Customer support: I don’t know much about the game’s customer support, but considering the fact that customer support is garbage industry wide I don’t really see this as a huge reason for the game’s failure.

Runescape-ish movement: Can you elaborate?

I don’t think it is a good idea to try to be a “crowd pleaser” and have things for every type of gamer. That’s actually what they TRIED to do, and as a result they failed at everything. A good game has a focus, and WAR lacked that.

They also planned on the generic Four Races trope: Human, Dwarf, Elf, Ogre and Midgets would be the only playable guys.

They strongly took ideas from the Warhammer RPG, things like career paths. How you could go from being a lowly Ratcatcher to a slightly less lowly Pickpocket.

Combat was to be more “realistic”. If you smack a guy with a sword, it’s still getting smacked by a sword, no? So a mighty Slayer would be in the same magnitude of power as a Squire; even though he’d still be vastly more powerful, the Squire could at least WOUND him and not be total dead weight.

They wanted to make a world. Runic wanted to make a Dark Age of Camelot remake in a world where Dark Age of Camelot exists.

businesses are legally oblegated to make money for their share holders and games cost lots of money to make because its alot of work before you can sell anything so its high risk etc so inorder to get investors to front the money to fund the project until its released and by released i mean its properly polished gold not a unstable cut down alpha test coupled with a multimillion pound customer service team to appologise and assure people that they havent wasted the money they are never going to get back (thanks legal department for making such an evil and unfair contract that we then use as a template for our attitude to customer service instead of seeing it as a safty net and last resort fall back position which would make it more reasonable, its actually the customer service fail that makes it evil, not the terms of the legal team.)
so anyway getting a little side tracked, you need to prove to the investor that they arent going to loose all thier money and are infact going to make lots of money, but heres the thing that i dont understand, these people must have desided to go with mythic over climax on the basis that mythic had already been somewhat successful with DaoC even though DaoC is actually a piece of shit by this point in time, the fact that they made something work before is supposed to mean that they are able to make a much much better game now… why?
surely what it tells you is that these people though skilled are only able to produce a piece of work of the standard of DaoC which is not good enough.
Why didnt they get someone to look into gaming and look at the ideas? surely it is obvious to anyone with eyes that saying true to a style and a culture that has bridged generation gaps and been manifested in books, paper and penicil games, board model dice games, computer games, comics and that what climax had was totally true to form those people clearly knew and loved warhammer, they are warhammer, they are the people that play it and turn something from a set of rules into something fun and real and alive. you cant make anything of quality without passion. btw regarding computer games, there have been many D&D and warhammer games before and most of them have been crap because they are either computerised versions of roleplaying which is retarded because machines and scripts cant adlib a character which is the very essence of roleplay, its just not the same as real people creating together, or the other type of failed game which focuses more so on the combat which is fine but but they have generally just not been any fun, as a computer game, the best ones were the ones which were basically the board game version which worked much better because you are getting something useful in that you dont have to have loads of models and dice and stuff and a machine can be taught how to play, at least in a limited and predictable way.

So yeah i just dont get it, why would anyone have made that call, why would you choose someone who made an ok game and wasnt really conntected to warhammer which surely is one of the primary selling points of the game and indeed the point of even making a warhammer online game rather than creating a new word for your game which could be anything you like to fit it into a game mechanic that was fun, its actually much harder to stay true to the existing warhammer lore AND make a good game than it is to make a good game and then flesh it out with something that fits nicely.
So you go with climax, who may well be able to make a much better mmorpg than mythic because they have plenty of game making experience so should be able to turn their hand to a larger project like mmorpg games and have not already proven to be only ok at it like mythic has.

its madness, its a high risk investment and so you want a high yeild reward from it, everyone knew at the time that there was alot coming in the pipeline, EQ was massive, i think top dog at the time, daoc was big and i think you had eve online too im not sure i only came onto that later on myself. WoW was looking strong and rightly so, and why? because it was being made by blizzard, and blizzard are ****ing awesome, they are like one of the only companies that seems able to release a fully finished game, which has everything to a high standard, a good game mechanically that works, good menus, high quality graphics both from a technical standpoint and from a creative one, large content, high quality cut scenes, voice actors and plots. Seriously all the way through they have always been the best, the warcraft series is right at the core of rts history along side C&C but honest warcraft was better made, actualy its just a shame that erm, sorry cant remember who made C&C westwood maybe? they are good but they should have given it to blizzard to finish / polish or just spent more time perhaps. So you now that WoW is gunna be massive and you can only combat quality with equal quality, like mercedes and bmw for eg you cant surely believe that you can sell a ford everyman ‘plastique’ for the same money as a mercedes ‘uberstatus’ no one would think that you could do that in the car world why would anyone think you could do it with a computer game? why would i choose a medium quality game for the same retail price and monthly fee when i could have a high quality one for the same money?

so randomly – if any game makers out there would like to give me as job as a consultant email me Guffrus@hotmail.com send me game when you nearly finished and ill play it and try to give you some solutions to whatever mistakes you made, there are always mistakes but its hard to see the wood from the trees i would imagine. not much chance of you guys paying me for my services though i dont suppose seeing as companies seem to prefer to sell people the game at this point instead of finishing it or getting some target demographic selection of beta testers to help for free

anyway rant over,

See in you a game somewhere

Guffrus

I remember a couple of things, one was to do with the magic system; normally we think of a wizard in a game as having mana points to spend on casting spells and this being the measure of thier access to power, like a battery and they are able to cast stronger spells the stronger or higher level they are.

The system they were going to use was one where the mana was something that was in the world itself and also the strength or level would be defined by the area of world that you were in, the wizard is like a tap, a conduit through which the power flows into the world and takes form, the wizard is also attempting (underlined bold lol) to define its form so if you are a low level wizard in a strong magic area you are likely to have problems using the magic that is there because it is beyond your ability to control, something will probably happen but what exactly is uncertain. totally warhammer, roll snake eyes and end up teleporting a squig inside your own colon. conversely you might be a mighty wizard able t control all magics but if there is no magic present in the world you cannot use it.

So totally awesome, realistic (f its fair to talk about realism with a totally mad up subject matter lol) mold breaking and original magic system.

The 2nd thing i remember was a monster spawn system where there would be say an orc camp at a point in a zone and i dunno say when the server first starts up for eg or going from a clean slate there wouldnt be any orcs then you get basic orcs at the camp, then maybe some of them start scouting around on patrol routes while more advanced orcs start to populate the camp and so on until there is a boss at the camp and many orcs of different strengths and you have loads of basic guys wandering around looking for trouble.
Thats cool, but this is the good bit, when the scouts meet other scouts they make a camp and you start getting more powerful orcs at the camps and in this way you get a realistic orc population, you dont get an orc respawning behind you, you killed him, hes gone, the new guys are infront towards the camp and if you kill them all it will take time for them to regain their strength.

This could have been epic, think of the possibilities of such a spawn system with various factions and such like, then make it a global scale instead of a zone and then integrate real time quests or player gen support request missions or whatever and integrate pvp and rvr into the mix and what you get is a game thats as good or better than wow instead of the piece of fucking shit we ended up with, seriously whoever dropped this ball should be executed so they cant damage the world in such a heinous way again

Guffrus

Do you have any details about how the original version worked? I’d love to read about that.

Guffrus