Man, if only they had set this game in space... We could have had, like, Space Marines and Legion of Chaos! Man I would LOVE to have played them, and Tyranids and all those other COOL races!!! We could even maybe have awesome jetpacks! And anti-gravity battles! Yeah awesome! pew pew.

Is there a WoW game set in space? No? Man, they could have totally capitalised and monopolise that theme. No competition!!! People wanna play fantasy, they play WoW. People wanna play hardcore Space Marines, then they have to play WAR cause there's no other game like it out there....

Man, that idea alone was worth all their developers high paid salaries.

All they had to do was copy an idea and they failed at that. I say fire the lot of them and hire me.

I wouldnt say that the Lich King wasnt a major factor, but more by its absence than its release.

You see, virtually all players I have met in WAR that had switched from WoW to WAR at its release werent really done with WoW: They just were done with Burning Crusade, and the Easy-Mode Patch just before WARs release, and looked for a few months of fun before their "main" MMO started again.

These people would never even have looked at WAR if the Lich King had released earlier, or there hadnt been this prolonged dry spell of interesting things to do in WoW.

Most of these players always were on a timer. They inflated box sales, server numbers and preliminary cries of victory, but they were never going to stick around anyway. So, when the Lich King released, it didnt really have to "convince" a lot of genuine WAR players, it just drew back those who were in a holding pattern anyway. Of the 800k or so, I guess an easy 200k were never intending to play WAR beyond the two big expansion releases that fall, Lich King and Mines of Moria. If you can, check the forums of these weeks to see almost half the fanbase active there having tried WAR for a short change of pace, but with firm intentions to be back when a "real" MMO kicks in again.

In a way, WAR has been hurt badly by these players, because had Mythic realized or known they would lose so many no matter what, a lot could have been avoided.

And also, I cant help but get the impression that these players formed a lot of the "I dont care, leave me alone, I just care for my own fun, I need gear gear gear" mindset so prevalent early in WAR, which has really influenced the way the game was played ever since the first days of Serpents Passage farming.

WAR has put itself in a position where it tries to compete with several far far superior games for the same audience. WoW, AOC and soon Aion are direct competitors, and all three are currently in better shape, 2 of them also far and away bigger and larger in scope.

The bottom line is that if you do not make a good game nobody is going to continue to play. Only the diehard Mythic fans are left.

Neither Blizzard or EA killed Warhammer.  Bad design concepts and a pathetic game engine killed Warhammer.

Good read, thanks for sharing the article.

Definitely interesting to hear things from an insider perspective.

I enjoyed the read, but it had almost nothing to do with the "fall of WAR". The article's actual title was more appropriate as it truly was just his story of his time working at EA Mythic. The only thing he mentioned was Wrath of the Lich King, and that was in an offhand manner.

Anyway, as others have said, poor design decisions killed WAR. The ambition and the dream was sound, but the implementation was off. An antiquated engine, battles that required a massive population density that did not exist, etc. The whole game only works if you have dozens, if not hundreds, of players competing and doing PQs together, but that requires a population the servers cannot handle, which is the ultimate catch 22.

It is a shame, too, because it verged on greatness in so many ways, which goes to show that the difference between something great and something bad is not much.

Originally posted by comerb

Neither Blizzard or EA killed Warhammer.  Bad design concepts and a pathetic game engine killed Warhammer.

TRUTH,  I didn't come from playing WOW and I had no intention of going to WOW regardless of what I thought of Warhammer.  Wars biggest problem is WAR, its that simple.  The RVR isnt' really RVR and we all know this.  You fight keep lords and and other pve enemies that have strange aggro patterns and aren't really fun to fight to begin with.  The world PVP I found was really mostly on the weekends and during the week I would log in and look for a war party and the higher I went the less of these I found.  The pve is horrible in War and even if it was decent thats not what I think most War players showed up for really.  I came for PVP that gave experience and world battles over territory.  I got tired of the instances by lvl 20 and after that I just couldn't stomach the wait for the RVR the higher I went.  

Interesting how the guy seem to blame everything but the game itself for losing so many subscribers. "Oh it was Lich King" "It was the cheaters and gold farmers" "It was the reccession".

No it wasnt, the game was as shallow as a children pool and had a broken end game. That was why it lost so many subscribers.

Also the game was advertised as an RvR game, which led people to believe there would be alot of PvP, yet most of the world PvP was about avoiding the other side and do PvE. Pathetic really.

Originally posted by Loke666

And the dumbest thing they did was that they didn't play Warhammer. The game was not made so the original millions of Warhammer fans would feel at home, instead they tried to make Wow players feel at home. It failed of course.

Warhammer is one of the best fantasy worlds ever made. If they had checked out the brilliant Warhammer fantasy roleplaying game they would have seen that everything was already mapped out, the game have a system that would have translated into a great levelless MMO. But no, they tried to make a mix between Wow and Daoc  and that upsetted Mythics fans and the Wow fans still play Wow.

This is spot on. Instead of creating a Warhammer game they created a WoW clone with some DAoC features and with a Warhammer skin, satisfying nor the WoW rejects (who went back to WoW), DAoC fans (who wanted the RvR to be like DAoC) or the Warhammer fans (who wanted to play a Warhammer game and not just a game with Warhammer skin).

The game is an epic fail in my book and whoever made those decisions should never be allowed to work with an MMORPG again.

Having 300K subscribers is definetively NOT failure. Nothing can compare to WoW and I think not even Blizzard will be ever able with any other game to have such success.

But I agree there is share of problems with War .... even little problems that never get fixed ... but furtunately majority is. Game is much more stable and better than at start.

So Warhammer had this huge budget.... where did all that money go?  Advertising?  Paul Barnett's mouth?

Because it sure as hell wasn't put into the game.

It still boggles my mind how this company created DAoC for a fraction of what they spent on WAR, but failed to recapture the spirit or quality of their original game.

Sad, really.  Obviously the minds behind DAoC have long since left Mythic.

I just hope that Mythic doesn't taint Bioware.  Now that they're under the same umbrella.

While I'm not a fan of the overly love-letter poetic tone of this article, it is intriguing for one reason: It shows how friggin clueless Mythic is.

If they seriously have the attitude of, 'oh it's WoW and gold sellers fault', that their game didn't live up to the hype, then I feel sorry for anyone still subbing.

With that kind of logic they really don't have much hope of addressing the many obvious issues with the game.

War tried to take on Wow..by hoping some gimmick PvP content would pull over that player base..it was wrong and it badly implemented this anyway...WoW like the game it copied EQ is a PvE game..and warhammer Pve is better not spoken about.

In the end Warhammer could have been amazing I was a big warhammer fan as a kid as many people im sure are..Warhammer has its own brillant RPG system for over 20 years using a selection of jobs and classes and a intutirive level up system..it would easily have transported into a new type of MMO..but instead they made warhammer more like a Wow version of fantasy battle..instead of the RPG deep world it might have been and ..im sorry but even playing War for the first hour of gameplay you realise its a 2004 game by producition standards..its shoddy buggy and badly designed.

Wheras i feel sorry for some games that fall by the wayside that..might have been...warhammer deserves what it gets.

Most of you people haven't played in months and still you state things about the game like they are facts? Many of the problems you bring up about the game are still true, but much has improved the last few months.

The servers I play on have pretty good population, one of them are totally packed during evenings...I have a hell of a time there every night.

And Lich Kings had a impact on WAR, and now I see some of my guildmates returning from WoW to try WAR again.

Originally posted by pre_mar

Having 300K subscribers is definetively NOT failure. Nothing can compare to WoW and I think not even Blizzard will be ever able with any other game to have such success.

But I agree there is share of problems with War .... even little problems that never get fixed ... but furtunately majority is. Game is much more stable and better than at start.

Warhammer does not have 300k subs.

Half that maybe.

I think it is important to keep in mind that the former GM who gave this interview was somewhat limited in what he could/would say.  There is a reason that the article had a big disclaimer about it and it seems most people are forgetting that. 

For one, he can't speak about certain internal specifics that went on at mythic.  I doubt he could go around trash talking the directors, staff, procedures and things of that nature.  Second I doubt he would want to even if he could, because he is looking for employment.  Giving a dirty tell all interview is a sure fire way to get blacklisted from potential job interviews with other game companies and I'm sure he would love a job and especially love another job in the gaming industry.

Having said that I agree he misses some of the reasons why warhammer failed and that is very strange coming from someone who was a "game reviewer" for a newspaper.  I have to admit I thought warhammer was going to finally be the game that broke the market into 2 heavy weight games, but that soon faded after a few weeks of play and the shallow game play reared it ugly head.  He had to see that if he actually played the game for a decent amount of time, which I am beginning to suspect most at mythic only played the early parts of the game, which is what I think is the reason for the next paragraph.

The really important part of that interview is the attitude and atmosphere of mythic.  I think that really tells a very subtle, but far more important aspect of why warhammer failed.  When he talks about how upbeat and postive everyone was during beta and right up to release it shows the mindset of the company.  They really believed they had captured lighting in a bottle and thought warhammer was going to be a raving success.  Somehow everyone at mythic thought the design of the game was awesome.  They really didn't see the pitfalls they were walking into or the flaws in the game design.  The first tier of the game gives a pretty decent impression of the game, but it really goes downhill after that.  Maybe they were only allowed to play in the early portion of the game? I don't know, but the sky is the limit mindset he described really shows a lack of understanding of their own game, because it only took a month or two for masses of  people to get tired of the game and leave. 

That more than anything else said shows the lack of understanding that mythic had about their game design. 

Originally posted by Loke666

Originally posted by Aguitha

Nice read, however it's not Lich King that killed this game, it's EA.  EA has one of the worst reputation when it comes to shutting down games and reducing staff.   EA cut staff when peoples logged back to WOW to play the expansion, what did you expect ?

 

While EA didn't help this is Mythics own fault. First they cut out a lot of important features from the game, 4 of the 6 citys for starter. They decided that 2 factions were enough even though 3 would have fitted the lore better. They released the game too early, they should have released 3 months after WoTLK instead with a more stable game and more content.

Having only 1 city gives more incentive for players to rally and defend it since it is their only city.  If each side had 3 cities, players could ignore losing a city or two before it impacts them.  Yes 3 cities would be better for gameplay, but I think it worked against the design of RvR in this case or mythic did not have an effective solution to get players to defend city sieges in a 6 city game.

As for releasing before lich king, I think blizzard was in a better position to wait out mythic and release lich king when they thought it would be in their best interest (before or after warhammer as they saw fit).  Ideally I think mythic would have rather released after lich king, but they had already delayed the game twice and blizzard had not even set a release date for lich king yet.  I think it is just a case of blizzard being in the drivers seat of when lich king released in relationship to warhammer.  Mythic could have delayed for a third time, but that would not guarentee warhammer would release post lich king.  Mythic didn't even know when lich king was releasing until August and Warhammer released in Sept. 

How can some of you doubt that WotLK is one of the largest reasons WAR failed? Where do you think most of those 1 million pre-orders came from? I'd say that most of them where definately from WoW players.

If WAR had started out with 300k subs and stayed there or increased, it would not have been a failure, but going from 800k subs to 300k, that IS failure.

I'm not a big proponent of PvP, but I do enjoy it on occasion.  I played WAR for about two months. One of my biggest complaints was the time to kill factor.  I really did not find it fun to die in 6 seconds or less and the constant death runs were more than I could stand.  I'm sorry, but I would much more enjoy combat where the players survive for at least 5 minutes, giving everyone time to try out strategies and recover from mistakes.  I'm tired of this industry's push for FPS, incredibly quick to die, no room for mistakes style of combat.  My second biggest gripe was the necessity to have raid sized groups to do anything worthwhile in RvR.  It was bad enough being forced to group, even worse being forced to raid.  DAoC had perfectly viable single group and even some solo RvR content and to me that made all the difference in the world.  A big part of that was the class system, which in WAR, forced you to completely and utterly rely on others to have fun.  A recipe that is proven to be disasterous to a game's health and entertainment value.

There is a very good reason why we seperate these game formats (FPS / RPG) and the industry's constant push to hybridize and bastardize it  is really getting old and irritating.

Originally posted by Lille7

How can some of you doubt that WotLK is one of the largest reasons WAR failed? Where do you think most of those 1 million pre-orders came from? I'd say that most of them where definately from WoW players.

If WAR had started out with 300k subs and stayed there or increased, it would not have been a failure, but going from 800k subs to 300k, that IS failure.

I don't think wows population dropped that much in the NA/EU region to represent that huge drop in warhammers playerbase.  I'm sure there was a sizable portion that tried warhammer who were also playing wow (or canceled to join warhammer), but if warhammer was good people would have continued to play it.  There is nothing preventing wow players from switching games or keeping 2 subs.  It doesn't matter where the players came from. 

Also I think many people overlook just how many former wow (and other mmo) players there are that just float around looking for a new game or don't play anything right now.  Current mmos can't even attract the burned out wow player, so I don't think lich king was the downfall for warhammer. 

The game had its chance and people were leaving well before lich king released. 

WAR was at the core a bad game, period. A crap expansion to an aging monster of a game might have had some effect but if WAR wasn't good enough to hold interest from that then, well.. guess what. Still a crap game.