What Went Wrong with Warhammer Online? A Postmortem.
This is sure to be controversial, but hopefully you will find the analysis and insights reasonably sound and share your own opinions.
What Went Wrong with Warhammer Online? A Postmortem.
The big question really is whether or not WAR can turn the ship around. Honestly, I am dubious at the moment. The next few months will really tell us a lot, but some of the mistakes listed in that article do not seem like things they can easily correct.
(Image to the left is not exactly a Dark Elf, but it is drawn by a really talented artist I know. She goes by Rikimi on DeviantArt. Check her out her stuff. If that is not enough dark elfish hotness, here’s a video of someone’s intricate Dark Elf costume.)
I can’t argue with any of that really. I would have mentioned the damned Knights of the Burning Sun as being ridiculously overpowered before they nerfed them though. On my Witch Elf, I sometimes took more damage from their stupid melee punishment aura than I inflicted with the attack that triggered the aura. I lost alot of faith in Mythic due to that. Sure, they nerfed it, but nobody that really knew what they were doing would have allowed that to hit the live server at all.
Warhammer could have been a great game. There’s alot of great things there. I still consider it to be a decent game, but had(maybe still has?) the potential to be far greater.
Destruction had its overpowered classes too, you know. This is quite a biased view.
The way I think it was set up to be balanced was that Destro would be overpowered in melee (Witch Elves and Marauders were crazy overpowered when I played, Marauders had the AE disorientate and huge AE damage and they were pretty tough and they could tentacle grab you) and Order had more powerful ranged classes. So if Destro played to their strengths with melee assist groups, the only response Order had was to stack Bright Wizards because once their melee got to you, you were dead. You were interrupted, if you stayed still you died, if you moved you took damage too, you couldn’t even get an instant cast off because of how the disorientate worked.
And that wasn’t any more fun either. That’s probably why Warrior Priests got buffed.
I’m still bitter about my archmage though. It ended up totally outclassed by just about every other healer on both sides.
Muckbeast did mention that Witch Elves and DoKs needed nerfing too, so I don’t see how the article was biased. He may or may not be overstating the issue on Warrior Priests, but there’s no doubt in my mind that Bright Wizards are busted far beyond anything else in Warhammer. I think it’s telling that when something of BWs gets nerfed, they just switch to using the next most broken thing they have and STILL dominate the game.
Witch Elves were really powerful at the beginning, but less than 6 months into the release they got nerfed into the ground. But even WE could never stand up to Bright Wizards.
Marauders were never overpowered, and are currently one of the weakest classes in the game.
Melee assist trains are useless because the game got dominated by AoE CC and AoE DPS. You can’t do an assist train under those conditions. All the top gank groups from DAoC learned that pretty quick – people with 5+ years of experience running assist trains.
What always amazes me is the fact that Mythic is not a bunch of noob developers. They made multiple MUDs that were commercially successful, and then DAoC which was a big success (a bigger success than WAR, honestly).
So you have to wonder how they made so many titanic mistakes.
Something happened to Mythic right around the time of Trials of Atlantis. From that point forward, the company seems to have made one bad decision after another.
ToA itself was a disaster. They lost half their subscribers by trying to add PvE/raiding to DAoC.
Then they had Imperator… aka Romans in Space. It never even got launched because it was such a failure of an idea.
Then you have Warhammer, and well… you can read the article.
So what happened 6-12 months before ToA? Who left the company that was clearly so incredibly important to the decision making tree that his or her absence ruined the company?
Do you think that balancing the classes much better would bring players back? I fear the reputation is already ruined, and the listed flaws almost cry like a SWG style NGE thing, which could scare away even more players.
Age of Conan also had its “Return to Hyboria” campaign, and it appeared to be a strawfire, at least if XFire playtime rise and drop after the end of the campaign can be taken as a reliable source of information.
Maybe it was also the brand. Warhammer is popular among its followers and known to computer gamers, but at least in Germany to nobody else. The name also almost sounds like Warcraft.
I also think games that focus on PvP have it harder than those who offer the mix. PvP alone does not satisfy, even if it is very good. Yes, I dare to say that. You cannot have sieges and major pvp actions all the time, and the “scenarios” can get boring, too, after the x-th repetition.
I do not think too much PvE is a reason that a pvp game tanks, the problem is more the itemization and the class balance that would work better in a pve than a pvp setting. Talk about “Age of Casters”, where the pve balance of classes is also a lot better than pvp balance, which is rather funny.
BTW: If you loved DAOC, you should test Aion! I have my gripes with the game, but I already bought it nevertheless. I wonder if it will see a subscriber drop 2-3 months after release.
I’m pretty much the target audience of scenario/battleground based pvp, and pve is completely unnecessary to me. Only time I did pve in Warhammer was when I was waiting for a scenario to pop up. Optimally the wait times would be short enough that I wouldn’t need the pve.
Despite playing Warhammer (the wargame). The online version never really excited me enough to try it.