The Devil's Advocate has returned and in this week's installment, MMORPG.com's own Drew Wood is slipping on the horns and cloven hooves to take on an argument that's been echoed for the last three years: Warhammer Online's level of success. See what Drew has to say about Warhammer and dive in to let us know what you think.

Working under that logic, the game had a good financial turnaround. The gameplay was solid but a little buggy, though no more buggy than many games that have launched since. The RvR was near-revolutionary and brought some exciting changes to the industry. Finally, the IP was done as much justice as could have been done for a video game.

Read more of Drew Wood's The Devil's Advocate: Warhammer Online Was No Failure.

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Look how many players are left, look how many players are playing much older titles......

This must be some kind of joke, saying WAR wasnt a failure, its probably the biggest failure of the MMO world when you think about the size of the IP.

I played it for a quite a bit myself, but this article is so out of touch with reality.

For me it was a failure. (VARNING: this is an opinion.)

WAR was no good in the end open world pvp only works with 3 factions as they are the player balance to population issues.  Mythic should have learnt from what was a success with DAOC and one of the critical factors is a the 3rd faction.  By leaving it out they killed the game before it started. What has happened to mmorpg.com :(.

The game had so many good ideas, executed so poorly.  The main reason the game failed was you can't have RvR with 2 factions.  It's impossible.  I don't know what they were thinking even trying it.  A DAoC style Warhammer game would've made billions.  All the PvP crowd would've been lapping it up like a dog with anti-freeze.  It really hurts my heart to see my two favorite things, Warhammer and Mythic fail so horribly.  

Drew you seem to like to point at number of classes, races, reviews and things of that nature to support your claim that Warhammer was a success.  It seems that your biggest supporting bullet point is some claim that the game was "profitable" at release.  A claim which really has never existed.

If you want to play with numbers try looking at some that actually point to the level of success of a game.

• 1 CEO "departed" from the company he started
• Nearly 100 game servers closed, leaving 6?
• Several rounds of massive employee layoffs
• 1 company dissolved and absorbed into another

No.

And I say that as a current active subscriber. I still play WAR and I like it.

If WAR had been based on a different IP, we would consider it a success. But it was based on one of the best fantasy IPs, and to not be more successful, is somewhat of a failure; though I think people that consider it an epic failure are mistaken and probably miss the previous point.

WAR didn't really use its IP that well I feel. Not as well as SWG or WoW did, and certainly not as  SWTOR will. But with that said it was still a fairly solid MMO, I ruined the game for myself after trying to play with a group of friends and everyone picking different servers and sides due to queue times on specific servers. I think if they had something similar to Rift's server transfer system at release I would still be playing. There were some balance issues, I hardly saw any bugs, and the leveling through the BGs was tons of fun.

to try to argue that WAR wasn't a failure is..... leaving me puzzled.

The potential in the IP , the expectation from a huge fanbase , and the makers of DaOC. If you have these 3 ingrediens fresh today  nothing short of dominating the mmo scene (besides wow) should be considered a succes

IF you take  SWTOR  you have an IP with a potential in that leaqe, a fanbase that huge and Bioware as makers. If that turn out to have a WAR like first year, it can't be called anything but a failure.

sry but their is no case to be made for WAR that justify changing that view. War failed huge. End of story 

Warhammer IP was raped by the fail game.

I have been in Beta since the very start of it and i can tell you one thing: Devs pissed on beta testers. They completely ignored what we said and they "always knew better wat players like". They were dismissive and ignorant to say the least. They deserved it but the IP did not.

Seriously ima warhammer IP freak i love the books figures etc [even tho i stick to books only] and i had hoped for good warhammer mmo.

Damn, if only Blizzard made Warhammer... I wouldn't mind WoW-like WAR, not at all.

ROFL to call war hammer not a failure is funny at best.  IHMO its not a success either.

a game focussed on rvr with no one around in tier 2,3,4 is a fail to me  capturing a whole map alone without seeing 1 enemy or ally is a failure to me.

It's a bit of a tangled discussion, though the Devil's Advocate has a point or 2 as well.

1. Financial Success: If it did better than break-even at least it's not a disaster, but neither was it the WoW-killer and sub goose that everyone hoped who made it and where the 1 month's subs looked to be heading but never did.

 Pass / Fail

2. Game Design: WAR was imo a combination of a core technology/design of DAOC and a merge with some WoW like features and decisions. How did that fair? Not as polished as WoW, lots of wasted content and changes during development and biggest failure not translating 3 FACTION RVR from DAOC to WAR instead going for the WoW 2-Faction model for PvE.

Pass / Fail

3. IP: The problem with WAR also was using the IP as a skin for the above technology, cherry-picking some of the most iconic classes from Warhammer and stuffing them into 2 factions instead of potentially multfactions. The Homes of the races were disparate and flying between zones was a terrible was to split the population up (eventually new starter experience was used). The capitals were pretty lame for the IP esp. the Destro capital in the Chaos Wastes imo. Some sub-quests brought the IP alive really well eg Sewers and Tzcheech in the Imperial City etc. But with the richness to choose from and the lack of some ppl's favorite playable races eg Skaven... not good enough.

Pass / Fail

4. Gameplay: There was some really fun gameplay in WAR from Keep Sieges, general RvR when the populations were brimming with players and excellent scenarios. Public Quests and some fo the quest stories were well realized too. The Classes were fun and inventive eg Dwarf Engineer and the Iron Breaker's Grudge mechanic etc.

Pass / Fail

5. Production Values: I liked the art style of the Warhammer world and the artists did a fine job realizing it imo. The music was good and the spell effects were good to etc as was the range of NPC's and Environments.

Pass / Fail

IMO: Overall the biggest disaster was deviating too far away from what Mythic's expertise and experience was with DAOC and going for <3 Factions, possibly more races could have been added later as dictated by the players feed-back...

Conclusion: 2* out of 5*

WAR was supposed to be a serious competitor to WoW, so to call it a success would mean that it equalled or better this expectation, which of course it did not.

As pointed out it should have had 3 factions and Mythic should have known this, GOA's management of the game was very bad in the EU as well, the netwrok code makes the game very laggy which is a major problem even now.

Having said all that I am a current subscriber and enjoy the game play the graphics and the classes very much, it is a crying shame that this game failed.

I wish that EA/Bioware/Mythic could do something/anything to turn this game around, re-release it with an expansion that includes a brand new faction for example. The MMO genre would be better off for it...................

Originally posted by VultureSkull

WAR was supposed to be a serious competitor to WoW, so to call it a success would mean that it equalled or better this expectation, which of course it did not.

As pointed out it should have had 3 factions and Mythic should have none this, GOA's management of the game was very bad in the EU as well, the netwrok code makes the game very laggy which is a major problem even now.

Having said all that I am a current subscriber and enjoy the game play the graphics and the classes very much, it is a crying shame that this game failed.

I wish that EA/Bioware/Mythic could do something/anything to turn this game around, re-release it with an expansion that includes a brand new faction for example. The MMO genre would be better off for it...................

 I periodically suggest (harass?) on the official forums by posting a new thread or response asking for a third class.

imho WAR never failed at all......it's still one of the better games around (altough i aint playing it myself anymore).

I cant think of a personal Top 10 where war would not have its place for me.

The only thing they did wrong was the 2 faction rvr instead of 3 factions.

just mho

Originally posted by wojtekpl

Warhammer IP was raped by the fail game.

I have been in Beta since the very start of it and i can tell you one thing: Devs pissed on beta testers. They completely ignored what we said and they "always knew better wat players like". They were dismissive and ignorant to say the least. They deserved it but the IP did not.

 

Seriously ima warhammer IP freak i love the books figures etc [even tho i stick to books only] and i had hoped for good warhammer mmo.

Damn, if only Blizzard made Warhammer... I wouldn't mind WoW-like WAR, not at all.

I don't think the Devs ignored the Beta testers. I was in Beta also.  they made a lot of changes in beta.  What utterly shocked me was how far their initial design missed the mark.  Remember, initially there was going to be no PvP except for the scenarios and a capital city seige....until the beta testers pretty much threatened death on the devs....then they added in siege warfare.

I think the Mythic devs utterly lost their minds before they designed WAR. If it wasn't for the beta testers, it would have failed even harder.  Even now, the only part of the game people praise is the RvR...and that would not have existed if the Beta testers hadn't screamed for it.

In the end, all this talk about Subscribers, Money and Graphs of Success..is Bull to us players.

What I care aboout is if the game gives me fun or not. Nothing else counts. And Warhammer, was frustrating in its gameplay and disapointing as a design and iteration of a beloved IP.

Hence, it was not fun for me, and thus I quit playing looking for something Fun.

That is all there is to it, people get attracted by a given IP an MMO is based upon, by its Screenshots or its Videos its nice Graphics and Music, but once atracted, it is the gameplay and the design that keeps them, otherwise they leave for something else.

If you design games to sell Boxes, do not expect to have a lasting Subscriber base.

I am not going to bash all the effort and all the work (or the invested money) many people put in to making WAR, but in the end the combination of the selected features and elements as defined by the design allong with the rendition of the finished product and that way it played out made for a game that was not fun to many people except the minority that stuck with it.

WAR sold like 1 millon boxes, and now has less than what 100k subs left, that is 900k players that did not like the game....90%...of people who bought the game did not like it.

You can play Devil's Advocate all you want but the facts are there in your face.

I remember hearing beta testeres talk about how much fun RvR was. Once I was able to pick up the game, I found that most players were in scenarios because that gameplay type had better rewards. The only RvR that was to be found was hugely ring-around-the-rosey keep capture where players were taking empty keeps while the enemy was away taking a different empty keep. I don't know, I sort of blame the playerbase. I think WAR had a lot more potential that was never realized (in the time that I played it.)