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.

Comments

1st post?

[Anonymous Coward]

Clueless yes-men put in charge.
This is the unfortunate rule rather than the exception these days.

Re:1st post?

[Dunbal]

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.

Re:1st post?

[Kjella]

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.

Re:1st post?

[pspahn]

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.

Re:1st post?

[beelsebob]

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.

Re:1st post?

[phantomfive]

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.

Re:1st post?

[CarpetShark]

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.

You mean there's a phase where they don't do that?

Re:1st post?

[sosume]

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

Re:1st post?

[JaredOfEuropa]

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.

Re:1st post?

[pipedwho]

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.

Re:1st post?

[tophermeyer]

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.

Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

So what is new?

David Jaffe is full of shit

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Since when was hoping your boss an unreasonable expectation? Jesus. Makes me question his competency.

Re:David Jaffe is full of shit

[bigstrat2003]

The guy in TFA sounds full of shit too. Honestly, it just comes off to me as a guy who's bitter that he's getting let go, and taking the opportunity to blast people who he didn't like.

Maybe there's truth to it. I don't know. But I sure as hell stopped reading about halfway through because with so many personal digs, it destroys his credibility in my eyes.

Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[BadAnalogyGuy]

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.

Warhammer just doesn't have the namepower that something like Starcraft has, and so a minor game on a dying platform is simply a losing tactic no matter when they release it.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[Dunbal]

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.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[mykos]

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.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[MagikSlinger]

Mod parent up. :-)

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[BadAnalogyGuy]

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.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[jjohnson]

2001 called, it wants its market prediction back.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[TheLink]

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.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[bersl2]

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.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[BadAnalogyGuy]

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.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[BadAnalogyGuy]

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.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[caerwyn]

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.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[fake_name]

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.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[Darinbob]

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.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[incognito84]

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.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[Kjella]

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.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[Anonymous Coward]

...you can go from no-name to best seller in a matter of days...

FTFY. For instance, Minecraft.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[Anonymous Coward]

Last I checked, Minecraft is on PC, Mac and Linux only.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[Anonymous Coward]

To be fair, the first decade was just last year.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[houghi]

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.

Then all we need is something like Visual Studio for Linux and there will be a shitload of games for Linux. Right?

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[VJ42]

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.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[delinear]

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.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[iainl]

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.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[Anonymous Coward]

Except Minecraft didn't require Visual Studio soul selling...

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[nschubach]

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.)

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[FreonTrip]

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.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[heathen_01]

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).

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[Mashiki]

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.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[BobMcD]

Why'd you buy it in the first place? Weren't they pretty up front with both of these facts from the get-go?

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[tibman]

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.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[Dunbal]

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.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[QuantumBeep]

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?

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[BobMcD]

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.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[Modern Primate]

If they can make Sintel, how long before a video game is made that way and of that quality?

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[QuantumBeep]

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.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[BobMcD]

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.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[Avatar8]

Right there with you Dunbal. PC gaming will never die, and IMO is growing again.

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.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[Avatar8]

I'm 40 and this is the third decade that I've heard it. PC is still going strong and getting stronger.

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.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[DrgnDancer]

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"

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[nschubach]

They were pretty upfront that RVR was a part of the game, but nowhere that I read said it would be required.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[Kjella]

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.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[BobMcD]

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.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[caerwyn]

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.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[Cederic]

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.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[ildon]

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).

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[nschubach]

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.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[Ocker3]

Minecraft is a wonderful example of garage-sized programming teams turning out incredibly interesting games

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[WuphonsReach]

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.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[TheLink]

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 :).

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[DiEx-15]

I am 34 and I know that if it wasn't for PC gaming, then console gaming would be two decades behind.

Re:Maybe it wasn't timing, but milieu

[Fozzyuw]

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.

• Only one *starting* area had any polish. The rest were hacked together filler space.
• Class Abilities were buggy. The White Lion class (I think that was the name) was all about positional attacks. A lot of your abilities were worthless in PvE because you couldn't ever get to the side/back of the enemy. Not encouraging when you're playing the first 10 'intro' levels.
• AI was buggy. Mobs couldn't reach you, they'd start running the most bizzare pathing, and this included your pet AI.
• Limited class selection and customization. To be fair, this was probably more about the Warhammer license and their restrictions, but if your game is going to be limited like this, the rest of the game has to really shine.
• Class balance was off the charts bad. This game was highly PvP focused and if you have class balance that bad, you've really failed. PvE balance was light-years worse, but you could at least write that off because of the PvP focus of the game. But those first 10 levels, again, set the impression and if one class is solo-killing 4-5 monsters several levels higher than you and your class is getting owned by 2 equal level characters... you start to feel put-off.
• Missing classes. If I recall correctly, they took out the "tank" classes from the game at the last moment (days before release?) because they simply weren't ready yet. I'm sure there's some press release out there (I recall reading it) that announced that the "tank" classes were coming.

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

AoC

[KevMar]

I guess they did not learn anything from Age of Conan.

Re:AoC

[Anonymous Coward]

Since Age of Conan is not an EA product, I can't see how they would learn anything from its development cycle. Regardless, AoC is more successful than Warhammer: Online is, as it fits a niche. Disappointingly is that they seemed to have not learned at all from their own games, and now Warhammer has a smaller subscription base than their significantly older MMO; DAoC.

However, EA has been ruining games for quite some time now. Hellgate:London anyone? That game had so much potential but was ruined because of how rushed it was.

Re:AoC

[KevMar]

Good point.

I just used that example because AOC was released just ahead of Warhammer. It was another game that slipped release dates and shipped an unfinished product. They had good solid release numbers and a very sharp decline in subscribers because it was unfinished. It sounds like AoC has made progress in the months after. But in the window of time where Warhammer was released, AoC looked like it was going to die an early death.

Warhammer didn't do it self any favors by releasing so close to a WoW expansion either. I tried AoC for 2 months and skipped over Warhammer partly because of the pending WoW expansion.

Summary not so good

[Kjella]

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...

Re:Summary not so good

[noidentity]

Come on, if they had waited until it was finished, it would have been good. Just look at Duke Nukem Forever.

Re:Summary not so good

[xtracto]

Come on, if they had waited until it was finished, it would have been good. Just look at Duke Nukem Forever.

ough now that was too easy!

Re:Summary not so good

[bug1]

Dont know about Duke Nuken Forever, but it took about 7 or 8 years for them to release Team Fortress 2.

TF2 has succeeded because it was released when it ready, and has been extremely well maintained.

Its an example of why gamers should manage gaming companies.

Re:Summary not so good

[CarpetShark]

EA simply cut their losses and decided to stop throwing good money after bad. The rest is just seeing what could be salvaged...

If it was launched and sold to the public under these (now documented) circumstances, with known bugs, that sounds like a pretty damning class action case right there.

Re:Summary not so good

[Rogerborg]

Great plan! Then the sharedholders can sue the board, and they can sue the producer, and he can sue the code and crayon monkeys! Lawyers can fix anything!

Re:Summary not so good

[CarpetShark]

Fair point. Honestly though, as long as customers get their money back, or some part of their money back, to discourage this from happening again, I don't really care who's sued within the organisation.

Re:Summary not so good

[noidentity]

Dont know about Duke Nuken Forever,

Surely you jest. It's been in development since 1997, and still hasn't been released.

Re:Summary not so good

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you do it, Sherlock?

Re:Summary not so good

[elrous0]

That's exactly what it sounded like to me. This sound like one of those Duke Nuke'em Forever projects that becomes so hopelessly dysfunctional at the studio level that nothing short of having big daddy come in and shitcan everyone (or just releasing it unfinished) is ever going to get it to gold status. It's not EA's fault that Mythic couldn't get their shit together. What did this guy expect them to do, indulge them forever no matter how many times they had screwed up in the past?

Re:Summary not so good

[GooberToo]

Come on, if they had waited until it was finished, it would have been good. Just look at Duke Nukem Forever.

When you have a company constantly missing deadlines, its a sure indicator something is amiss. And yet EA seemingly did nothing other than demand a release - all the while continuing to infuse money to fuel the missed deadlines.

What should have happened was a hard look at the project, removing certain features, long before it got that bad. Then, they could have released a complete, functioning game with slightly fewer features. They could then continue to develop and add those features back in, which continues to drive interest in their existing subscriber base while grabbing new subscribes with those very same features.

This is a classic story of what is a typically mismanaged project in the software industry. The real pie in the face is that EA should have known better and actually been pro-active in protecting their investment. The fact they didn't seems to hint of incompetence and mismanaging at EA too.

Re:Summary not so good

[Rogerborg]

As long as the shareholders get their money back, or some of their money back...

As long as the board get their money back, or some of their money back...

But they won't though. Only the lawyers ever win.

Re:Summary not so good

[AK Marc]

And where's the personal integrity? These people shipped a known bad product. And all because of the threat of being fired. Let me in on a little secret. That's unethical, and it gets the company out of business almost as fast as you'd have gotten your pink slip. So why act unethically then loose your job? I'd rather act ethically and look for a job than unethically and look for a job.

"They would have punished for our incompetence if we didn't act negligently, so we decided to act negligently, rather than take responsibility for actual mistakes we've made." Sounds like they should run for office.

...EA

[phorm]

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.

Re:...EA

[Dunbal]

Yet EA is still - overall - making buckloads of money.

      Of course. Because they are such big publishers and have a finger pretty much in every genre of game (through acquisitions), they dominate the market. Especially since games are a wonderful impulse buy - pre-teens and teens who "have to have" the game because whats-his-name at school got it, or because it's version 3 in a series, or because of the bright colors on the packaging. Mature gamers who remember what EA used to be, and hope that a company as old and (once) respected as EA will stand behind their products and patch them ASAP if there are any problems.

      It takes a long time to absolutely destroy a reputation, especially when you're in a dominant position. But I can't help but notice that every company franchise they buy out gets destroyed, dumbed down, and processed so much it stops being fun.

Re:...EA

[mikael_j]

You actually got Tiberium Wars online play to work? I must say I'm amazed, after going through EA's online help database and contacting their tech support I found out that in order for me to run it as a client, NOT a server I would have to have roughly half of all available ports forwarded to my desktop.

Oh, and when that didn't work they told me that it was because I was using a "Linux router" (a FreeBSD box actually) and that I should connect my desktop directly to the internet and disconnect the rest of my network from the net while playing...

Re:...EA

[hairyfeet]

Oh man, how EA is able to completely take such wonderful series and then piss on them and set them on fire. Lets be honest folks, as long as they have the cash cow known as exclusive NFL license to print money via Madden they are just gonna keep on sucking. Another good example of their destructive behavior is sitting in a box right in front of me...the Medal of Honor series, or MoH for short. I bought the 10th Anniversary pack and it is just sad to play them one after another and watch them fall from greatness to shit. It goes from great (original and expansions) to good (Pacific) to absolute shit (Airborne) and by the end they've turned it into a completely lame arcade console shooter complete with fricking power ups like it is Painkiller or something! WTF! Way to destroy the immersion assholes!

That is why I only buy maybe one or two AAA list titles (last was Bioshock II, and surprise! Ruined it, bad imitation of the original) and spend the majority of my money at Good Old Games where I can get games that are FUN to play, don't have to spend time dealing with SecuROM and Starforce bullshit (loooove how their installers and removal tools don't work more than half the time on x64!) and the games are cheap to boot. But as long as EA has the license to print money that is the NFL license (I know guys that have a fricking standing order at Gamestop for EVERY Madden game for EVERY system they own so it will ALWAYS be at their door on release day) EA can continue buying up and destroying the greats, whether in house or bought and crushed EA never met a series they couldn't ruin. I just hope when the license comes up for renewal the NFL refuses to grant them exclusivity, then maybe we might actually get football games that don't suck too!

Re:...EA

[pitchaxistheory]

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.

You DO mean Tiberium Twilight (CnC4) don't you? Tiberium Wars (CnC3) came out in '97.

Re:...EA

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it so weird for an online game to require your computer to actually be online?

Re:...EA

[mikael_j]

When a game client requires 30k+ ports to be connectable from the outside to function there is something very wrong.

Re:...EA

[Anonymous Coward]

Mature gamers who remember what EA used to be, and hope that a company as old and (once) respected as EA will stand behind their products and patch them ASAP if there are any problems.

i dun think ea patches game..as in ea is just a publisher. The content (i.e. game/patch/etc) comes from the various studio under its arm, so its mostly a mix bag and highly dependent on which studio is it.

Re:...EA

[AmberBlackCat]

It also doesn't hurt that they could make a deal with the NFL so their competition can't even make a game.

Re:...EA

[PRMan]

Just make a game with player numbers and city names. It worked for EA NHL 92. And 93 was only NHLPA hockey, the NHL didn't approve.

Re:...EA

[phorm]

I had to double-check that date, but no, I mean Tiberium Wars, which came out in 2007 (three years ago, as opposed to thirteen).

After being screwed by EA, I passed on either C&C4 or Red Alert 3. In fact, I generally avoid any EA games at all now due to the massive suckage in my previous experiences, but let me guess, C&C4 was much the same as C&C3 in terms of being buggy and disappointing?

Re:...EA

[Dunbal]

I'll admit I have no idea how the business works, but I'm sure EA could lean on the developer and say "patch this piece of crap if you want your next cheque".

Re:...EA

[Digital Vomit]

Mature gamers who remember what EA used to be, and hope that a company as old and (once) respected as EA

If EA was ever a respected company, it was probably just because customers didn't know any better. I recall discussing game development with one of the developers of Starflight (released in 1986) on a message board many years ago. He cautioned others to be careful of publishers like EA (who published Starflight) and lamented how naive they, as developers, were in their dealings with them way back in 1982, when development of the game began.

Re:...EA

[@madeus]

It was probably using UPnP or NAT-PMP and your FreeBSD box wasn't setup to handle it (I'm not sure what the status of UPnP or NAT-PMP).

Using high ports on non-fixed ports from a known range which client and server negotiate in real time is a legitimate design for a TCP/IP app.

I'd get a decent dedicated router or, if it using UPnP, take a look at something like Microsoft's UPnP testing tool for Windows and see what it reports: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/using/tools/igd/default.mspx

Re:...EA

[mikael_j]

I was just going by the instructions given on EA's website as well as what their tech support people stated, which was that I had to forward more than half of all ports to the desktop machine running Tiberium Wars. Also, this was the OS X version of the game so Windows-only diagnostic tools wouldn't work anyway.

And besides, I see no reasonable excuse for them demanding that more than 50% of all ports be forwarded to the client, it just sounds like they did a really poor job when designing the multiplayer part of the game. You could easily build it so that the server requires a handful of connectable ports and the clients initiate all connections, or at least so that clients only need a couple of open ports, and the port ranges could easily be modifiable with servers announcing to the EA servers what ports they're running on and the clients announcing their open ports to the server...

Re:...EA

[laurelraven]

No, there is NO reason to have you open extra ports to your PC directly. Routers and Firewalls, unless very old or very poorly implemented, understand connection state. The solution is to have the game client initiate all connections and hold the connection open. There is no reason my router should be forwarding any ports from the outside to my PC that aren't part of an established connection, unless I am running a server on that box.

Re:...EA

[laurelraven]

I think you have Tiberium Wars confused with Tiberian Sun, which was released in 1999.

A lot of people would buy anything Mythic made

[Rix]

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.

Re:A lot of people would buy anything Mythic made

[Anonymous Coward]

A lot more people would have bought anything Mythic made, had they not single-handedly ended Dark Age of Camelot with the ill conceived Trials of Everquest Lite expansion. The mass exodus that shortly followed was gut wrenching, if not somehow morbidly hilarious, to watch.

WAR was doomed from the start, with or without EA's involvement.

Re:A lot of people would buy anything Mythic made

[Kindgott]

It is free to play, and I still couldn't stick to playing it for more than a week. The fact that free play is restricted to Empire vs Chaos Tier 1 may have been a factor, but probably not the deciding one.

It seems mostly bland and uninspired to me, where it doesn't seem thrown together or buggy.

Re:A lot of people would buy anything Mythic made

[Barny]

Damn it, its been what, 5 years? That horse is not only dead its decomposed, they have all but publicly apologised for it, you can now have all the ToA stuff done and completed in a day or two.

Please go back to VN.

Re:A lot of people would buy anything Mythic made

[Anonymous Coward]

Ooo. I can do ToA stuff in a day or two now? So, how much grinding do I have to do to get a decent number of players in the game? How about my guild? My alliance?

Fanboy all you want - nothing will change the fact that Mythic is a shortsighted group that not only failed to understand their player base, but failed to understand the MMO market itself.

And sorry - the catastrophe they inflicted upon DAoC is very relevant, when you have an anonymous troll whining about how EA is entirely responsible for the death of WAR, despite all evidence to the contrary.

Re:A lot of people would buy anything Mythic made

[Avatar8]

Unfortunately probably as many or more people will avoid buying anything from EA, myself included.

I have yet to forgive them for ruining the Ultima series and Ultima Online. I don't care what IP they get, they'd have to give me the game for free before I'd play it.

As they absorb and ruin more independent studios, I think more and more people will start boycotting EA.

ETP!

[Anonymous Coward]

outstri4S

EA...

[Anonymous Coward]

wouldn't be the first game that got "killed" by EA's moneymiling....

that's why i stopped buying games published by EA.

I feel dirty whenever I play a game

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I hope they don't ruin this game

[tehtehteh]

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...

Re:I hope they don't ruin this game

[Fross]

if you're referring to Warhammer, it's been out what, 2 years? I doubt it's going to change much anymore.

Anyway, the first tier is free to play, so get it and have some fun.

I wanted to be a game programmer...

[MetalFlow]

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...

Re:I wanted to be a game programmer...

[Anonymous Coward]

Independent game design can be a good portion of that idealized vision you have of game design, so long as you accept the uncertainty of a paycheck or health insurance, have the patience to grow slowly on small projects, and have supreme amounts of confidence in yourself and your team. If you're a part of the "industry" though, it's just your standard corporate bullshit and politics with a "game company" skin laid over it. They will use and abuse the talent exactly the way the music industry does, and promote the bland, boring, two-faced corporate assholes in charge when they're done firing all the real brains behind the product.

If you must work in the games industry, do it to get some experience for a resumé, then leave with some patient friends to start a little shop and have some fun. That or start the shop off your own ideas and spare time while working a real job. Sticking with "the industry" will chew you up, spit you out, sap your soul, and generally make you hate life.

Re:I wanted to be a game programmer...

[fadir]

Not all studios are run by EA or the way EA runs their studios. There are some sane people out there that are actually interested in long term goals and not only in short term revenue, especially independent studios with own funding (like the one I work for). Instead of playing poker and betting everything (or even more) on the next title those studios plan carefully and have realistic expectations and goals. They might not (ever) make the headlines like WoW & Co - but they make a decent living in their niche market(s) with a pretty solid business plan, without the fear to lose your job next month. They payments are not stellar but fair - a pretty good deal I'd say.

Re:I wanted to be a game programmer...

[Anonymous Coward]

No joke. Ever wonder why there's so few older game devs? It's because they all left forever when they realised their shit jobs would never improve.

In most creative industries you stand on the shoulders of giants. Well in this one you sit in the wretched dirt until you become one with it.

Re:I wanted to be a game programmer...

[Anonymous Coward]

In most creative industries you stand on the shoulders of giants. Well in this one you sit in the wretched dirt until you become one with it.

Creative industries, like what, acting? Singing? Music? Painting?

Re:I wanted to be a game programmer...

[Anonymous Coward]

We have a saying in Norwegian close to "You only remember the bad..." - which in this case would be "You only report the bad". Yes, game developers have a higher than normal rate of being taken advantage of by the people with the money in the company because of their passion for games and game development. This is just another example of this in effect, but that shouldn't stop you from working at a company where this is NOT the case.

Signed,
Game programmer at a competing MMORPG developer.

Ship it w it's done, stop it when it's shit

[fadir]

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.

Re:Ship it w it's done, stop it when it's shit

[Rogerborg]

Where does "Spout obvious generalities in bullet points" fit into your list of bullet points? Powerpoint can fix anything!

Re:Ship it w it's done, stop it when it's shit

[fadir]

It doesn't seem too obvious to even big studios and publishers.

Re:Ship it w it's done, stop it when it's shit

[MORB]

[i]"Ship it when it's done."[/i]

There were more than 110 people working full time on AoC at the time I left funcom, most of them working in Oslo with salaries adjusted for the high cost of life there. That's expensive as hell.

Unless you're blizzard and swimming in money, you have to rely on external sources of funding for that kind of project, and if you need to push the release back, you have to convince them to pour in more money instead of cutting their losses and pulling out.

Re:Ship it w it's done, stop it when it's shit

[fadir]

"stop it when it's shit" would be the better option then. It doesn't make sense to ship something that's not done. Yes, you might cut your losses because you still get some customers to pay for the crap that you call a game but what is in fact an early beta at best. But in the long term this customer will think twice if he'll buy your next game.

If you aren't Blizzard, don't attempt a project as big as Blizzard's titles. "Schuster, bleib bei deinen Leisten" is an old German proverb, meaning "stick to what you are able to handle". Being too ambitious doesn't help anyone and will just end up in a disaster - happened many times, especially in the gaming industry.

I really don't understand why even medium sized studios with medium or low funding attempt to build AAA-titles. And while Mythic is definitely a good studio - they are simply not big enough to compete with Blizzard & Co. It's suicide.
It wouldn't make me wonder if Mythic would get shut down by EA or at least merged with/into another studio sooner or later. It's common practise for this publisher.

Re:Ship it w it's done, stop it when it's shit

[MORB]

"If you aren't Blizzard, don't attempt a project as big as Blizzard's titles. "Schuster, bleib bei deinen Leisten" is an old German proverb, meaning "stick to what you are able to handle". Being too ambitious doesn't help anyone and will just end up in a disaster - happened many times, especially in the gaming industry."
Well, AoC's failure was not caused merely by a funding problem. After all we did have 5 years, and a lot of good people. I think it was mostly a combination of being shy on some things, like not being willing to rewrite the engine and tools from scratch instead of reusing the crap from anarchy online.

And there was also kind of a poor philosophy of trying to add too many feature in the game right at release instead of doing fewer things but doing them well (like blizzard originally did with WoW).

For instance, the guild city raid thing should have been cut from release (it just wasn't ready) and released in a polished form in an expansion pack imo.

Re:Ship it w it's done, stop it when it's shit

[fadir]

Still kind of proves my point. If you don't have a producer/manager/whateverheistitled that has the balls and the authority to call the shots and cut features when it's getting out of hands then you aren't capable of handling such a project.

Developing a game is much more than having a bunch of good programmers. Someone needs to keep the strings in his hands and have a plan and a schedule to follow - and the ability to make people (all of them) follow his lead.

Re:Ship it w it's done, stop it when it's shit

[Anonymous Coward]

That must be why EA consistantly fail to generate an annual profit... oh, wait.

Re:Ship it w it's done, stop it when it's shit

[Anonymous Coward]

"Schuster, bleib bei deinen Leisten" is an old German proverb, meaning "stick to what you are able to handle".

In English, a similar saying is, "Don't bite off more than you can chew."

Re:Ship it w it's done, stop it when it's shit

[cgenman]

I'd throw in there "Ship it when it's fun." External of any other milestones, once you've hit that point where it's actually an enjoyable game, give yourself 4 weeks of polish and bug hunting and throw it in a box. Don't bother finishing the extra 6 minigames and the Alternate Reality Game that were on your schedule if the game is already fun.

Re:Ship it w it's done, stop it when it's shit

[Anonymous Coward]

So according to you EA is perfect - oh, wait...

People are commonly successful in spite of their own failings. Its likely EA is no exception. Besides, when you are large enough, you can afford to cast a wide net. A wide net needs only have a few good catches to support the entire company. That is far from meaning EA is well run.

Re:Ship it w it's done, stop it when it's shit

[Avatar8]

You need one more point to your list.

- Avoid avarice when EA suits show up to buy out your studio and ruin your life's work.

Re:Ship it w it's done, stop it when it's shit

[painandgreed]

Well, AoC's failure was not caused merely by a funding problem.

I'm going to chip in a bit here and say that part of AoC's problem was that it was boring, or at least presented as such. I was at GenCon a few years ago when it was being demoed. AoC had a walled off booth, with booth babes giving away plastic swords, and you had to be 18+ to get in. I waited in line to see it expecting some killer graphics while running around a snake god temple with slave girls chained to the walls and slicing down bad guys. What I got was running around a field and empty village with an occasional bandit that would show up and get killed in an unspectacular couple of strokes. Perhaps the graphics on the grass in that field was really good, but I'm not interested in nice looking grass. I left and told everybody I knew about how boring AoC looked. I'm sure thousands of others from that weekend did the same. I'm not saying the entire game was like that, but if that's what people came up with to display the game in such a venue, I can't really expect that they presented the game that well in any other venue either. Since I bet most MMO sales are from word of mouth from friends, it was still a bad choice.

Ya pretty much

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:Ya pretty much

[MartinSchou]

How do you know that what he is saying is not 100% objective and true? Being furious and lashing out does not mean he's not truthful and objective.

Re:Ya pretty much

[pipedwho]

This kind of reminds me when an employee resigned and in their letter of resignation gave their reason (basically pointing out how corrupt, dishonest and incompetent our manager was). Of course, the next layer up just ignored it as "that person no longer works here, and therefore their observations will not be considered". After hearing about what was written, we all thought that it would be certainty that the manager was going to be replaced. Long story short, they just blamed the guy that left.

Needless to say, two months later the entire engineering team (all five of us) resigned in the same way. All five letters were put on this guys desk within the space of 30 seconds. The look on his face was priceless. This was years ago, and that guy is still working there.

Re:Ya pretty much

[Anonymous Coward]

"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 "

^^ up this
MMO are design to consume ur time. Given that each person has a limited amt of time, being okay just dun cut it unless u have specialized/unique feature that other MMO product lack.

Re:Ya pretty much

[Pinky's Brain]

The anecdote from another developer about item generation does ring true though from a player perspective, it was pretty clear that item generation was a giant cluster fuck (and excuses about how hard it was, so have patience, were frequent in the early game).

Re:Ya pretty much

[Anonymous Coward]

As en employee working at a game company that makes games for EA i can tell ya.. Yea they really are that incompetent. He may be subjective but EA still suck big time as a game company. Ofc they may be a big company earning good money but in some ways that's a miracle really considering how most of their decisions reflect great incompetence. I think a great deal of their success comes from game companies working overtime to satisfy their demands so they wont lose future orders. EA is after all a big client to lose.

Re:Ya pretty much

[Fozzyuw]

Warhammer sucked because it was, obviously, released WAY too soon. There was only one zone with any reasonable polish (the one with the burning Windmill), classes weren't complete, **STARTING** zones were so buggy you couldn't complete quests. The bugs go on...

As TFS states, this is why I know so many people tried and left the game within days/weeks and not renewing past their 'free' 30 day included play time.

There was some good parts of the game that you could see the potential... but it wasn't cutting it.

Fact of the matter is, there's just much better choices out there than to release a sub-par game. And MMO's cost WAY to much that some people just don't comprehend what it takes.

Re:Ya pretty much

[GooberToo]

I'm going to guess the people aren't quite as incompetent as he pretends.

You're either completely foreign to software development or have been ignorantly blessed in the people you've been privileged to work with. The comic strip of Dilbert exists not because its some strange world but because its something most anyone in industry can relate. In fact, most of the jokes in the strip are literally, parodies of true events.

The reality is, in the software industry, the following are truisms:
1) Your boss is likely a PHB promoted well beyond his capabilities.
2) Those managing the project will create a schedule with absolutely no footing in reality while demanding you adhere to it. Worse, its frequently made by marketing for features absolutely no one wants.
3) Releasing a half finished, unusable product, is the norm.
4) Testing and documentation is almost always neglected.
5) Testers are typically treated like the enemy. And should their findings conflict with the schedule, they will likely be ignored.

Basically, the software industry is completely fucked up. Doubly so in the gaming industry. In most other industries, they would all be fired for complete incompetence. One of the responses is the party complaining didn't have realistic expectations. That's certainly one way of looking at it. Realistically though, those saying he has unrealistic expectations are the ones with unrealistic expectations and are only compounding the problems.

Basically, his expectations are unrealistic exactly because the software industry is completely fucked up. Then again, the expectations of the industry are unrealistic, resulting in extremely poor quality, incompetent behavior exactly because the industry is completely fucked up and that's the accepted norm. So its become a catch-22. If you act responsibly, you are bucking the system of incompetence and will likely be censured.

There definitely are some exceptions, but it doesn't change the fact, that this is the software industry at large. In some ways, Microsoft actually help lower the bar for the rest of the industry. So its not exactly surprising Microsoft is reflecting glass; which typifies low quality and way overdue projects as the norm.

Re:Ya pretty much

[tibman]

I believe you. Not sure why terrible people are kept around like that. In that kind of situation, it's the good employees that leave.. the shitty ones will stay because they are atleast getting paid.

Re:Ya pretty much

[GooberToo]

Not surprising in the least. Especially in the software industry.

Generally this means the upper management is completely fucked too, but they want to keep the lower fuck ups around so they have someone to blame for their own incompetence.

Re:Ya pretty much

[tophermeyer]

Plus from the organizations perspective, if the team has just lost one or more of its most talented core members then it cannot afford to also lose the group leader. No matter how incompetent the person might be.

In my experience employees that jump ship like that are seen as immature, and any issues that they raise during their resignation are chalked up to that employee having poor conflict resolution skills. I've done something similar to what the GP described, and in hindsight I regret it. After speaking with contacts at my former organization, the company's management looked at the situation as my supervisor being cursed with a number of disloyal employees, and gave her an opportunity to restructure her team.

Remember that throwing your immediate manager under the bus to their boss is not always a good strategy. That persons boss is likely the person that hired or promoted them in the first place.

Re:Ya pretty much

[PingSpike]

Another problem with MMOs is they kind of have to get it right out of the gate. This is true to an extent with all games, but look at the example shown where they sold a million and lost almost as many in the first month. With a regular game I might be disappointed with bugs and 6-9 months later I'll install the patch and start playing. (I can't tell you how many poorly reviewed 'buggy' games I've played for the first time, a year after release and not had any complaints about bugs at all) But when I have to pay $15-20 to retry a game I already got burned out of $60 on, chances are I'm not going to bother. It's throwing good money after bad and all.

Re:Ya pretty much

[cowscows]

I guess if you're worried about getting a referral, then caution might make sense, but outside of that, you might as well let your bosses respectfully know why you're leaving. If they choose to ignore your information, then that's their problem, but at least you can leave knowing that you made an honest attempt to help. Give it a shot, even if you fully expect it to change nothing, and then get on with your life.

Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean publishing an anonymous rant where you publicly trash specific people and whine like a little baby.

In the experience that you described, do you think things would've turned out any differently if you just quietly shuffled out the door without explaining why you were leaving?

Re:Ya pretty much

[tophermeyer]

In the experience that you described, do you think things would've turned out any differently if you just quietly shuffled out the door without explaining why you were leaving?

I think things might have gone differently had my team members raised our concerns in a more proactive manner. If issues are raised and the company continues not to take action, then leaving might be the most responsible choice.

My only point was that the time to raise those concerns is not while you are quitting. Too many people keep their frustrations bottled up until their exit interview, at which point the company sees no need to resolve the problem.

That kind of gang-resignation just smacks of organizational mutiny, and leaves the company in a position where it is incapable of taking any action to correct the issue. Their focus is a replacing a number of key employees as quickly as possible.

Re:Ya pretty much

[pipedwho]

In the case I spoke of above, we arranged a number of meetings with our boss to discuss the problem (and everyone was extremely polite). After a few months with nothing changed, we arranged a face to face meeting with his boss (who had to fly in from another country as our branch was a R&D facility set up to gain various tax benefits). Things didn't go so well there either, since it was obvious that guy was the same as our boss - so we tried to go above him to get something done, but that proved impossible (or way too hard/risky).

Everything we did was polite and to-the-point. That is, we didn't bag out any of these guys, we simply indicated that it was hard to achieve results in this environment - and even politely suggested options (ie. the correct way to do things) that didn't involve firing anyone. It sort of worked for a week or two at a time, but would devolve back into the old mess. Talking to these guys was time consuming, high latency, and unnecessary pain that normal people usually prefer to avoid.

Our team (and not the manager) were constantly being blamed for 'lack of results', and after a year and half with this new manager we had basically given up. The week before the first guy resigned, he had another face to face with the bosses to discuss the 'problems'. But they basically said that he was the problem for wanting things to be done differently and going against 'superior directions'.

You can read my post above for what happened next. After we left, R&D completely stopped and this guy was kept around (and years later still is) with a couple of gopher style employees. The guy was clearly politically connected enough to be 'unfireable'.

Re:Ya pretty much

[Ol Olsoc]

Remember that someone decided that the bad manager was put in that position by someone else. If it is a mistake, it will make whoever put him/her in the management position bad.

American corporations have no reverse gear. Once a decision is made, you stick with it. To change course is so drastic a solution that it is seldom used. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if that the poor manager has risen a few levels since then. That will make the person who promoted or hired him look good. All is well, sorta.

Its just part of the culture.

Not really

[Rix]

Free to level 10 is an evening or two of play. It's more of a more rational demo strategy.

Re:Not really

[TBBle]

I've been told that the Tier 1 RvR was the most fun of the lot. And the Empire area worked better than the Dwarven area for Tier 1 RvR. So it's probably the best choice of something to make free to play.

On the other hand, I personally quite enjoyed Tier 2 and Tier 3 keep sieges in both attack and defense, although the boss fights at the end tended to drag on a bit. Quite hard to find more than one group an evening that'd do it though, and once the populations got unbalanced, there was often no keeps available to be taken for days at a stretch.

It was a fun game...

[CougMerrik]

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.

Re:It was a fun game...

[DaAdder]

The game actually is quite a lot of fun and it's finally been going in the right direction for the last 8 months or so. They've focused entirely on the PvP/RvR experience though, so those looking for updates to the PVE aspect of the game should probably look elsewhere. As for the dull keep-taking in T4, that's being overhauled in the patch that's currently on the test server. They did a similar overhaul of the end game that's city invasion which turn out to be quite good. They're definitely on the right track these days, but it be too little too late. I know me and my friends will stick around for a while longer though, there's simply no pvp experience that gets close elsewhere.

Re:It was a fun game...

[NBolander]

A shame I don't have the points to mod you up. Since Carrie Gouskos took over it has been moving in the right direction. It's not a well run software project by any standard but the game is great fun and certainly nowhere near dead yet.

Re:It was a fun game...

[Jeek Elemental]

I remember when entering the game first time, getting the "go forth and kill 10 sprites" thing, I thought it was a joke, a cheeky parody on earlier lesser games.
Then after some more quests I got that sinking feeling...

To be fair tho, the rvr was pretty fun and I did spend quite alot of time in game.

It is obvious tho that the producer failed at many points;
- massive pvp advertised and key part of design, but noone bothered to check if the system could actually handle that: it couldnt, not even close
- decent if simple 3d engine, but with plastered on effects (by mythic?) that looked like example templates from some microsoft dev pack, and performed absolutely horribly, bringing top end rigs to knees
- no music
- oddly inconsistent art and animation quality, from good to complete crap
- overall design seems to have changed during development, miniature terrain, buildings and class details suggest a "meta" design where each character represent an army, but quests and later patches seems to have forgotten that. Incoherent mess.
- amateurs at every level, I dont think there was ANY feature that worked quite right, Ive never seen anything like it. Even bugfixes went out bugged!

So I think ealouse is quite right in blasting the producer, but I dont think any part of the team should be terribly proud here.

Id really hate if the industry concludes from WAR failure that theres no market for this kind of game, people had fun with it despite all the flaws, but the flaws were massive and many and as people started to realize there was no intention of fixing it, they left.

Re:It was a fun game...

[Pinky's Brain]

The big problem I have always had in RvR is that there is nothing to strive for ... it's all a gear treadmill.

If my guild could plant a flag on a keep and get something really good out of it (not advantages in the gear treadmill) there would be far more involvement. Faction pride is a fucking fantasy ... also there should be an economic aspect to War, it should consume resources.

Resource gathering for GOOD siege need to be in, not just ballistas ... but things like the fuck huge summons from the original cinematic.

Guild officers should get get to ride warhorses in keep combat with some combat bonuses. They are supposed to be the leaders ... let them tower over the battlefield and let them live a little longer. There needs to be a little prestige and power for good guilds (just disable the bonuses in scenarios and when combat is initiated in an area without a large scale battle going on).

Also there is a complete lack of tactical options for small groups in keep combat, there need to be far more battle objectives and they should be more important ... just create a lot of objectives which can work as travel destinations and radar, and let them give warnings on chat when a large group of enemies come into the area .... presto, makes them instantly important in battle, intel and mobility.

These things are so fucking simple. Wake me up when they do anything like that, instead of more dumb gear treadmill shit.

Re:It was a fun game...

[Pinky's Brain]

They should have ported the game code from Warhammer to AoC (combat system and scenarios, but allow player made factions). Then they'd have had a half decent game with a half decent engine.

Re:It was a fun game...

[DaAdder]

Then check out the current changes on the PTS, which is evolving every day with user feedback. They're gearing up for a very decent revamp of the RvR. Some of your points will be adressed there, some look like the will be in the not so distant future.

It won't be perfect, but it'll be another of a lot of steps in the right direction.

The game was where it should've been at launch about 6 months ago, but it took a year and a half to get there. If you ignore that time and pretend that the game is only about a year old, the game is looking pretty decent. It's still not for everyone and there's a lot of rough edges, but it's certainly worth a second shot if you're at all interested in the PvP aspect of an MMO.

Maybe because it sucks...

[toffi]

... 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.

just don't let SOE incharge of... and

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Just buy indie

[rsilvergun]

Jeff Vogel does pretty well for himself.

In Game Voiceovers

[maccodemonkey]

"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.

Re:In Game Voiceovers

[Kindgott]

Voiceovers for quest text is just something I'll be skipping because I've already skimmed through the obligatory, "Sand people attacked my land cruiser while I was en route with a shipment of unobtanium for the port in Mos Eisley, and the crates with my valuable cargo are littering the deserts. Without the money, I can't afford the medicine for my sick daughter, and I'm incapable of traveling and/or fighting; would you please find 50 crates and return them to me?" I'll be already heading in the vague direction the quest NPC has sent me on, trying to get my next level/item/skill and some in-game currency.

Heck, I have friends who refuse to play Borderlands with me because I won't read the quest text before charging off in the direction of my next waypoint.

To each their own, I suppose.

Re:In Game Voiceovers

[Splab]

Voice overs can be nice, but not in a MMORPG. It's so fucking frustrating to stand around and wait for the big boss to end his dialogue before you embark on your next spectacular wipe.

In WoW some dialogues can take several minutes, which will make you lose focus and get you agitated since it's wasting precious raid time. LK for instance will give you a solid 2-3 minutes worth of speeches, add run time buff time etc. you are wasting more time getting to the fight than the actual fight (most groups won't make it beyond 60% health which doesn't take more than 7-10 minutes).

Re:In Game Voiceovers

[troc]

Personally, I use the LK speech/cut scene to /grab another beer/take a quick bio break/briefly stand up and juggle a bit for exercise/ before the main event starts and I have to concentrate. I rather like it. The Sauerfang one on the other hand annoys me something rotten as the fight is rather easy and doesn't require much concentration by anyone (it was only ever a gear check anyway). Even when we were training LK, I still didn't mind as it gave everyone a minute or two to make sure they had their game face on, or make silly comments in vent.

I think WoW mostly gets the cutscenes right - the only seriously annoying waste of time aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh one was at the Argent Tournament and they allow you to skip that one now anyway :)

Re:In Game Voiceovers

[Anonymous Coward]

"YOU have found your way here, because YOU are among the few, gifted with TRUE VISION, in a world CURSED with BLINDNESS. YOU can see through the fog that hangs over this world like a SHROUD and grasp where TRUE POWER LIES..." continued ad nauseum until wipe.

Gah, I do hope Cataclysm brings an end to this. It's annoying the second time you hear it. It's really annoying after the hundredth time. Makes me wish for the great days of the Crusader's Coliseum and Wilfred Fizzlebang - last year's annoying voiceover. And oh, what heaven it would be to only have to listen to "Thorin, my lord. Why else would these invaders have come into your sanctum but to slay you?"

Re:In Game Voiceovers

[basscomm]

Voiceovers for quest text is just something I'll be skipping because I've already skimmed through the obligatory, "Sand people attacked my land cruiser while I was en route with a shipment of unobtanium for the port in Mos Eisley, and the crates with my valuable cargo are littering the deserts. Without the money, I can't afford the medicine for my sick daughter, and I'm incapable of traveling and/or fighting; would you please find 50 crates and return them to me?" I'll be already heading in the vague direction the quest NPC has sent me on, trying to get my next level/item/skill and some in-game currency.

Heck, I have friends who refuse to play Borderlands with me because I won't read the quest text before charging off in the direction of my next waypoint.

To each their own, I suppose.

Believe it or not, some people (like me) like to play games and pay attention to the little details like the "backstory" and the "raison d'être" for the things you're asked to do instead of treating the game's goals and objectives like a series of meaningless checkpoints.

Re:In Game Voiceovers

[Anonymous Coward]

At least she didn't stop gameplay while talking. That one wasn't so bad. It's a LOT different to be forced to sit and wait 5 minutes while they talk then it is to listen to them talk while the game is going on.

Re:In Game Voiceovers

[cgenman]

While I agree that full voiceover should imply care about plot and user experience, sometimes all it does is bake bad writing into the build. Text, at least, gives your writer the flexibility to polish crummy dialog during periods where the rest of the company is bug hunting.

Re:In Game Voiceovers

[maccodemonkey]

"While I agree that full voiceover should imply care about plot and user experience, sometimes all it does is bake bad writing into the build. Text, at least, gives your writer the flexibility to polish crummy dialog during periods where the rest of the company is bug hunting."

While I agree, both Knights of the Old Republic had voiceovers, and it was a significantly immersive feature. The Old Republic seems to share the same dialog system.

Hell, if The Old Republic is anything like KoTOR, I could never run into a player character and I wouldn't care.

Re:In Game Voiceovers

[_xeno_]

There are degrees to backstory, though. When playing World of Warcraft, at some point, I stopped reading the majority of quest stories because it basically all came down to one thing:

"Hi, I'm a random NPC whose story is completely self contained and unchanging. I need you to kill these monsters and collect the things they drop for an arbitrary and meaningless reason. Once you've succeeded, the only change you'll see is that I will no longer have an exclamation point over my head."

Me: Whatever. Kill things!

I'm told the end game content had a more coherent story, but after a while, I just stopped caring about every little meaningless detail when essentially the entire quest's story is a lame excuse to kill things.

Re:In Game Voiceovers

[m0rm3gil]

You aren't shallow - you're overly optimistic.

It doesn't matter if they got Liam Neeson in to do voice work if the script says "bring me 10 wamp rat tails."

Re:In Game Voiceovers

[ShakaUVM]

>>Hell, if The Old Republic is anything like KoTOR, I could never run into a player character and I wouldn't care.

I used to feel the same way, until I read this article and realized it was by the same guys that did WAR.

It's not that WAR was bad, but rather that WAR really told me the developers had no idea what they were really doing.

Re:In Game Voiceovers

[kamapuaa]

If you want story, read a book, watch a movie, go to a play. Video game "plots" are laughably moronic and that isn't going to change any time soon.

This is EA

[TranceThrust]

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.

Re:This is EA

[Kagura]

Ever played a Paradox Interactive game? Notoriously awful at release, and only truly living up to its potential sometimes years after.

Re:This is EA

[Galilee]

I agree with you, but I also know that I'll be buying Diablo 3 on launch day (whenever that is).

That's why I quit playing

[SendBot]

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.

Re:That's why I quit playing

[Fross]

They've actually fixed a few of those issues (make sure you play on a high population server), particularly with the learning curve. Give the free trial a go. Still has some serious problems, but it's good for a couple of weeks of casual play.

Re:That's why I quit playing

[SendBot]

I wonder if I'm even eligible for the free trial since I've long ago purchased the game.

Re:That's why I quit playing

[Fross]

You will have to make a free trial account and you can use that - you'll have to level up from 1 but it's Tier 1 only anyway, so it's not wasted time.

Your free trial account isn't linked to you/your previous purchases in any way, so no limitations there.

Mod up

[tygerstripes]

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.

Re:Mod up

[nschubach]

While I'd like to agree that PC gaming isn't "going away" I think it is hitting a "lull" because more and more people buy laptops and without further investment they don't make for awesome game machines like the PC does. (They are getting better, but still...)

I can't wait for PC gaming to "die"

[primerib]

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.

Re:I can't wait for PC gaming to "die"

[mlts]

I just wonder if that might be something the big names are wanting -- a big crash like '83, then they will be able to blame "piracy" [1] for all their ills and get ACTA ratified with more Draconian "anti-piracy" measures like self destruct chips, hardware DRM stacks, and the like. Remember the INDUCE act of '06?

The big names will whine and bitch about how the poor pirates are eating their lunch. In reality, all that does is give them the mandate to make ever more exotic DRM stacks with a game attached to it, lobby Congress, and have excuses for crappier and crappier content with more and more essential stuff as DLC [2]. We used to be pissed about late beta quality games. Now we are ending up with early beta, or alpha stuff being shipped with *one* patch if lucky, then the game is forgotten about.

I completely agree -- the computer game industry needs an enema. However, people would rather have their Sims sequel or play known IPs as opposed to actually trying something that is new. At least in its heyday, Origin Systems always had new IP even with sequels. 10 years from now, I know we will have a Sims 4 or 5, a Madden 2021, something Halo based, and sequels for all the mainstream FPS games, so we can hear some 13 year old kid spluttering obscenities 24/7 just as well in the future as now. Only difference will likely be DRM systems nastier than we ever dreamed of. Perhaps LensLok + activation + mandatory online connection + a hardware dongle that would fry the motherboard if any protection got compromised [3].

[1]: Even on a platform that had a 0% piracy rate, sales were pretty low on the PS3 compared to other platforms, so that is a good judge of how really the game industry is doing without them able to drop a smokescreen on numbers.

[2]: I'm just waiting for games to ship essentially with nothing but a DRM stack and everything past the title screen be DLC. Even though someone spent $80 on a game, they have to pay $20 more if they want to actually purchase the character they will be playing and name it. $20 more actually gets one past the first chapter. The cost will be justified as "Movies cost $20 per chapter to watch. It should be the same with games."

[3]: I remember companies hawking dongles in the '90s that had capacitor arrays to discharge into the user's motherboard if the dongle thought it was being bypassed. I'm sure this technology will be back.

Re:I can't wait for PC gaming to "die"

[Anonymous Coward]

PC won't ever die unless the console makers smart up.

Which is, full keyboard + mouse support for handling available (not forced) for the console and it's games. This way all spectrum of possible games could be available for the console, since you can already find joysticks and wheels available for most consoles.

Being limited to use a gamepad (which is only ideal for soccer games and arcade'ish types) for normal usage is what preventing a hostile takeover of the PC market.

That's a tricky one

[Anonymous Coward]

Scratches head. Gazes into the distance.

Is it because it was a pile of fucking shite?

Re:That's a tricky one

[obeythefist]

It wasn't that bad. It just wasn't... well it sure didn't compare with WoW... you can't release a fantasy MMO today with 2-3 features that WoW doesn't have to make up for the 50 or 60 that WoW does that you're missing.

The game design was a little clunky and limited feeling compared to WoW, too. A good solid MMO must retain that feeling of freedom that a player gets. In WoW, you can go wandering in any direction that you like. The only "railroading" you get is when you wander into an area where the rabbits can bite your head off. That's when you know you need to go back to your newbie area to level a bit.

EA Games

[Anonymous Coward]

EA screwed up a game? No way!

OTOH...

[Phydeaux314]

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.

Not the best rant I've ever read.

[Burnhard]

This rant would have been entertaining if it actually contained any substance or analysis.

Well, here are some actual reasons

[Draconi]

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.

Re:Well, here are some actual reasons

[Jeek Elemental]

sure, pqs are a good idea, but never had a chance because ALL the pve inherited the crapiness of the underlying, shallow crap-layer combat system.

Re:Well, here are some actual reasons

[tibman]

I loved the Public Quests.. what a fantastic idea. I played for a month or two and it was pretty low pop. The public quests were a great way to meet people. I would usually chat someone up and go "Hey, want to do that public quest together over there?" They'd go "Hmm, that would be nice because i've tried it solo and it's impossible." That's how friends are made!

I know this sounds overly simple and stupid.. but if you've ever played lots of MMOs, you'd know that most of the time it is a Massively Multi-player yet Single-player game. The public quests forced people into groups in a way that wasn't uncomfortable and can last as long as each person wished. Having to join a guild just to have "friends" doesn't feel natural to me. Feels more like high-school where you're crammed into a group together.

Re:Well, here are some actual reasons

[Pop69]

All valid points I'm sure. I'd be interested to hear if you think these faults are due to shovelling it out the door unfinished to meet a deadline ?

Re:Well, here are some actual reasons

[Psychochild]

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.

I'm an MMO developer, but I only played Warhammer Online in the open beta. Didn't get into enough (and my friends didn't start playing it) to buy the box and play it afterward. But, allow me to provide some insight here.

Most major MMOs like Warhammer follow a trend which is set by the number of players they initially attract. After they hit their peak (usually pretty quickly after launch), they usually slowly decline over time to a steady state. There are small fluctuations based on releases of expansions, etc., but the number of players during that steady time is generally a function of the peak number. So, conventional wisdom is that you want to have as high a peak as possible to retain the maximum number of people playing (and therefore paying) when you hit the steady state later. Yes, there are exceptions like EVE Onlien or WoW, but those are special cases (EVE Online flopped when it launched and the company only survived due to some particularly lucky circumstances as I've heard it) or minor trickery (Blizzard has been able to smooth out fluctuations in WoW's North American subscriber numbers with Chinese player figures, something that few other western game companies can do due to severely increased government restrictions on games in China.)

Put in this perspective, this mandate makes more sense. In general, new content attracts new people while fixing old content retains old people. Which catches you attention more: We added two new zones! or We've fixed four dozen bugs! For most people, it's the promise of new content they didn't experience before that draws them in. EA/Mythic likely wanted to increase the number of people to increase that peak and therefore have more players on the other side of the peak. I'm sure the comforting lie told was that they would fix the old content once they had hit their peak. Unfortunately for them, they hit that peak early and it's not been good news for them.

Now, obviously, this didn't go according to plan. But, it's not like someone intentionally made a stupid decision; the logic was supported by a lot of evidence. Turns out that the usual interpretation wasn't so good.

warhammer online is a piece of shit

[Anonymous Coward]

./ 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

David Jaffe misses the point...

[flimflammer]

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.

Re:David Jaffe misses the point...

[Zoozie]

I disagree. a /dance does not belong in warhammer. There are so many emotes already and they fit the lore much better. Anyone complaining about emotes in warhammer should see a squig herder do a /special or go play Aion and do /dance or /cheerleader etc - it does not belong in warhammer.

Re:David Jaffe misses the point...

[Chris Mattern]

The reasoning that "War is going on, there will be no happiness whatsoever" is ridiculous to say the least.

It's *supposed* to be ridiculous. It's *Warhammer*. Warhammer is supposed to be ludicrously grimdark, with extra grim and some more dark piled on top.

Re:David Jaffe misses the point...

[dammy]

Jaffe is wrong, /dance is appropriate for Order's tree humping Elves.

Dunno, doesn't sound like incompetence

[Moraelin]

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?

Re:Dunno, doesn't sound like incompetence

[cgenman]

The sad thing is how often that happens. Developers have to make unrealistic promises in order to get that initial contract all of the time, especially with MMO's. Not only do you have to make an unrealistic promise, but you have to make an even more unrealistic promise than the dev house up the street just did. The "publisher" might care, but the accounts managers making the deal don't seem to realize or care.

Of course, my opinion is that if you have to make a bad deal to get a contract, it's time to walk away. But you can't walk away from every contract and still have a company. I've seen far too many bad deals in my day because the company got hungry.

Re:Dunno, doesn't sound like incompetence

[jeffasselin]

Except there are those such as Blizzard who ships "when it's ready". And they don't hesitate to cancel projects that don't meet their expectations. And when they deliver a product, it's highly polished* and always a big success.

* The release of WoW was a bit of a clusterfsck but Blizzard have stated themselves they were surprised with the popularity of the game at release which completely swamped them with way more users than they were ready to accommodate with their server architecture. The actual game, game content and gameplay was really good.

Re:Dunno, doesn't sound like incompetence

[Anonymous Coward]

It kinda of shows what kind of internal standard Blizzard set for themselves (i.e. pretty high)

But comparing studios like Blizzard to others is a bit off the mark, not many studios have so many successful home-run track record titles as a company "resume"

Games dev doesn't suck! Please mod parent up.

[TBBle]

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.

Re:Games dev doesn't suck! Please mod parent up.

[elrous0]

Dear Moderators, I'd like to request substantive support for the parent post.

Wow, that is the most eloquent way I've ever heard "MOD parent up!" expressed in my years on /.

To some people it must be new

[Moraelin]

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.

Re:To some people it must be new

[chrysrobyn]

You're describing what happens to fandom when expectations are too high. Do you recall hearing anyone criticize George Lucas before Phantom Menace ("Yoda was a bad muppet", etc)? Anyone who dared such a thing was immediately ridiculed. We were so enamored with the fictional universe the man had created he could do no wrong. Until, of course, he did.

Or perhaps the genius that was Joss Whedon. Firefly was pure art. The actors cast were perfect for their roles (and I say this while not caring much for Summer Glau). You don't create a long running show like Buffy without something going for you -- and then a spinoff like Angel that lasted a few years to boot. Then, with a gigantic "thud", Dollhouse. For whatever reasons that everyone had, Dollhouse had loyal viewers, but I'd never have considered them fans.

Fans will zealously overlook imperfections in order to better enjoy and advocate for the object of their affections. And then, when they're shunned, they have a habit of either just walking away or even turning on the remaining fans. You shouldn't be surprised that Warhammer (a franchise with 20 years of fans) had some people who were less than receptive to legitimate criticism. Nor should you be surprised when the fans who now feel scorned by their idols acknowledge the problems were there all along.

Re:To some people it must be new

[Moraelin]

Yes, well, I didn't say it was impossible to explain. I even have a few unflattering explanations of my own ;) But I still find fanboyism (and i don't mean just fandom) to be a failure mode.

Re:To some people it must be new

[DavidTC]

I don't think Dollhouse is a reasonable example there. Dollhouse was certainly comparable to Buffy. So was Firefly, for that matter.

The problem is that Joss Whedon wasn't on the WB anymore, and Fox expected a lot more.

So the expectations were too high, but not from the fandom, or at least, that's not what killed it. It was the high expectations of Fox, who through Whedon could make a show with mass market appeal, when all signs indicate he cannot, and should just stick to genre stuff, which he's amazing at.

As for Whedon's fan...most of them became convinced he could 'do wrong' with season 6 of Buffy.

Dollhouse wasn't what they were expecting, with a lack of character interaction that Whedon is great at. I don't think there was anywhere near as much fan backlash as you seem to think, though...people weren't expecting another Buffy. Many of them were just bored and left. I'm sure some fandom, somewhere, had some giant flame war, but in general Whedon fandom has flame wars over things in the shows, not which of his shows are the best. (Quite possibly because most of Buffy fandom has experience with someone mocking their taste in TV, so are in the 'watch whatever TV show you want and stop complaining about ones you don't like' category.)

But by the start of season 2, when it became clear where the series was going, and we actually had 'the villains' become interesting and the good guys actually now exist, and were the same room as other characters, the Whedon fans were happy. A lot of them, who'd gotten bored halfway through the first season, came back.

Sadly, the rest of the universe was still not watching the show, and were in fact actively leaving, which is why it was killed.

Re:To some people it must be new

[Jeek Elemental]

I agree mostly but one point is that lucas didnt make movies alone, he had some percentage of influence on the original movies.
When you watch the latest triple crapulence you realize that original percentage was probably not very big.

So the lesson is credit where credit is due; scale your expectations according to the percentage of original team involved, instead of a single person or aspect.

Re:To some people it must be new

[Anonymous Coward]

Yoda was a great muppet, and muppets are awesome. Just had to point that out.

Re:To some people it must be new

[harl]

It wasn't just half finished. It was half thought out. Public quests? Great idea at launch but anyone who's played an MPOG knows that low level areas turn into ghost towns.

Enjoyable Game

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Enjoyable Game

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello EA Employee,

Please note, when posting on forums as AC (Anonymous Coward) against the forum group think. It gives an obvious representation of who you really are.

Please remember to register an account next time. Also, on forums where we can tell when you registered, make sure to register far in advance.

Crapfully yours, Legion

I played WAR Beta...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Also, one thing... they said before too, you know?

[Moraelin]

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.

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.

"Unrealistic expectations"

[Minwee]

David Jaffe has criticized the insider for having unrealistic expectations of working in the games industry.

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.

David Jaffe sucks...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Just another interactive movie

[JustNiz]

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.

Re:Just another interactive movie

[obeythefist]

Welcome to the console era of gaming.

Old news...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Original Text (before hack)

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Original Text (before hack)

[Anonymous Coward]

Also some interesting bits from the comments in the original (non-hacked site):

--
#1 another anonymous ea louse says:
October 13, 2010 at 5:59 pm
Also why was/is Paul Barnett’s girlfriend promoted to lead a content development team hrrm? And why did she argue with some of the most talented terrain artists in the industry about content layouts? There are some horror stories from the content development side as well. ;)

--
#2 from EA Louse:
ealouse says:
October 13, 2010 at 12:48 am
Oh. My. Gawd.

I’m not going to rag on my old boss, but let’s just say that Mythic screwed the pooch on this one. Wait, why dance around it?

OK. So some devs tried to blame Games Workshop for all their “restrictions” but that was just bs. Utter bs. Paul Barnett wanted this game to be DARK. The management demanded dark, chaotic settings and ugly ass character models.

Paul, fist in palm, told us how “WAR will never have dancing! There is no dancing, these people are in a WAR!” So brilliant. BRILLIANT. Copy WOW and abandon everything that made DAoC great, but leave out dancing the one place where artists really get to express ourselves.

FU Paul and your arrbitrary stupidity.

So many other bad examples. Irony? When we did the international releases we were told we needed to make the models prettier because they were too ugly. Gee. Ya think?

What I’m saying is that it wasn’t the art management, but the “direction” was fucked from day one.

--
#3 from EA Louse:
ealouse says:
October 13, 2010 at 1:09 am
Wow, Sanya. That was a long time ago.

Yeah, that was actually not Rob Denton. That was her having a fierce, loud fight with Mark Jacobs about forum postings. Sanya had a very hard line stance on developers posting on the boards.

They shouldn’t. That’s community’s job. - Is what I'm sure she would say.

But Mark Jacobs, who loved posting, especially about things he couldn't guarantee and made our lives hell because he would essentially promise them, did not like having to play by her rules. She totally called him out on it in an embarrasing way and too many people at the company knew about it, so she was out the door.

They replaced her with a really nice guy but he was a puppet who couldn't make Mark abide by the rules. Arguably though, he did a great job, but Eugene wanted community to be under marketings control, so when the big anti-Mark coup occurred they also fired all the community representatives left, and put one of the marketing lackeys in charge of all three Mythic products.

Lets see. Other crazy things Mark wanted to do what Blizzard announced with Real ID like, years ago, and Sanya fought him on it. Mark also hates when devs post with fake names, and forced everyone who posted on boards to use real names (which created drama and stalking opportunities, which discouraged devs from posting).

So, all in all, Sanya stood up to him in a public space, and the next thing we knew there was a "mutual parting of ways." Also, her husband worked with us too, veteran, and he left later.

--
#4 from EA Louse:
ealouse says:
October 13, 2010 at 11:15 pm
Huh? I never took my own life. I did lose my job today though.

If anyone has any questions regarding Warhammer I will be more than happy to answer them However, I honestly do not know anything about TOR, except that it will fail.

--
#5 from EA Louse:
ealouse says:
October 13, 2010 at 11:31 pm
Well, I did get ousted today from EA and Mythic. Not sure about any pending lawsuits as of yet, but I have been informed that I may want to hire a lawyer for representation.

Guys I have been upfront with you from the very start of this thing. Why play skeptic now? Either you want the facts or you don’t want the facts.

*boom*

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, there goes TFA.

Let this be a lesson to you: use strong passwords.

Lessons not learned

[KriticKill]

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.

Re:Lessons not learned

[Khisanth Magus]

WO showed no signs that it was ever going to be ready. It had gone way over budget and way past the deadline that Mythic itself set...then past the new deadline...then past the new deadline. EA Louse even admitted that they kept slipping. So EA should keep shoveling money into a project that showed extremely bad mis-management and was just becoming a huge money sink?

It was time to cut their losses and just get something out the door to try and recoup what little they could out of the cluster-**** that the project had become

DAoC handled that better

[Rix]

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.

Miss the game

[moeluv]

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.

Re:Miss the game

[z3d4r]

i've played since beta and continue to play to this day. hacks were never as prevelant as people thought. not saying there wasnt some, but much of what was called hacks was players not understanding other classes. example - speed hack: i often run my blackguard with the shielding anger + endless pursuit tactic. in larger fights this combination of tactics means i move 35% faster and never run out of action points until the last enemy has fallen or i am myself killed. shaman players in particular are often accused of speed hacking, while 99% of the time its due to the run away tactic the class gets. GCD exploiting is more a matter of bad system + lag. having said that, hacking is simply not an issue in the current game, it just doesnt happen often enough. all the hackers have long since been banned

Re:Miss the game

[moeluv]

Believe me I understood the classes pretty well, and my system is not low end. I realize it wasn't every player but there were enough to have a significant impact. It was fairly easy to tell who was using something like warbuddy.

The real issue is casual games.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Err...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

All MMO's come out unfinished.

[setrops]

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.

Skippable voicing

[gknoy]

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? :)

For what it's worth

[Anonymous Coward]

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.