Once more unto the breach of reviewing that which is many ways unreviewable… This time around, I’m taking a sober look over on Eurogamer at the Euro-state of Mythic’s MMORPG Warhammer Online, nearly a year on from its high-profile launch. You’ll find my ruminations lurking over yonder, and including chin-scratchy nuggets such as these:
Mythic don’t want you to waste your time saving up money for a bigger rucksack. They just want to you to fight – ideally, to fight other players. The game’s greatest triumph is a largely seamless blend between punching NPCs and punching real people – no need for different skill sets or alternative armour. The enemy is the enemy. That row of number keys and a few team-mates, be they anonymous or known chums, are all you need. The sad side-effect of such single-mindedness is a glaring loss of personality.
A few bonus thoughts are below…
Two things I didn’t really get into in the review itself. Number one, I don’t personally know anyone still playing WAR, whereas I know a ton of WoW players and a few LOTRO ones. Simply a reflection of the massive disparity in player bases, perhaps, but the key is that I know a feckload of people who did play WAR when it launched. They’ve all since drifted away. Even the WAR-playing housemate I mention in the Eurogamer piece gave up on his latest sojourn into the game after less than a week.
Population is a big problem for the game – yeah, there’s often enough people in the instanced scenarios (though I’ve experienced far too many that have closed themselves down after a few minutes because there’s only a couple of people in ‘em), but the persistent world itself is almost a wasteland in most zones. There’s a chicken-and-egg dilemma here – is the game’s purely combative, rather one-dimensional nature to blame for the people-drought, or is the people-drought responsible for how lifeless the game environment feels?
Secondly, the score. Well, frankly a number’s a number, and I’m generally past caring about that personally. The words are what matter. That said, it was very nearly a 6 rather than 7, and I very seriously considered a 5 at one point. That 5 would, however, have been based a little too much on the population problem rather than on the game itself. The latter may be responisble for the former, but the fact remains that the game would be much more fun if there were people everywhere, amplifying the intended sense of global war: I know that from experience of the launch month. I figured that, even though Mythic have made a right pig’s ear of the game’s atmosphere, they do deserve respect for WAR’s corking PvP systems and some mighty generous free content updates.
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What would have saved Warhammer Online is if they would have made it Warhammer 40k Online. As it stands, it has very little to offer to those who are playing WoW;p style and gameplay are nearly identical, except all of your friends are playing WoW. If it were set in the 40k universe, it would at least had a huge style difference and probably would have brought in all of the Dawn of War fans to it.
Something needs to emerge out of the MMO market besides the overly casual WoW and the hardcore Eve. Right now, there is no middle ground. Vanguard was close, except it needed more development time and it started to cater to the casual market by removing death penalties, making content easier to solo, and introducing instant travel. The original EQ was probably the best example of this, but the graphics are so aged that it makes my eyeballs bleed and the accessibility of the higher end content is lost to those who don’t have contacts in the game already.
I’d agree it lacks depth as a social game, but when I was murder-izing npcs in the first few levels I couldn’t really tell. What shocked me the most was the huge gap in the feel/personality between playing Chaos and Order. I had played Chaos during the beta, and it was funny and felt like it had lots of (albeit evil) personality. Hard to describe now, it has been so long, but at the time I thought the missions, the quest givers, and the overall feel of being a bad guy all meshed together quite well. And this was across the two factions, Chaos and Greenskins, didn’t get a chance to play the Dark Elves. Fast forward to free trial, and this time I decided to try out Order. The Elven zone felt half-assed. There wasn’t the scope or scale of the “kill 10 rats” quests that the other factions have. I know, it’s still a lame “kill X” quest, but for the other factions it was disguised much better, in my opinion. I thought the elven classes were interesting, but that interest was riding thin on, as what Alec already described, shallow choices in character customization and poor epic-ness. The humans and dwarves were better, but I thought the humans at the time felt way better for one reason and one reason alone: the public quest for level 5-7 ( I think). That’s the one that culminates in a Chaos Giant bashing through the wall of trees to your left. That was just an awesome moment, and you’re not even 2 minutes away from the starter zone yet. The other Order factions lacked such awesome-ness.
@Professor
I heartily agree. Open-World Hillsbrad PvP was the best fun I’ve had in an MMO probably ever. Blizzard of course has been running away from that for 4 years now. It’s a shame that no serious competitor can emphasize stuff like that.
As for Warhammer, I think it simply offered too much stuff to do and not enough people to do it with. Most of the selling points of the game (Public Quests and queued-controlled PvP minigames from level one) really aren’t the sorts of things that players want to do as soon as they log into their new toy. They, along with the weirdly linear nature of both the game world and the character options, makes it hard to suspend disbelief.
Chiablo’s point above is also pretty important. The game offers little (except decent world PvP and actual classes) that can’t be experienced in WoW, and you don’t have to abandon your friends and start from the beginning. In short, WAR would have benefited greatly from a “surprise” six month delay to push it past Lich King’s period of relevance, as well as a brutally honest internal assessment during that time of what things need to be pruned or added later.
I really wanted to like WAR. I did.
If any one thing turned me off the game, it was the fact that Mythic is terrible at balancing. Such was the case in DaoC, such is the case here.
You’ve got 24 classes. Some weren’t online long enough to be beta tested, and had crushing flaws. White Lion, sort of like a WoW hunter that’s melee only, packing Intercept minus the stun & cooldown, had a pet that died in 1-4 hits at max level, no scaling. The crushing imbalance in many of the classes has not yet been remedied, even after patches specifically stated to address many of those classes.
There’s something depressing about getting a class to max level and watching patch after patch make an already poor class worse, because Mythic’s method of balance is to paint with the broadest strokes. (Bright Wizard and Sorceress nuke-type casters are overpowered? Nerf ~all~ AoE. Witch Elves doing too much damage? Nerf ~all~ procs.) The weakest classes are casualties of such work.
There’s other problems too – getting one of the most basic endgame armor sets is calculated to take three months on average, what with lockout timers and abysmal drop rates (I did 70 runs of the city dungeons and recieved 2 drops for my class. That’s with a lockout timer of 3 days between runs and me being undergeared for PvP until I had my set).
The game as a whole lacks polish. There’s something infuriating about finally getting that endgame armor piece (Sentinel Mane) and having a clipping error if you have any helm on. If you don’t have a helm on, 11 of the 12 hairstyles have a similar distracting flickering clipping error of hair sticking out through the middle of your back. Ditto for many Shadow Warrior hoods. If you got the Collector’s Edition and gave your elf a blindfold, well, you’ve got bits of blindfold sticking around & through any helm you decide to display.
All too often, I find that WAR simply defies the imagination, and not in a good way.
Oh yes. One more thing.
It should be noted that this game is by no means a business failure, whether or not it ever meets the ridiculous milestones by which we howling nerds now measure MMOs that have only been achieved by one game ever.
Mark Jacobs has said they’ve spent south of $100 million making Warhammer. The title sold over a million copies, plus they still have 200k-300k subscribers paying $12-$15 a month. That means they’re probably making $30-$50 million a year, plus their cut from the $40-$50 million in box sales, plus whatever subscription fees were paid from the 4/5ths of players who have quit.
After a year i can say: I miss the big thing in WAR. PvP is great, but circle raids and the endless stupid RR farming .. where is the point? What is about big epic fights 400 vs 400 and some other stuff..?
There were big chunks of this game I really enjoyed, but like so many others, just found the slog too much and gave up (I played for about 7 weeks in the end, and I enjoyed most of it, so it was a good run tbh). Just wasn’t really worth continuing with.
The RPS guild was absolutely brilliant though, and I hope that other MMO developers play this and take away some of the best points. Although getting an end game character fully tooled up was a slog – getting up to Tier 4 wasn’t a slog for me at all. I loved being able to take part in PvP from Level 1 and the whole PQ system.
The biggest shame for me while playing (for T1-T3 at least, not so much endgame) was that there could be four destro warbands and four order warbands marching aournd the three main RvR lakes and they would largely dance around one another taking undefended keeps, full on clashes only happned when one side was defending their last keep, and it descended into sitting outside the opposition warcamp just out of range of the guards and warmachines…
Flawed, worth trying, learn some lessons, build somethign better next time…
Its nice to see that all that I have feared came true. You can´t capture the very perculiar setting of the WHFRPG in a MMO. Just impossible. Where is the intrigue, the backstabbing, the rotten high class, the filthy scum in the harbours, the epic quest for Ghâl-Maraz itself? Playing a Bright Wizard clearing out a Golbin lair surely won´t add anything to the atmosphere of the game.
I´m glad WAR failed. Hope the devs and publishers learned a lesson.
hitnrun, yeah, THEY spent sub 100 million to make the game, then EA probably put in another 20 million on marketing.
Mythic/EA’s cut from the box sales will be something like, 30 million.
That leaves, call it 80 million (assuming under 100 million rounds to 90).
Of those subs at an average of $13, with say 240k players that’s a grand total of 3.1 million.
Now minus server costs, 500k (estimate on my part – including power and servicing), staff wages (50 employees? 100?) Call it 250k which I think is very conservative given managers/heads of department may be one something like 200k a year. Rent, water, further marketing… So on and so forth.
So lets cut that 3 million down to say 1.5 Million pure profit – again I think this is conservative, It is probably less than 1.
So you have
30 million from box sales.
+ 1.5 Million per month
+ 10 million miscellaneous subs (those who paid for 2-3 months) from ex-players.
The game won’t be in the black 14-18 months, if it maintains at 200k+ subs at a conservative guess.
Like most who were playing wow when this launched I started playing with a ton of friends. Fast forward to a month later and we had all quit, be it for wow or something else entirely.
It seems a lot of people in the comments are echoing what I felt at the time, WAR just was lacking something (atmosphere, whatever) that made you want to keep coming back. I just found it had nothing that made me want to know more about the world, characters, or places in the same fashion that WoW had done.
A lot of guys I played with had been old DAOC whores, always recounting the immense RVR and lamenting every other game since for being crap in comparison. Ironic that they all quit and went back to PVE’ing in wow, which they were equally lamenting as being dire!.
I actually enjoyed the Beta of WAR, probably because I didnt actually have to level, but after passing T2 (around mid-late 20’s) it felt so pathetically slow it really didnt take long to call it quits.
It was probably compounded by the fact you could go through all 3 faction zones for your level and still be no-where near actually leveling. Ultimately to level it practically felt you were forced to level hump in the Instanced BGs to get anywhere. Which brings me onto the nightmare that was Tor Anroc… NO THE PAIN MAKE IT STOP… yeah that sums that up pretty much.
To top it off was I the only one that felt the whole animation system was horribly clunky? After coming from the silky-smooth nature of WoW it felt as though you were almost playing a game-by-email at times.
I don’t really think the games balance issues were helped by having a ton of the Order classes/races seem wholely unappealing (I’m thinking mainly Elf – White Lion). I didnt see a Swordsmaster (? was it a swordmaster) and/or a white lion more than a handful of times, yet everyone and their mother was a BW.
It’s a shame it fell on its arse though, a competitor for WoW would of been a good thing to have around. I just hope TOR doesn’t suffer the same fate as WAR.
What kind of horrendous dipshit asshole is “glad” a game failed? Fucking shameful.
There’s intrigue, backstabbing, treacherous and unpleasant nobility, dockside scum, and so forth written into the quests. It’s as close as any MMO is likely to get to an actual tabletop roleplaying session (i.e. not very).
And I really have to question cheezey’s statement that you could go through all three faction zones and still not be levelled enough to move on. I played from launch onwards, and although they definitely had exp rate problems that they corrected to some degree in later patches, that only ever forced me to play the content in two racial zones before moving to the next set. Maybe a bit of a third if I weren’t feeling like tracking all the way through one of the other two. And that only started around T3. By the time I was 40 I’d only experienced one of the three Order storylines all the way through – the Empire one. I certainly never had to grind exp in PvP. I might add that I would definitely have preferred a combination of level rate and quest density that could have let me play through one racial zone set per character. That would have gone a long way to extending WAR’s lifespan for me, since each new character would have been a new questing experiencing.
Hey, let’s take the worst parts of DAOC and the worst parts of WoW and make some bastardised hybrid mess with a bad, buggy engine that’s a chore to play.
All they had to do was take DAOC, stick it in a modern engine and slap the Warhammer IP all over it and watch the moneyz roll in. How on earth did they mess that up?
the game has yet to fail. true it lost most of it’s population but the “thing” everyone claims this game lacks is a niche for those that loose. loosing faction whines, leaves and whines some more making others leave. the game is still the best MMO imho if you have the guts to actualy fight. like said before it’s sort of an MMO FPS where you log on, get into the fight for a while then log off if you want to, no strings attached.
if you stop putting the bar that high and start looking at what the game brings instead of what it lack you’ll see it for what it is. PVP game where some win, some loose but those that loose get too butthurt to actualy try and improve.
also i fail to see what the “i played a couple weeks at launch” ppl actualy have to say. you got to what? rank 15? or the “endgame” gear being sentinel set? just shows you have a lot to say about nothing you know about.
A random thing I’ve kind of noticed recently. Warhammer (the tabletop war game) is about trying to out-think and outmanoeuvre your opponent. WFRP (that’s the tabletop RPG) is… well an RPG, so it rewards thinking and creativity and atmosphere and so on.
So why is everything else related to these two games that involve your brain, so dumbed down? The novels/comic are just fight, fight, fight, yawn, yawn, yawn. And WAR appears to be just about hitting each other ad nauseum. It’s almost insulting the intelligence of tabletop players.
@ Morph
True, but conflict is still central to the Warhammer universe. The intricacies of military tactics are difficult to convey in an exciting way in books, let alone comics, but at least that aspect is slightly more understandable. It’s a shame that WAR couldn’t provide more depth. Let’s hope the impending 40k MMO will offer a more engaging, tactical experience.
@SuperNashwan: Thirded!
It’s the only MMO I would seriously consider paying a monthly subscription for (although I suspect as an urban setting it would be a lot harder to make than a fantasy MMO).
It didn’t hook me like WoW, but that MMO treats gamers like robots who enjoy spamming hotkeys at the same mobs for weeks to reach parts of the game that actually look fun, followed by more spamming of hotkeys to get gear to actually participate in the end game funness. I mean if that game was a mate, you would have probably punched it in the face by now.
War was alright, but I never got hooked. Pretty sick PVP, I guess I was just a sorc and nuked everything for hours and hours
Yeah, everyone who has anything bad to say clearly was just losing badly at PVP. Awesome counter argument there. Well done.
My major problem with it was the wierd disconnect that I had between the abilities and the animations. It felt like they were never in sync. You press the buttons, numbers happen, and some time later there would be an animation which didn’t really feel like it fit properly. I don’t know what it was exactly but it felt horribly clunky, especially after WoW where everything is so smooth.
What would have saved Warhammer Online is if they would have made it Warhammer 40k Online.
A shit 40K game wouldn’t have done any better than the shit WH game they released. Mythic needed to deliver a good game, and they didn’t.
As for being similar to WoW, eh. The things it did to differentiate itself from WoW (and there were lots of things) were poorly done, and the things it did in inspiration of WoW were poorly done.
The game was just bad, Mythic screwed up big time, a different setting wouldn’t have changed that.
I still play WAR. I recognize the validity of most of the gripes here. But somehow I still have a blast logging on and fighting it out with people in open world and instanced pvp. What makes this game more than just TF2 with a fee is that, say what you will about lack of personality, in TF2 I can’t be a gobbo running around doing all sorts of heals, buffs, debuffs, making people’s brains explode, etc. A big pfft to those who say that WoW pvp comes anywhere close to WAR. Screw being a WoW healbot and needing to avoid dpsing to conserve precious mana. Screw mana in general, WAR did well to do away with it.
Anyhow I’m not here to sell the game, I’m just saying that me and plenty of others still have a great time.
Cheers!
I absolutely loved Warhammer, actually. I found it atmospheric and while not nearly as immersive as some other MMO’s, it was OK. What killed it for me was the dwindling populations and refusal by Mythic to merge the servers early – even during the initial month. This game requires a healthy population both within your proximity (for public quests and open RvR) as well as server wide (scenarios) just to deliver the intended experience at all.
From the start, they should have:
- Made public quests scalable and able to be completed by two or more players from the start
- Had cross-server scenarios (ideally server groups, like WoW)
- Launched with half the servers
I think the negatives are well covered and pretty much true. We all have our particular hot buttons that make a certain thing not desirable, but you guys tend to miss the one area where the game has tremendous strengths, particularly against a wow.. in the pvp department:
1) classes can’t do everything, so within a group your highly dependent on the other classes..every class is flawed in a big way (tanks are weak, dps dies quickly, healers cant dmg) which puts more interdependency on the units.
2) everything is designed so that you don’t have to grind for years. you can gear up for pvp super quick to a point that gear differences are irrelevant in a week after reaching lvl cap, whereas in a game like wow, good luck catching any hard core raider who has spent six months raiding.
3) the system doesn’t have stupid money sinks or time sinks that make you spend a lot of time sitting around. no armor repair bills, no watching your guy fly around from zone to zone for 7 minutes, etc.. no farming potion mats for four hours before a raid.. all the b.s. stuff is pretty much done instantly, so if you want to just pvp, you really have nothing every holding you back
after the last two patches, which 1) significantly nerfed aoe; and 2) just largely fixed the city end game — i think the game is at its best state ever, though the last year has been really rough with bad patch after patch, no end game, etc.. now really is the time to try the game. it’s definitely at its strongest point.