalanced classes: they tried to make equivalents for each faction, and over-powered the Bright Wizards, Warriors Priests, and Witch Hunters. Excellent write up about that here, especially about Crowd Control: http://www.brighthub.com/video-games/mmo/articles/44427.aspx?p=3
* Not moving fast enough on PvP imbalance complaints: The common response would be "We ran the numbers! On average, 50% are Order, 50% are Chaos! It's perfectly even!" and in the real world of course it was usually a massive mis-match between sides in individual fights
* The mandate to produce new content instead of fix old broken content. I'll never understand that one, and I tread on dangerous ground going too much into it, but it was a horribly bad idea.
* Public quests: I have always, truly believed that public quests were a good idea gone horribly wrong. This is probably just me being naive from my days on UO, where if we had a fun system idea we could implement it directly ourselves and things like "automatically adjusting difficulty, loot, time constraints and quest goals" were well within reach for the designer. Public quests in WAR stopped being fun the moment population surges in a zone dropped -- soon becoming impossible to complete. How awesome would it have been to at least have them dynamically adjust to lower/higher levels of difficulty based on how many people were in the zone and their relative strengths? How much better if the same *kind* of PQs weren't spread like filler throughout all the zones and they were a little more creative?
Hopefully other games will learn from this: you have to finish and polish the game until it shines! Only in the emerging F2P market can you get away without doing so, and even that will change over the coming years.
./ should really change Anonymous Coward to Lazy ...
Problems WAR had
1. the character models, monsters and environment had no unison at all, they looked awkward interacting with each other.
2. the animations were poor AND buggy
3. the combat was poor
4. the characters abilities were poor
5. no balance
6. too many classes
7. stupid itemization, NO itemization
8. dumb ruleset for an combat orientated rpg
9. stupid netcode, laggy, screwed with the animations further, aggravated poor combat
10. no content in tier 3, 4
11. content and quests were BORING and TEDIOUS, lack of itemization meant no real rewards
12. no game world, they were charging monthly fee's for a set of instances, thats not how you make an MMO you IDIOTS, rule number 1, a streamed cohesive world with an accurate map, no load times, if you cant get that right you should be jailed for incompetence
13. no story, total lack of story and background
14. no interesting characters, again, the "world" story and characters are just no existent
15. the game is just fucking terrible, it fails at everything
I don't think David Jaffe really understood the dancing thing. Just because you're in a state of war doesn't mean people don't dance anymore. Do you really think just because you're in the middle of a war that no one smiles, everyone is huddled in fear 100% of their lives until they die or war ends?
The reasoning that "War is going on, there will be no happiness whatsoever" is ridiculous to say the least.
I dunno, at least the complaint in the summary sounds more like Mythic were the incompetents, not EA.
I mean essentially the complaint in the summary boils down to "we blew deadlines once too many, but EA is to blame for eventually wanting to see something for its money right now." Which seems to be a surprisingly easy sell for fanboys everywhere. The publisher is always some big evil entity that doesn't nothing but come out of the blue and force people at gun point to ship too early.
In reality, EA shopped around for a dev after the first attempt failed, and Mythic won the contract by asking for X months and Y million dollars to deliver product Z. Which was presumably a better offer than anyone else had. (And probably in typical game dev fashion, it was a deadline and budget they knew they can't meet, but were basically hoping that the publisher would then keep throwing money at it just to not lose the existing investment.)
But eventually the publisher has enough of throwing good money after bad (and if they don't, look at what happened with Duke Nukem development), especially since most games won't even break even anyway. As ROI goes, when you have a finite R to expect, you can't throw infinite I at it.
Then the fanboys complain that the publisher are the evil guys and to blame for everything wrong. Now a dev does the same too. WTF?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Dear Moderators,
I'd like to request substantive support for the parent post.
Games development can have great advantages over non-games development (irrespective of cubicles) but it's posts like the grandparent that can scare people away from an otherwise fulfilling career.
Sure, you probably end up trading in potential salary, but if you find the right studio and right team for you, it's worth the pay cut.
Regards, from someone who took a $15k/year pay cut to join the games industry almost half a decade ago, and is still thrilled to be making video games for a living.
Paul "TBBle" Hampson
Paul.Hampson@Pobox.Com
Except Minecraft didn't require Visual Studio soul selling...
I left because:
* I was forced into PVP and I hate PVP with a passion (at a certain point I ran out of missions I could complete with my regular group because they ramped up difficulty, missions did not reward, and killing mobs was worth jack squat exp),
* and the story lines were too linear (finish this town and go to the next)
Granted, all MMOs now are too linear for my tastes so I quit playing them. I'm not going to pay a monthly fee for a single player linear story that allows me to teleport to any point in the world (negating the world part of the game.)
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Actually, I dunno... at the risk of coming across as schadenfreude, I kinda feel vindicated. Relatively soon after launch I wrote a post titled something like "Warhammer: Curse Of The Half-Arse", detailing some ways in which it was a half-arsed unfinished mess. Not only I had a bunch of fanboys telling me I'm wrong -- and verily, according to them even WoW had never been better -- but some flat-out accused me of lying.
Now it turns out that it _was_ unfinished, and even at least one dev says so. And it's apparently insightful now to say "what else is new?" about that.
Not that the fanboy squad will learn anything from it. Come next game, they'll again bark to defend their corporate idol and accuse users of making up issues that get officially fixed in the next patch, or are documented in some patch notes, or is acknowledged in some dev blog or interview. But woe if you're the one saying that their corporate idol did anything less than _perfect_.
At any rate, I'm guessing for some people it must be new. 'Cause it sure wasn't obvious to them at the time.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
After they fixed up the game they announced their "free trial" program, so I decided to give it a shot.
I played EQ1 in high school for two years, and used a buddies EQ2 sub for a year while he was deployed overseas, but other than that hadn't touched an MMO in years.
I actually *really* enjoyed it. I thought the experience was really polished. The graphics were decent. They seemed to fix some of the gameplay mechanics that had always annoyed me in MMO type games. The problem was I simply don't have the time to sink into an MMO, so rather than upgrade my trial account I just quit once I reached the trial level cap.
I've actually tried free trials of other MMOs since then, and have been pretty disappointed. WoW just seemed primitive and missing features after having played Warhammer. I also tried the free version of the EQ game, and was similarly disappointed. If I were looking to actually get into an MMO, I'd go with Warhammer Online in a heartbeat.
Along with my entire guild of hardcore PvPers from other MMOs. This was supposed to be THE PVP MMO. Alas it was a pile of shit. Individual skill counted for diddly squat in RvR. It was a simple Zergfest. The only time we had any fun was when we were blatantly cheating.
We used a bug so that we sound achieve mount speeds in combat, it was fun because you could engage a larger force and break away when you are being overwhelmed. This is a necessary ability for any damn PvP game. Without this, you just get overwhelmed by a larger force, even one comprised of half-brain button smashers. That is unless you had exploit #2!
We used another bug that took advantage of an area of effect (AoE) ability for our dwarf tank class. The ability calculated the damage incorrectly. Instead of applying damage to all targets, it would apply the damage recursively, dealing damage to all targets, then again same damage to all targets minus the initial target, and so on. Damage was not enough to kill, but we coordinated with 2-3 guys to use the ability at the same time. Oh the uproar on the boards when the mindless cluster-fuck of 30 players met an untimely demise because they were so tightly packed. It was delicious. I told them I will personally autograph the screen shots of me exploiting if they wished.
Without these bugs the game was shit. How can you PvP when it's decided by numbers in every single encounter? There is little a person could do given the silly and generic abilities given to us to not simply get run over. As a result all the RvR "epic battles" were just a tug of war back and forth. One side gets momentum and steam rolls the other... until that side resurrects and all attack en masse. It was just the worst kind of combat possible. Jut pick a target out of the crowd and mash buttons till they die. Pray no one does the same to you in the mean time. No such thing as timing or coordination required.
Of course you can guess that none of us even bought retail. Why by a game that's not fun unless you find an exploit? I knew the game was goign to be crap. And it was. Only thing it had done better than WoW I would say was the Public Quests, which were a nice little thing they no doubt stole from a different game.
They actually said the same thing before WoW, and could even offer numbers to support it. Each time someone got 100,000 players, you could see a bunch of other games losing a total of 100,000. Market saturated, all you can do is steal players from Everquest, etc. Heard it before. Quite eloquently too.
Then comes WoW and enlarges the market by a whole order of magnitude.
Turns out there was still room to grow. But of course, you needed to offer something to people who didn't already like Everquest. Everyone who wanted to play an Everquest clone was already on Everquest, and everyone else didn't want to play an Everquest clone. You couldn't enlarge the market by just catering to the same group of people. You needed people from outside that group.
My take is that the same happens at the moment. Sure, if you make a WoW clone, your market is kinda limited to the people that WoW already caters to. You need something new to get new people.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
He's right. Someone should have told us right up front, whenever we first had the vague notion that working in the games industry might just be more rewarding than being an overworked combination of galley slave and cabin boy, just what "realistic expectations" about industry jobs should be.
Here's a tip. At some time you're going to get treated like crap by some self-centred jackfruit with delusions of godhood. In the games industry we call those times "weekdays". Weekends are when you can get away from all that, since there aren't quite so many people in the office then. But don't worry, we'll only have to work weekends and evenings until we get past this next milestone. After that everything will be JUST FINE. Honest.
When you've had enough, you can always quit. I'm sure that nobody will give you any trouble with that at all.
It's entirely possible, in a monkeys-flying-out-of-your-butt way, that your work experience may be better than that, it's just insane to go into the business expecting anything different.
I'm not sure about "poor game support" so much as a lack of standardization across different distributions, and a lack of polish in the APIs available. As certain distributions become more widespread (Ubuntu, I'm looking at you), polish will follow, and a certain baseline functionality will come to be expected for most systems operating in the capacity of a desktop. With that will come polish.
PC gaming may not be dead but it is has changed significantly over those past two decades. I'm not sure there are really fewer "really hot titles" however some generes seem have fallen by the wayside. What does seen to be an increasing trend is porting console games to the PC - or developing with consoles in mind from the start. In the past games would be developed for the PC only could have been far better (IMO) if they did not have to cater for console players (e.g dragon age).
He made God of War, then walked away and made a stupid small Playstation arcade game, and now hes doing twisted metal which looks like garbage, because it was always a garbage game.
God of War 2 was far better than Jaffe's, and God of war 3 was insane.
Jaffe hasnt made a good game since God of War, and it was his only good game... which he walked away from.
I'm in my 30's, and I'll simply say that this is the 3rd decade where I've heard it. In the late 80's(it was printed often in compute, and commadore), in the 90's, in the 00's. And I'm sure we'll hear it again in the future. PC gaming isn't going anywhere, when a guy can setup his own dev team with a few buddies and pop out a indie game, without having to drop 50k on a SDK.
Om, nomnomnom...
The article said the best thing they like the fact that it has full voiceovers.
I hate that as its a clear indication that the game must be totally locked on its rails.
0 replay value.
Honestly I'd rather just watch a movie. Actually it amounts to the same thing (except a movie DVD is cheaper, and has a better plot).
What is it with games these days? So narrow... I guess its cheaper/quicker to develop one long script instead of a truly dynamic environment.
I was one of those people that bought Warhammer Online and didn't make it past the free month of play. The game had a lot of potential, but was clearly incomplete at the time of launch.
What he says is probably true about EA, but it's a bit tired and old. It's no news that EA is a bit out of touch with developers and pushes them too hard, and forces products out the door. They've been known for doing this for years. If companies like Mythic want to have full creative and administrative control of their projects, they should stop whoring themselves out to companies like EA. It's 2010, you don't need shelf space to sell a game any more. Buy some servers, create your game, and then you have nobody else to blame but yourself when it is shit.
Why'd you buy it in the first place? Weren't they pretty up front with both of these facts from the get-go?
oh gosh, you are crazy. If you think (even in a few years) that you can cram my desktop into a phone.. you're insane. The games i play daily are fairly demanding on a computer. I don't think a phone can even play HL1 at a decent resolution, that game is over 10 years old. A phone doesn't have the storage capacity to download my TV shows.. i can store about 20 good res episodes which means you NEED a pc to store and manage all that content. Unless you plan on paying a service to manage it for you. If you have your phone loaded up with music, that deeply cuts into your tv show storage.
Your phone is a communication device. If your phone becomes powerful enough to play high-end games and manage all your music/videos.. guess what? You have a portable Personal Computer (PC) that can also make phone calls.
I also doubt that people are migrating from PCs to Consoles. Consoles were the gaming machines before PCs were. The people who play on PCs like it that way and Consoles are for people who want something that "just works". They can also coexist together. Some people prefer their MMOs and RTSs on the PC and their FPS and RPGs on console.
Damn, i feel like i've been trolled.
I will agree though that smartphones will likely replace portable consoles like gameboy and psp.
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
Someone guessed the password and trashed the site.
It's a shame when these want-to-be hackers decide to show their immaturity and lack of understanding for freedom of information; the original text's transparency into the Game Industry is invaluable.
That said, below is the original text of the post before the defacing:
--
Why Warhammer Failed
Posted on October 12, 2010 by anonymous
Hi everyone,
I would think myself to be part of some noble cause, like the original EA Spouse trying to save her husband from a hellish work environment at EA. That had a happy ending, however, with tons of publicity and a total change of overtime wages and salaries and how they are handled within the company. I do not expect a happy ending, so I’ll be personal and selfish, and this is just for me.
So just call me EA Louse.
I found out recently that I will be dismissed from Bioware Mythic during the next round of layoffs EA coming this November. I’m sick of seeing EA outsource their art and find every excuse to get rid of us and still not achieve anything. Mythic is dying, and its not us who killed him but we’re taking the fall.
But if you want to know what really went down with Warhammer, I’ll tell you right now.
First, the project leaders did not know what they were doing. Jeff Hickman was the saddest excuse for a producer I’ve seen. All he did was drink the Koolaid and suck up to the right people. He was the perfect yes-man, and this reached down to almost all managers.
My boss who will not be named, again and again would tell us that Rob Denton, one of the original owners, said we should “do this” and “do that” and we would say “omg it makes NO sense, please explain A, B, and C to him. “And then he’d come back and tell us, after we thought he had gone to talk with him,” No, Rob wants in this way. Jeff agrees, this is what we’re going to do. Understood? ” They never actually talked back to Rob. We didn’t talk back to them.
Rob said jump, our leaders said, “How high?! And on who?”
So we shut up and did what we were told, by people too afraid to tackle real problems. It is a culture of fear, especially since Mark Jacobs was fired.
Oh, he left voluntarily you say? No, he was fired, and everything placed on his shoulders by those closest to him so they could divide his salary and annual bonus. I bet Rob is enjoying that sweet new Maserati he bought after leaving the knife in his partner of 15 years.
Want to know more? Keep reading. I can keep ranting.
Rob was never there during the development of Warhammer. We always joked about when his next weekly holiday was coming. (Answer? Next week!) Mark was not available, was way too head down trying to design his own contributions or whatever. Rob always handled things. We were told NOT to speak with Mark in person, never, or else we would be explaining to Rob.
The coup began long before Warhammer, and Jacobs did not even realize it.
And yet, this is common gossip in the company, and nobody in this industry seems to get it. So get it! Rob was responsible for the entire project, then blamed Mark when things went wrong.
Ah, but could not do it alone. No, he needed Jeff Hickman, promoted from customer service to produce the Warhammer project. Wait, let me let you have that sink in. The man running customer service, on the theory that the management of a large team of CSRs qualified him to run a game development project, was put in charge of a $50 million project with no previous experience.
And he needed Eugene Evans, the man who brought you the almost non-existent marketing campaign behind Warhammer. We could not even believe how bad they fucked up the marketing campaign. There was almost none. We slaved for years, and this is how we were rewarded for it by Eugene and the people of EA? Being told that Warhammer was not “worth” a lot of money spent on it? LOL. Now he’s
Well, there goes TFA.
Let this be a lesson to you: use strong passwords.
It's not the bottom ranks that's the problem in larger corporations. As the crowd thins towards the top and the roles are primarily managerial, the temptation to promote those you like becomes more prevalent.
From what I've observed, this is really true in large organizations where departments are constantly politicking over staff, budget, space, etc. Managers have a need to promote subordinates whom they trust and expect will not throw them under the bus for their own advantage. Those people have a value to them that is separate from objective assessments of their work performance.
This is not inherently a bad thing. But if unchecked in can definitely lead to a disastrous work environment where competent and ambitious workers are passed over in favor of loyal underlings.
Netbeans, Eclipse, whatever...
Funny you should bring up game development on linux though... the linux game development community seems more bent on reinventing the wheel (freeciv, etc) or making existing DOS/Windows games run on linux, than actually innovating.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Sounds like EA needs to take a look at Blizzard's success and their unofficial "It will be ready when its ready" motto. EA appears to employ short sighted business execs who lack common sense, as a general rule.
I was one of the people who played at launch, and quit shortly after. A few things bothered me (not the issues with the Bright Mage snares; I was playing one after all). The linear, progressive nature of the campaign was really irritating. Finish an area? Good, your done, forget about it and never come back. Other than maybe pick up some old titles you might have missed there was probably no reason to go back. Coming from WoW where there are good excuses to revisit old areas (farming, achievements, old instances/raids, etc.) it was annoying to realize that once you finished up with the campaign, there was literally nothing to do, except pvp constantly (which I suck at anyway). The public quests were an interesting idea, but ultimately a failure. For about a week after launch it was fairly easy to get people to stop by and join in. After that everyone moved on, and the only way to do them was with a guild or friends. For someone that doesn't have very many friends that mmo game (and the ones that do, didn't bother trying WAR), this was a killer. The crafting system was a steaming sack of shit. I don't think I ever did more than glance at it and gather a few things, in the three or so weeks I played. Finally, there was little reason to go to the major cities. You could find all the vendors, skill trainers, and almost everything else you needed along the way (I didn't play to far, but the library and the trophy stuff seemed to be the main reason to visit the cities). Again, for someone coming from WoW this was a huge turn off.
On the good side, the idea of public quests was solid. It just needed a better player finding feature. The titles, the lorebook, the bonuses for killing lots of creatures of a single type, were all very cool, much better than WoW's achievement system, simply because there were tons of titles for all kinds of crap, and you could get alot of them with very little work, making it easy to feel like you were really accomplishing something. For example, there were titles for thing like clicking on yourself 50 times, or doing pvp naked, scoring critical hits, and survivng pvp fights with 5% hp or less (getting that one was awesome; I wish WoW had a Toothskinner title), as well as situational titles that you got if you found certain static world objects and such. This game showed alot of promise. Its a shame EA fucked everything up.
Why'd you buy it in the first place? Weren't they pretty up front with both of these facts from the get-go?
You have made a mistake. This is not a rationality contest. What you're arguing with is a (presumably truthful) answer to the question "Why did you cancel your Warhammer Online Subscription?"
But hey, why pass up a good opportunity to be a snot?
Judge me however you wish, but the question is valid on it's face:
Knowing the two features you hated were amongst the only distinctions of this title, why did you attempt it?
Answers could include:
A) Lack of research
B) Hopefulness that they'd change their minds
C) Peer pressure
Lots of things, really.
If they can make Sintel, how long before a video game is made that way and of that quality?
Most keeps were placed for where most people would end up: at the level cap. There was a single keep for each 10 level spread below that.
The lower level keeps were under almost constant siege, and those at the level cap always had a keep available to attack.
My followup question is, are you asking for an answer to your question, or are you attacking the OP? We need less of the second.
The question is not an attack, nor is it rhetorical.
I appreciate what you're trying to do, Beep, but you're barking up the wrong tree. There is sufficient material to be curious about the topic at hand, and the answer could well lead into interesting conversation.
If you doubt my sincerity, my posting history exists for your further research.
Eventually consumers will catch on to the "buy a new console, buy all new games" scheme. If I bought a new PC today I could still play some of my old DOS games and almost everything in between. Add emulation and I can play other computers' games AND console games.
Besides, with internet access and a keyboard, how is a console much different than a PC? Oh, yeah, the PC has much more computing and graphical power.
I chose my TI-99/4A over my Atari 2600 rather quickly. NES (8 bit) came out and distracted me briefly with Zelda, but I went for the PC 286.
I think we're all cursed to tolerate the console fanboys every generation.
I think you're wrong. Or at least, you might be right, but if you are it will be becasue of deliberate choice made by manufactures of mobile devices. It's a matter of "How much performance is enough, and how much does it cost." When the first PCs starting coming out IBM wasn't worried. They could barely add 2 + 2. They were for hobbyists. They had nothing like the power of a mainframe. Then, slowly, they got better. At some tipping point it became apparent that a PC, while still not *as* powerful as a mainframe, was powerful *enough* to do most of what a mainframe could, albeit slower, at a much lower price. Slowly, slowly... the mainframe died. Does this mean you never see mainframes anymore? Of course not. There's still a few applications out there that need the kind of power that mainframes provide and are worth the money to get the best tool for the job. Even with clusters there's a small but existent market for large single system image computers. It's just a really tiny market.
When the first Laptops came out people thought they were cool toys. Maybe even useful in some specific situations. Not really like a PC though. You can't really upgrade them, they don't have the kind of power you need, and they're expensive. Then slowly they got a) more powerful and b) cheaper. They still aren't very upgradable, but people seem to care less about that now. Now they vastly out-ship desktop PCs. You can get very nearly the same power in laptop as you can in a desktop for very nearly the same price. Why not get the portable? this doesn't mean that desktop PCs are gone. You just see a lot less of them than you used to. There are still plenty of applications where every little bit of power matters, and portability matters less. People still buy desktop PCs for that. How much longer before laptop and desktop performance and price ratio become so close that almost no one buys desktops? Who knows. Maybe never, since the balance seems close enough now for laptop manufacturers to sell plenty.
Now mobile. As it exists right now, the mobile market is tangential to the PC market (and now I'm lumping laptops and desktops together into one market). The iPad, iPhone, and various sundry Android devices are nice for when you need the Internet in your pocket, but are nothing like as useful as a "real" computer. Let's look forward ten years though. Miniaturization continues to advance. The CPU in your phone is nearly as powerful as the CPU in your desktop, it has around the same amount of RAM, and while micro video cards aren't as nice as those for desktops they're getting there. Where we used to dock our phones to sync with a PC, now there are docks that allow us to connect to monitor, keyboard, mouse and external storage. The display is, from all normal human perspective just as good (and able to be on a full sized monitor); and application responsiveness, while measurably slower in computer time, looks exactly the same to an average user. Why should I buy a PC? My phone now *is* my PC. When I'm at home it's docked and does everything I need for content creation, moderate gaming, and Internet functionality. When I'm not at home it's my normal portable. Hell, at some point maybe I don't even need the dock, it just does everything wirelessly.
Will it *kill* the PC? Probably not. Just like each previous iteration there will be applications for which some people will want a full sized machine. Most people, most of the time, won't though. PCs will become semi specialty items used by Musicians, artists, programmers, and others who actually do need the full power than a desktop or laptop provides. For the rest, portables will be cheap, convenient and "good enough".
The big question is, will the current crop of providers (both manufacturers and service providers) take things in this direction. It *could* go this way, but there's evidence that the providers don't *want* it to. They want to keep portables as toys both because they don't want the headaches of being the "new PC"
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
They were pretty upfront that RVR was a part of the game, but nowhere that I read said it would be required.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
I'll take the argument that the mouse is still the best device we have for pointing and clicking on things, sure. But I still fail to see how spreading three of my fingers across four movement buttons on a keyboard is a better experience than moving an analogue pad with my thumb for most things. They're really only any use if you've designed your RTS to require umpty-thrumpty buttons, rather than a more streamlined experience.
Every RTS on PC I've played in a long time uses the mouse for selecting units, groups, buildings, setting waypoints, targeting enemies and so on, you don't use the arrow keys for much. The keyboard is usually for speed dial to command groups, map areas, build queue, calling in reinforcements and things like that. They are usually accessible from the GUI, but the keyboard is faster just like knowing all the shortcuts in Word.
It's not like this is an overwhelming amount of choices. For example, in an RPG your mage may have 10 tactics slots - two for greater and lesser health potions, two for mana, three defensive and three offensive spells. It's still not that difficult to choose what you need. You could of course hide it all behind a two-level menu if you're out of buttons (use spell -> spell, use potion -> potion) but it only makes it more annoying to choose. Or you could simplify but then you generally turn it into a twitch/mash game with little strategic element.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Sounds like an issue with their marketing, then. They did say it, though, e.g.:
FAIRFAX, VA – MAY 18, 2005... ...
“I have always been a big fan of Games Workshop and Warhammer and I am thrilled that we are now able to work on one of the world’s greatest and most enduring fantasy gaming brands,” said Mark Jacobs, CEO and President of Mythic Entertainment, Inc. “Our goal for this first of what we hope will be many Warhammer-based games is to create the single-greatest RvR-based MMORPGs in the industry.”
Consequently, this is why I avoided it as well. I did try to get into the beta, just to see how deep it would go, because 'based' could mean a lot of things. But they kept on saying things like, "There will be no 'kill ten rats quests', everything will support the war effort." Having played a lot of PvP-style RPGs, I know well that something as simple as selecting the wrong server or class can completely ruin any hopes of enjoying it.
I don't think we're actually disagreeing here. You're pointing out that new technology which is initially represented as restricted to a niche can evolve beyond that niche. That's something I agree with- but my point is that, if tablets evolve in that direction, then they (like all your other examples) will effectively become what they have replaced.
The only thing really keeping something like the iPad from begin a general purpose computer is the lack of a document management solution and the walled garden approach to app installation. Once that changes (or a competitor fixes those issues) what will be the difference between the two? Tablet gaming will basically become the same as PC gaming, with the exception of limited interfaces... but even then, I could easily see tablet games coming out requiring certain peripherals.
You could argue that they're closer to the console model, but I'd have to disagree: the product lifecycle is much more similar to the PC, given release cycles and platform fragmentation; even the iPhone has several not-100%-compatible versions out there.
The ringing of the division bell has begun... -PF
The concept of a couple developers pounding out code in a garage is certainly romantic, but it doesn't reflect anything but the least adept and amateurish "game programmers" out there.
The healthy and lucrative Indie games market disagrees with you strongly. Especially if you start to include mobile devices.
I'm going to have to say off the bat, that if you're not a fan of PvP, you should not have bought Warhammer. Period. It's like buying Quake 3 Arena and not being a fan of deathmatch. Maybe it's your fault for being stupid, maybe its their marketing's fault for not making it clear that Warhammer was primarily a PvP game. Either way, that's not a fault of the game or its design (unless you want to contend that the number of players interested in a PvP MMO simply isn't large enough to sustain a subscriber base, but that's more of an economic problem than a game problem, so to speak).
I played from beta up until about a year after release. I loved certain aspects of the game. There some pretty nasty bugs, horrific lag in the forts and such. What really drove me out of the game was Mythics lack of dealing with the hackers(speed/gcd etc). More than not dealing with it on the forums they acted as if it wasn't happening. A pvp game where your opponent is using a hack really isn't that much fun. Admittedly it wasn't everyone, there were great players on both sides, but there were enough hacks to ruin it alot of nights. Does anyone know if they've dealt with this? Because if the fixes ppl spoke about here are true and the hacks have at least been somewhat dealt with I would seriously consider reactivating my account.
I knew about the RVR aspect, but... like a moron, I was also sold on the sales pitches that there would be PVE content. Who's to say you can't have a PVP/RVR game that allows people to play totally PVE to support those people who wanted to go deal with that whole PVP mess? Even during Beta, they had special areas for that type of gameplay and I never had to go into it if I didn't want. I guess I expect too much. I also subbed because friends were subbing as well so I guess you can say I let myself be tricked.
Anyway, OP asked why we quit. I gave my points.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Minecraft is a wonderful example of garage-sized programming teams turning out incredibly interesting games
I'm not going to pay a monthly fee for a single player linear story that allows me to teleport to any point in the world (negating the world part of the game.)
I'm betting that's aimed at WoW's dungeon finder where it assembles a group from everyone available from multiple servers/realms, transports you to the dungeon, then puts you back where you started.
Realistic? Hell no. Immersion breaking? Hell yes. Enjoyable? Beats the pants off spending an hour or two in LFG trying to get a party together for some of the less popular dungeons. Queue up, go about your business (questing, shopping, talking with friends, looking for resources, sorting your bank), and within 10-20 minutes you'll get a pop-up notification that a group has been put together and off you go. If you're a healer/tank, you can probably shorten that wait to under 2 minutes.
So, it's a mixed blessing. But ends up working better then the old manual LFG system given that people are people. Spend an hour putting a group together. Then wait another 30 minutes for everyone to either get to the summoning stone and/or finish doing whatever they were doing. Whoever gets to the stone first gets to waste the most time waiting. I'm finding that I don't mind the auto-teleportation because it lets me do other things while we wait. I queue up almost all the time when I have an hour or so to play and usually manage 1-2 dungeon runs. Before, I would be lucky to see 2-3 dungeons per week, and mostly on the weekend when I'd have 3-4 hours to play at a stretch.
That being said... I personally think that you should have to find the summoning stone at the entrance to the dungeon before you can queue up for that dungeon. And that's basically what is going to happen in the expansion. A lot of the dungeons supposedly have pre-quests, or have to be found before you can queue up for them. We'll see how well it works out in practice.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
I think we can debate as much as we want about what makes Warhammer, WoW, Call of Duty and most other games good or bad, but we would miss the point if we did not realize that most games today fall in the category that can be called "casual games".
Just to clear any confusion, let me explain what I mean by 'casual games':
A casual game is a game that is aimed for casual players. A casual player is someone who does not play too often, just picks up the controller/mouse once every few days to have some fun when there is nothing else to do. Obviously these players aren't interested in too complex games that take many hours of play to understand the mechanics of the game, and that are very difficult and frustrating during the first 10-20 hours of play. What these players want is a game you pick up, enjoy right away, drop, pick up 3 days later again and enjoy, drop...
In order to get a game like this, you need to keep things simple. So first, you try not to put too much content. You also avoid adding too much mechanics to the game. And of course, everything has to be straight-forward, obvious...
Take WoW for example. Some things could have been added to the game to make it more complex:
- Maybe character alignment and party psychology
- Diplomatic relations between races instead of only 2 factions.
- The ability for players to shape the game world directly through their actions.
- More realism. Like, boars that don't loot swords.
- More content in order to gain in diversity. Like a wider variety of mounts, or use for all the spare animal body parts in alchemy.
- Perhaps a bigger world, so that all players don't visit the same places and don't do the same quests.
Now, the above are just a few examples of how a casual game like WoW can be modified to become more complex. But at that level of complexity, the game will take a lot more time to be learned. And the belief is that casual players who are the majority of gamers and also buy more games, will be put off by that level of complexity and will stay away from the game. That's true, and that's why 99% of games today have a "Casual" feel to them (for instance, did you notice how all FPS are really similar in gameplay, and aside from the story and characters there is no difference between them?).
The thing is, while it may have been true up until now that the majority of gamers were looking for games that were easy to pick up because they did not consider games as a serious entertainment, this has now changed. Current video games have built a market of gamers that now understand video games can be very interesting and who spend a lot of time playing. The majority of gamers who play casual games are not casual gamers anymore. Game developers have to understand this change in dynamic. The strategy of "Let's keep our game simple and approachable in order to attract plenty of buyers" is out-dated. Gamers now are willing to invest serious time and effort into a game, in order to get a great experience (just look at how much time people pay WoW, or how anxiously Halo fans await the next volume in the serie)
If you ask me, I think the reason any game that is too casual fails today is mainly because the game was too simplistic, not complex enough, did not offer a challenge, did not offer anything more than competitor games of the same genre, and thus was boring and unappealing. Any other explanation actually explains why the game was 'casual' rather than 'pro'. Hopefully developers will soon go back to making complex games, like they used to in the early 90s (e.g. Robinson's Requiem to name just one). It seems indies are actually understanding this (e.g. X3, Amnesia, and others) while major developers don't seem to get it and believe the PC market is simply not a good market.
Thanks. So I suppose some percentage of the subscribers will have done that.
;) ).
:).
Someone I know was playing it for the PvP, and I did watch him play and some bits seemed silly to me.
For example: say you want to go to a keep (for some battle), so you teleport to some starting point, ride your mount towards the keep for a few minutes, then turns out the keep is too full, when that happens you are _forcibly_ teleported ALL THE WAY BACK to the starting point. Then you ride towards the keep, maybe get killed on the way this time... Or get teleported back again. Repeat till you give up or get in. Why not just say "too full" and leave you outside the zone to maybe fight enemies who are trying to get in - have the siege extend outside as well - so it might become somewhat of a logistics problem- even if your side are losing in the keep, if you stop enough enemies from entering the keep zone, you might eventually turn the tide.
The other thing was - many play WAR for the massive battles, but if your PC and network connection aren't good enough, it becomes a slideshow in massive battles. So perhaps many had systems and connections that weren't good enough for a satisfactory experience. I heard that sometimes it's the server's fault...
I've never played WAR but instead of two sides perhaps they should have had 3 sides. Though that is more work for the developers and game balancers, it could mean that if one side gets too powerful the other two could gang up on it. Rather than one side keep losing all the time and having the players give up (which means even more losses - since results of massive battles can be more dependent on the numbers involved than the skill - assuming not too many noobs
FWIW I play Guild Wars. It's probably a dying game too, but I don't have to pay any subscription
I've been following this for a few days now and noone seems to recall that Wrath of the Lich King came out two months after WAR. Gee wow, ya think maybe there's a connection there? Established games have more subs? What a novel concept! WAR is a good game and it had a good launch, but it was never going to out-WoW WoW. You want MMO fail, look at something like WWII Online or hell, FFXIV.
This guy is an egomaniacal knob with bizarre expectations. If you're stuck with a crappy project, crappy management or crappy publisher, the idea is to pull together as a team and get the job done and over with in the hopes of scoring something better next time. Do the best you can with what you've got. Or, y'know, quit. This crap is smooth sailing compared to some stories I've heard, let alone lived through (you know you're in trouble when the CEO turns up on a Sunday morning, mid-crunch, in a minivan, to drive the whole team to church). It's people like this that destroy the credibility of real whistleblowers, and just help to entrench the cases of genuinely poor project mismanagement.
I have played Dark Age of camelot for 5 years, World of warcraft for 5 years, EvE Online on and of for a while, Acheron's call, City of Heros City of Villans and other to a lesser extent.
None of these MMO's came out done. NONE. It is the nature of MMO's to be works in progress. Sure they have to have some sort of playability and having played my Zealot to 31 in Warhammer at release it was a good game. The public quests worked the battleground worked, the quests worked.
they added some classses later, but so did Wow they added BRD and other dungons after relese date. Darkness falls in DAOC. I did not play EvE from the begining but I am sure the same thing happened as changes are made after every patch.
I also understand that publishers want a product to release or else you could be faced with George Broussard's 10 year excursion of development.
I am 34 and I know that if it wasn't for PC gaming, then console gaming would be two decades behind.
As long as you get voiced quest text, and I get the option to see subtitles and/or skip them when I've read them (or done them already), I think we'd be happy with the same game. Few things are annoying in the same way as having to listen to the whole story all over again when you start a second character.
Knights of the Old Republic did a great job of this, so I have good expectations for SW:ToR. Unfortunately, with Cataclysm out soon, when would I play it? :)
If you want to know why it failed, ask the subscribers why they left, and then pick out the common points.
I never even finished my 30 day "free" game time upon game launch.
It wasn't all bad. I really liked the "social quests" thing. Where, all of a sudden mobs would spawn and "attack the town" and anyone in that area could help kill the mobs and all get rewarded for helping, instead of fighting against each other to finish each individuals quest requirements.
The class concepts were interesting. But as TFS states, it definitely was pushed out the door WAAAAY too soon in terms of benefit too the game. But the problem is, it would have taken another year to have polished the game to meet the bar of, say, Warcraft and I imagine that company simply wasn't going to keep dropping money into a hole.
What that has to do with SW:TOR, I'm not sure. Bioware has a lot of funds thanks to their high-grossing titles that they're still releasing (Dragon Age and Mass Effect for example) that can keep funding a project until it's ready. On top of publisher support (EA) as well as Lucas Arts support (how many art concepts and designs are coming from them? How much 'content' is mostly already established thanks to KotOR?) To be fair, again, KotOR 2 wasn't good for Bioware.
And I've been following SW:TOR for a while. I can say they definitely appear to be doing a lot of design decisions right. That is, until I heard they're trying to shoe-horn space combat and regular ground combat into the "Vanilla" game. *shudder* That's never turned out well so far.
And to be further critical... I saw the first game-play footage they showed for, I think, E3? It really, really didn't look very impressive. It was *way* to standard MMORPG when it needs to be -->STAR WARS
Of course, I say this, but I really don't have much of a solution to avoid it expect making it more action/hack&slash RPG than the standard RPG. It's, no doubt, not an easy thing to do or there would be a ton of awesome MMO's people could choose from... instead of WoW and then Niche MMO 1, Niche MMO 2 and "Hey Look! Everyquest is still around and releasing a new XPAC!" LOL, I wouldn't be surprised if EQ1 has more players than EQ2. =P
"The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth." ~1984 George Orwell
I'm a full-time WOW player, but I play WAR when I want to do PVP. WAR failed in world content... The quests for single/small group play are limited at best. But when I want to pwn face, I have more fun in the f2p scenarios than I do with WOW's battlegrounds or Arena.