Warhammer Online Nerfed

Another ruined game, I guess release dates are just THAT important.
 
FreiDOg said:
They are when a slip means missing the holiday buying season.
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Blizzard has proven it doesn't mean shit. If you release a good game, regardless of the date..it will SELL. PERIOD. It is just some moron of an exec who has it in his head that if you don't sell it during the holiday it won't sell. For some reason..maybe one day, they will learn who their demographics are and how much money they really do have.
 
Trepidati0n said:
Blizzard has proven it doesn't mean shit. If you release a good game, regardless of the date..it will SELL. PERIOD. It is just some moron of an exec who has it in his head that if you don't sell it during the holiday it won't sell. For some reason..maybe one day, they will learn who their demographics are and how much money they really do have.
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99 games out of a 100 are not Blizzard / Valve games. They make their money in the first few months and if the studio wants to stay in business long enough to make a sequel, they'll put it on store shelves when they think they can make the most money. This is only more true for publicly held companies like EA.

It's not a good long term business model, but for developers who aren't Blizzard, it works well enough.
 
FreiDOg said:
99 games out of a 100 are not Blizzard / Valve games. They make their money in the first few months and if the studio wants to stay in business long enough to make a sequel, they'll put it on store shelves when they think they can make the most money. This is only more true for publicly held companies like EA.

It's not a good long term business model, but for developers who aren't Blizzard, it works well enough.
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You just proved my point. Every single time a quality game has been released by a company, they practically printed money. When you realease a game that has been rushed out the door, you only shoot yourself in the foot by trying to grab as much money as you can in the short run and pray that you survive.

Remember that Bliz/Valve are just like any other game company out there. They all have budgets but they also all have very talented developers. The largest difference is the people on top.
 
I read the entire interview and I agree with him he does suck they had to but I admire their dedication to quality. Instead of having more bullet points on the box they decided to do what was right for the player and for them. Id rather have the fun working classes than to have some classes boring and unbalanced. Besides I am sure they will be patched in later or something. This is nothing to over-react about. I am still looking forward to the game.
 
Oh, man!

Not only has this been in development forever, but I remember all the hype that the developers have surrounded around it using their podcasts which I watched. Now they're meaningless.

They boast all these features and great classes, and then say "nevermind, we're deleting all that, have fun with 30 percent of what we BSed about"?

Guess I'm done with MMOs for good.

And I can DEFINITELY see how this is just a trick to later release all those in an expansion to grab even more money of what could have already been packed into the original release.

I also disagree about the above comment about how he would rather play a balanced game; so if they were to only release ONE class, with ONE town and ONE spell, you would be happy with a game because it's all perfectly balanced?
 
Well what would you have rather them do seriously ? Lie and leave in low quality cities and broken classes just for the advertisement kinda like funcom and AOC. I like his honesty and I really admire that. People come in here talking about how come companies screwed players over and when a company tries to be realistic and honest they get flamed to hell. Even blizzard is guilty of this. How many of their classes were broken at the start and some still are. They only have to mirror each class to each faction None are unique. I would rather start out with complete and awesome classes and cities. It is dissapointing but like I said that is the difference between blizzard,funcom, and Mythic. Mythic treats its loyal fans with respect and honesty while blizz just butchers something different every patch(even if you post negative feedback on the ptr) and Funcom just dont know what the hell they are doing.
 
Hey look, another thread of people complaining about a game they have never played.
 
"Mark went on to say that he feels that while it would have been nice for each race to have their own city, they believe that, for the above reasons, the decision is a net win for the players. The team, according to Jacobs, really believes that while they would have liked (and know that players would have liked) to have all cities fully functional, it is better to do it right twice, than wrong six times.

Jacobs also talked about their other option, which would have been to delay the game on behalf of the Capital Cities. In the end, that wasn’t really an option as even delaying the game to accommodate the cities would have resulted in issues and in the end, wouldn’t have resolved the issues listed above.

“Once something goes live,” he added, “it becomes much more difficult to change so you have to be more careful. You can‘t make as many sweeping changes and when you make changes you have to look at the impact on the existing player base. There are so many bad things that can happen post-launch when you make significant adjustments. By doing it this way, we don‘t have to worry about that. We can make the adjustments to the new cities and then rotate in those cities.”

“Right now, for each city, we have 12 public quests and almost 100 quests that either lead to the city or within the city, or leading out of the city, plus three dungeons for each of the capital cities. That’s a fair amount of content and there wasn’t going to be that much in each city in the initial design.”

“This isn’t something that I can say that it is really a good thing for the player,” he began. “We’re cutting out some classes. I can say that we are doing this for quality, absolutely. Unfortunately, what I can’t say, and I won’t because I’ve never lied to the player base and while this would be a great place to start, I’m not going to.”



“Four of the classes that we’ve been working on, we just couldn’t get great,” he continued. “We looked at them and we said these careers are just not great… and we tried, and they weren’t coming out well.”

This left them with a decision similar to the one that they were left with for the cities, do they continue and try to get it, or do they shelve them? In the end, after looking at the metric data that they have been collecting throughout the beta process, they saw that there were four careers that just weren’t working for the players.

“We tried,” Jacobs said, “we tried to see if we could make them better and we just couldn’t make them great. So we had a choice. Do we put in some non-great careers just because they are iconic, or we cut them out and put them in post-launch if we can get them right, or do we not put them in at all?”

In the end, whether it’s the second or the third option is still unknown.

In the end, the team felt that adding careers into the game that weren’t up to their standards would have hurt not only the game and the company, but the players as well. Trying to fix classes (that are already in the game) post-launch can cause a boatload of nightmares as players not only of the careers involved, but of other careers as well. Many MMO players have experienced the nerfing and other annoyances that are often involved in a great deal of tinkering with an existing class, and Mythic didn’t want to put anyone through that experience unnecessarily.(blizzard has been doing this since day one)

“We’ve been down that path before and we’ve seen other companies go down the exact same path. We’re not going down that path. We’ve launched too many other MMOs and seen too many other guys go ‘it’s not quality, it’s quantity’… Bad move, especially in an RvR game.”
 
Trepidati0n said:
Blizzard has proven it doesn't mean shit. If you release a good game, regardless of the date..it will SELL. PERIOD. It is just some moron of an exec who has it in his head that if you don't sell it during the holiday it won't sell. For some reason..maybe one day, they will learn who their demographics are and how much money they really do have.
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And Blizzard has the resources to actually do this. Not all companies have this luxury. Especially without a few hits already under their belt.
 
canislupy said:
http://www.massively.com/2008/07/11/mark-jacobs-announces-major-features-cut-from-warhammer-online/

Mythic is going to cut 4 of 6 capital cities, 4 character classes (two of which are main tanks for their race) and who knows what else, all in order to make the November ship date. My pre-order for the collectors edition has been canceled.

They say this had nothing to do with EA, riiiiiiight. :rolleyes:
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How do you know this will ruin it? You didn't experience what it was like before the change, so how do you know that after the change it will be worse?

While initially I thought that this would take away from the character of the game, I think it will improve the PvP. 6 cities is too many objectives. With two, the dynamic PvP objectives that are the cities will have more focus for the players.

I know it's a bad sign, but every developer has to make compromises to make the release date so that they're competitive. At any time, Blizzard could announce the MMO they've been working on, and that could take away from WAR's popularity. Better to get it out onto the market and add the features with updates, like Age of Conan has done. Personally, it doesn't bother me too much, as long as what they release is fun to play.
 
Hey what about the opposite arguement of saying, Hey we do not know if we can make these classes good enough to be in our game by launch or ever, so instead of delaying the game again we will go ahead. Each side has two other melee dps and tanks to choose from so that is not a game breaker. Also the cities instead of being unfinished will each be implemented when they are finished and awesome.

I would rather them release a really well done game missing some content then an unfinished piece of shit like Age of Conan.

But I guess the OP and others do not care how good something is they just want the most regardless.

Think about the release date like this, does it really matter if the game is release with 4 less classes and 4 less cities but on time? No, the cities will be put in the game after launch, and the classes IF THEY CAN GET THEM TO WORK will be put in the game. What if they never get the classes to work delay the game forever? This way people can play the game sooner and start enjoying it and get some content that was intedned for launch a few months later.

I think most people little take a game with 90% of its content polished in a few months rather than waiting for a game THAT COULD (but might not) have 100% of its content polished in half a year or longer.

Makes me sick that some people punish a developer for having the integrity to stand up and say "This is not working so we will not put it in our game" were some developers just slap shit on a wall and hope it sticks.

Good Day
 
Remember when people were staying optimistic towards AoC reguarding missing content? AoC had tons more optomistic HYPE than WAR aka possible wow-killer and look how that turned out.

Since publishers won't let Dev's finish the damn game this announcement firmly places Warhammer in WoW's shadow It will be fun and sell, people will love it for 1-2 months, then realize it's not that different from WoW.
 
Trepidati0n said:
You just proved my point. Every single time a quality game has been released by a company, they practically printed money. When you realease a game that has been rushed out the door, you only shoot yourself in the foot by trying to grab as much money as you can in the short run and pray that you survive.
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There are plenty of instances where good quality, fun games did not do well, or did not do well for the developer. IronLore shut their doors as soon as they released Immortal Throne, and Titan Quest, while not being a defining moment in the genre like Diablo was, is still a very good game. System Shock and its sequel were phenomenal games for their day, but never attracted the audience of Diablo or Half Life.
A bad game will not sell long; but that does not mean all good games sell well; there are simply too many counter examples to that.

But that's not really what I was saying to begin with. It doesn't matter how long you sit and polish and tweak a derivative, uninspired title, they will not have the impact that Diablo, Warcraft and Starcraft had. Nor will they generate the on-going sales those titles do.


Remember that Bliz/Valve are just like any other game company out there. They all have budgets but they also all have very talented developers. The largest difference is the people on top.
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How many game companies could invest years of development into a major title like Starcraft ghost only to kill it because it didn't meet their standards?
No, Valve, Blizzard and ID started like any other game company, back when putting out a major game could be done for under a million dollars. They have, over the course of 15 years bought themselves the right to say when their games are done; and which of their games are good enough to release.
Joe Shmoe Development doesn't have that; they are at the mercy of publishers, so publishers dictate the games that are made and when they come out. It's not a good thing for developers, but it's what you have if you're not sitting on a privately owned gold mine.
 
TBH, Blizzard nerfed the shit out of WoW before it was launched as well....there was originally supposed to be a ton of playable races. I don't have any links, but I remember reading in an early PCgamer mag that they wanted like 15 playable races to start. Just because War is getting nerfed a bit doesn't mean that its going to suck. I don't think I'll play it, but I don't think its going to suck.
 
This game hasn't been in developement forever... 3 years people. THREE YEARS this game went from concept to launch this fall. THat isn't a long time, its NO time practically. And if you mention the shitfest of a failer Warhammer Online was before mythic started working on it, it doesn't count. Mythic didn't keep a single thing from the old try by whatsthereface company.

I'm currently in the WAR beta, and I believe this game will rock face when released, and yes, even without 4 classes and 4 capital cities.
 
Roliath said:
Expansion Material perhaps?
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No. They have publicly stated it 100% will NOT be expansion material and will be provided through content patches (the classes may be replaced with alternative new classes however instead of the originals). While disappointing, they have said the extra 4 cities if they work gameplay-wise without dispersing the action too much will be placed in, if not they will rotate them in and out. WAR still has 20 classes, and two IMMENSE amazing cities/areas that aren't run-of-the-mill auction house and taxi stations. Of course class additions are "set in mud" as always stated.

Visec said:
Remember when people were staying optimistic towards AoC reguarding missing content? People were HYPING AoC 10 times more than WAR and look how that turned out.

Since publishers won't let Dev's finish the damn game this announcement confirms Warhammer will reside in WoW's shadow It will be fun and sell, people will love it for 1-2 months, then realize it's not that different from WoW.
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I don't know if anyone saying WOW is similar to WAR has even played Mythic's last game, Dark Age of Camelot, but they are worlds apart ;). WOW is a casual game made to be a one-size-fits-all, whereas WAR/DAOC will be very RVR focused with a decent-sized PVE amount inside of it.

Anyway, I can't say a whole lot past this (which has all been publicly stated) as I'm in the beta... I will say this has not in the slightest affected my impression of WAR though. Kudos to Mythic for telling people flat-out and straight up honestly instead of waiting until moments before release like "other companies" do. I will note I also was in AOC's beta and did cancel my pre-orders (yes, pre-orders for multiple accounts including my own and family's) within a couple weeks. WAR on the other hand has its pre-orders in place still ;).

I love overreactions, you should see the thousand-post threads over at WHA from the day this announcement was made (7/11/2008), which have mostly calmed now. Everyone will whine, but they're still going to buy it if they were actually planning on it... and they'll still be very happy :).
 
To be clear, I was not and am not advocating Mythic release 4 crappy classes and 4 half-built, fall-through-the-world cities before they are ready. My disappointment comes from them deciding to cut content instead of delaying the game. I prefer companies delay to get things right, although I know that nothing can ever be made perfect, especially in MMOs, and some compromises have to be made. Personally though, this passed my threshold. YMMV.
 
ill decide more when i get in beta. im not gonna cancel my ce just yet. the stuff they cut will be added later...so yeah disappointment but not enough ......................to not try the game out at least.
 
4 cancelled classes doesn't bother me that greatly.

Blizz has 9 unique classes.

EAMythic will release with 20 unique classes.

The complexity of balancing each side is far heavily weighted in favor to EAMythic and the lack of 4 classes (2 on each side) shouldn't affect anyone THAT greatly as they are other viable options.
 
Tylerdurdened said:
Oh, man!

Not only has this been in development forever, but I remember all the hype that the developers have surrounded around it using their podcasts which I watched. Now they're meaningless.

They boast all these features and great classes, and then say "nevermind, we're deleting all that, have fun with 30 percent of what we BSed about"?
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Hmmm

Similar situation, their podcasts really sucked me in, however I'm not dispairing quite yet! A lot of the systems sound good, what sounds like is missing is content. It think if the systems are in and working well the content can lack and still provide a good game.

My experience with AoC has thusfar been incredibly disapointing, they proved without a shadow of a doubt that even a good game at release can go to crap after 2 months of "updates"
 
Gaiden133 said:
4 cancelled classes doesn't bother me that greatly.

Blizz has 9 unique classes.

EAMythic will release with 20 unique classes.

The complexity of balancing each side is far heavily weighted in favor to EAMythic and the lack of 4 classes (2 on each side) shouldn't affect anyone THAT greatly as they are other viable options.
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Exactly, 4 classes isn't that much for a mythic game, hell daoc had like 30+ and they kept adding several per expansion. There are several classes that can fulfill the tank/healer/dps role in any given party and eliminating one in no way cripples the game. And as for the capital cities, well that depends on how the game ends up playing but in most mmos people end up congregating in the same one anyway.
 
the classes don't matter much but removing 4 out of 6 cities is a big deal. Especially when the end-game content for warhammer is capturing these cities from opposing factions. So it would have been like a gigantic battlefield game with 6 capture points and now it's just 2 with one big battle going on in the same place forever. Sounds bad.
 
Trepidati0n said:
Blizzard has proven it doesn't mean shit. If you release a good game, regardless of the date..it will SELL. PERIOD. It is just some moron of an exec who has it in his head that if you don't sell it during the holiday it won't sell. For some reason..maybe one day, they will learn who their demographics are and how much money they really do have.
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Yea how does the holidayseason apply to mature rated mmos?:confused:. Which moms buy their kids mmorpg games for christmas??? I have a hard time believing this matters for this type of product, and since they have to cut so much it's definitely gonna be for the worse!

FUCK EA.:(
 
I agree that a mmo is not a holiday only gift. I guess they are trying to be EA.
IF it kinda installs and if it kinda works. GOOD ENOUGH
If we sell enough copies we might even fix something.
F the customer

But it sounds like they are removing everything before the release, so it sounds like we can't get anything to work, how do we fix this...MORE MONEY
damn they must be US Senators
 
I also disagree with the suggestions that having only 2 capital cities will make things better as far as end game PVP is concerned, as I would rather see each side having to wage war and defenses on multiple fronts, weighing each other and directing guilds, efforts etc. on more than just a single cities goals or defenses.
 
sparks said:
I agree that a mmo is not a holiday only gift. I guess they are trying to be EA.
IF it kinda installs and if it kinda works. GOOD ENOUGH
If we sell enough copies we might even fix something.
F the customer

But it sounds like they are removing everything before the release, so it sounds like we can't get anything to work, how do we fix this...MORE MONEY
damn they must be US Senators
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WTF are you talking about?
They could have released shitty cities and barely working classes that nobody played because they were boring and had no flare tot hem. Instead, they said it didn't work and took the content out.

They know when they're going to sell more copies of the software far better than any of us. And if they think that they need to get it out soon to sell a lot of copies, then it's their choice to do so -- they are a business and have to make money.

The funny thing about this thread is that if they had pushed the date back another few months to get the classes and cities in order, there would be a thread about that with 10 times as many threats to cancel their orders.

If you had the desire to buy the CE version for almost twice the normal one, then you're going to buy the game. Stop bitching and go start a petition or something.
 
Demon10000 said:
WTF are you talking about?
They could have released shitty cities and barely working classes that nobody played because they were boring and had no flare tot hem. Instead, they said it didn't work and took the content out.

They know when they're going to sell more copies of the software far better than any of us. And if they think that they need to get it out soon to sell a lot of copies, then it's their choice to do so -- they are a business and have to make money.

The funny thing about this thread is that if they had pushed the date back another few months to get the classes and cities in order, there would be a thread about that with 10 times as many threats to cancel their orders.

If you had the desire to buy the CE version for almost twice the normal one, then you're going to buy the game. Stop bitching and go start a petition or something.
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Agreed, people need to calm down about these sorts of things, in general. Hell, a week after diablo 3 there were already multi-page threads about how the game sucks (and not "is going to suck", "already does suck"). Fallout 3 receives similar criticism.

How many of the people doubting mythic so much played any significant amount of daoc? Because personally, everyone I knew who played that game, myself included, thoroughly enjoyed it. I still think its pvp system is the best of any mmo I've played, and I would certainly expect them to learn from and build upon the daoc formula.

I'm not saying it'll be incredible, destroy WoW, or whatever, but there is no other game studio better equipped to create a Warhammer mmo, end of story. Mmos undergo significant changes in the months before and immediately after their releases, just give it a chance before bashing it based on a couple paragraphs you read on the internet.

Not to mention the fact that in the interviews they explicitly said that EA had nothing to do with it and that they didn't even know (because guess what, they don't make every game design decision).
 
I wouldn't have complained, though I agree that many would have.

Because I like and can afford to purchase collectors editions of games that I am interested in playing means that even if they cut content I find key to my interests, that I would still pay $30 less for it? No.

I spoke with my wallet, so I feel no need to drum up a petition. If enough people canceled like me over this, they would know it pretty quickly, though I think I may be in the minority here, but I'm okay with that.
 
canislupy said:
Because I like and can afford to purchase collectors editions of games that I am interested in playing means that even if they cut content I find key to my interests, that I would still pay $30 less for it? No.
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Are you seriously upset at these classes being removed? Do you even know what their abilities were? What function they provided to their group? How they played?

And the cities -- are they going to impact your game THAT much?

Or are you more upset that they cut content to make a deadline, after pushing their release date back about a year?

Their in a damned if you do, damned if you don't situation. If they get complete content into their users hands, then provide them with more free content, thats a win in the long run. If the put half-ass models and crappy classes into the game, thats a long time loss because THATS what people remember.
 
I actually could care less about the classes (which I failed to emphasize in my OP, sorry). The cities are what did it for me, and as I have already said, no I don't want POS cities, I want them to finish them then give me the game (or, like I have done, I will cancel my order and wait for the cities to be implemented). Not only for the RvR/PvP reasons I gave above, but also fundamental to my enjoyment of the game in choosing faction/race/class and the exploration of said and all its lore and setting. I get it, this is not there yet and I 100% agree that they should not give me flawed cities/content. And its not that I don't disagree completely with what they are doing, I can appreciate them having a business to run over there, but that doesn't mean I am obliged to give them my money before I feel their product meets my expectations.
 
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