Warhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes - P4F WTF????

[Cadaverine]

Newest schedule:

Thurs. Sept. 29th
4PM-6PM EDT (8PM-10PM UTC)
Fri. Sept. 30th
10AM-9PM EDT (2PM-1AM UTC)
Sat. Oct. 1st
1PM-5PM EDT (5PM-9PM UTC)
Sun. Oct. 2nd
NO TESTING

 

[Malakili]

http://www.youtube.com/user/TotalHalibut?feature=g-u#p/u/0/mDfPe8haloA

Total Biscuit did a first impressions, it looks pretty amazingly bland and uninteresting.

[Threash]

It's grinding battlegrounds without the one and only reward for grinding battlegrounds, character progress.

[Modern Angel]

Yeah that looks pretty shit. Also: way to completely ignore what people enjoyed about WAR (big keep battles, sadly probably impossible now) AND split your game's 20k remaining subscribers!

[Nebu]

Five buttons? Five abilities?  Really?  If they don't make up for this with tactics, the game will become boring in a pretty big hurry.

[Threash]

The game IS boring, the five abilities has nothing to do with it and actually i considered that a plus.  Games already have way too many barely different abilities, five is about the perfect number.  The problem is it is straight up battleground grinding with absolutely nothing to show for it.

[Nebu]

The game IS boring, the five abilities has nothing to do with it and actually i considered that a plus.  Games already have way too many barely different abilities, five is about the perfect number.  The problem is it is straight up battleground grinding with absolutely nothing to show for it.

How is this any different from Battlefield Heros?  That game is making money as F2P with microtrans if I recall correctly.

[HaemishM]

The game IS boring, the five abilities has nothing to do with it and actually i considered that a plus.  Games already have way too many barely different abilities, five is about the perfect number.  The problem is it is straight up battleground grinding with absolutely nothing to show for it.

What he said. I've tried to get into it in the beta but goddamn, it just doesn't feel very interesting. Even with summoner/account progression, I just have no investment in the game. The characters are different but the gameplay is so derpy jumpy quicky that I never feel very invested in the matches.

[Threash]

The game IS boring, the five abilities has nothing to do with it and actually i considered that a plus.  Games already have way too many barely different abilities, five is about the perfect number.  The problem is it is straight up battleground grinding with absolutely nothing to show for it.

How is this any different from Battlefield Heros?  That game is making money as F2P with microtrans if I recall correctly.

MMO combat is not fun enough to stand on its own as the sole source of entertainment, FPS combat on the other hand is.  If the combat was more DCUO and less WoW it might have been ok.

[HaemishM]

Having watched the Total Biscuit review, I would have to say he's pretty much spot on. There's just not enough fun, skill or effort required to make the game worth playing.

[Cadaverine]

Total Biscuit is dead on.  Battlegrounds were one of three redeeming features in WAR, and now they've managed to screw even that up.  It's actually rather shocking the extent to which they have no damn clue what made WAR fun, as little as there was to be had.

Last weekend, I tried it yet again. playing the Dwarf Engineer.  I was doing a whopping 28 damage per, with my basic attack.  My turret was largely useless, as by the time I'd put it down, the fight had moved elsewhere.  Playing BG's with my Engineer in WAR was fun as hell.  I had a blast chucking grenades all over, blasting squishies, and whatnot.  I didn't even have something resembling something that might be moving in the general direction of fun playing the Engineer in WoH.  That's ignoring the lack of any sort of character progression, and little to no player progression.  It's just a clusterfuck from start to finish.

At this point, the only reason I can see this making it out of the gate is because it's cannibalizing existing systems, and art assets.

[HaemishM]

Yeah, the CONCEPT of taking Warhammer Online Battlegrounds and grafting a MOBA-style transaction engine on top sounds like money hats. Very little art assets required, the engine just needs modification instead of wholesale creation, and the lore/story bits are almost all written. It ought to be a goddamn money factory.

That's what makes it so disappointing. It's simply NOT FUN. The combat is actually too fast for the abilities they've used, the engine looks dated and assy and it doesn't feel like anything I do matters a fuck. I was severely disappointed with Battlefield Heroes and that beats the pants off of this.

[trias_e]

I think it's possible for something like this to be good.  But you need Guild Wars type skills.  Interesting, non-spammy abilities that can be used in tactically significantly ways.  This clearly did not go that route.

[Bungee]

I don't know, I sorta kinda had high hopes for this as it is exactly what I enjoyed most for the last 6 months of my WoW subscription: logging in and doing BGs and Arenas with a few friends of mine. Nothing else. And I figure there is quite a few similar wired people out there. There just has to be some kind of progression to it.
Maybe trying to do it a bit more DotA-esque with levels and skillpoints/equipment. Add builds to it. Like you still have 5 slots but you can choose out of 15 skills and then level those. I don't know, I just really wanted this to be good...

[jakonovski]

Sadly, I don't think this ever reached even the intention of "let's make a good game". It was more like an EA exec came up and said, "you need to do something, anything to monetize the husk of WAR".

[squirrel]

Yeah I played for a while last weekend, it was dull.

There's like 18 different characters - most of which are completely the same in terms of gameplay. The skills go something like: a damage attack, an attack that does slightly more damage on a timer, an ability that makes your damage attacks do marginally more damage, an ae damage attack and a damage attack with damage over time.

Uh.

[luckton]

Aaaaaand shit-canned.

http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/02/27/warhammer-online-wrath-of-heroes-sunsets-next-month/

[Lantyssa]

I don't think anyone could have predicted this result.

[HaemishM]

I knew the game was fucked when it took the second worst of the WAR battlegrounds (Mourkain Temple) and made it their only map for the early beta. The game just had no depth to last and was really WAR PVP with all the good AND bad parts removed. It was a castrated game system.

[Arthur_Parker]

It was just a money grab, they tried to copy Turbine who turned DDO around somehow, only the I think Turbine was still Turbine at that point while Mythic had already been completely gutted.

[Modern Angel]

I am never, ever going to get over how badly Mythic has bungled everything regarding this IP.

[Malakili]

Only made worse by how genuinely decent some of it was.

[angry.bob]

The Tier 1 experience was so excellent I don't understand how they made the game so shitty by halfway through tier 3. I have my theories, but they involve things like making the world PvP too big and spread out, too much landmass, slow leveling to delay the endgame instead of making ranking up the endgame, blah, blah, blah. When the big draw to your game is PvP and you have to hop from place to place to find where it's at, your game fails. Planetside 2 I'm still watching you...

[UnSub]

Personally I was amazed about how badly done Tier 1 was. Some of the instanced PvP was fun, but the world PvP (and associated keep flipping) was underdone and the PvE was terrible. If that was the best part of the game, it's no surprise that WAR flopped as badly as it did.

I'll always remember seeing a bear run up a vertical cliff face to attack my character; someone was so against players exploiting pathfinding that they made it ridiculous.

[Malakili]

Personally I was amazed about how badly done Tier 1 was. Some of the instanced PvP was fun, but the world PvP (and associated keep flipping) was underdone and the PvE was terrible. If that was the best part of the game, it's no surprise that WAR flopped as badly as it did.

I'll always remember seeing a bear run up a vertical cliff face to attack my character; someone was so against players exploiting pathfinding that they made it ridiculous.

The reason Tier 1 was "the best" was because people actually did open world PvP because it was the best, or at least roughly equal with the others, way to level.  The bottom line was that after that, scenarios were just WAY more efficient in terms of leveling, and so that is all people did.  Then, when people got to Tier 4, you hit the Keep trading meta, where the zergs would just capture each other's Keeps and then run past each other to trade them back.  Most efficient way to get good loot drops.  No one wanted actual confrontation because you didn't get much for it.

The pieces were all there.  The few times I got high level Tier 4 Keep sieges and legitimate fights over zones it was pretty damn cool.  But it almost never happened in practice.

[Hayduke]

Though I didn't like the game on release I tried it the summer after release when they dropped that Land of the Dead content patch and thought it was a good deal of fun.  They had largely solved the grind issue in t3/t4 with that and I thought the game was a lot of fun with a semi static group to do scenarios and rvr with.

Only really left because they came out with some patch that made all of the endgame revolve around city sieges.  Those were just awful.

[HaemishM]

I'm still amazed that Warhammer hasn't gone F2P yet.

[Falconeer]

I hated every single minute of Warhammer. I wanted to like it but there was no way. Horrible combat for my tastes. At the time it was already substantially worse than WoW and Age of Conan, and only slightly better than LotRO. Not enough to care.

But I am curious, since I keep hearing how great the tier 1 experience was for so many people, I'd like to try and understand what I am not understanding. What was supposedly good about it? I mean, for what I can remember it was just battlegrounds (arenas) right? What am I missing? The fact that everyone was low level and with only a handful of character skills so with lots of room for player skills? The fact that the maps were supposedly very good? Character interactions leading to outstanding teamplay?

[Rendakor]

I liked T1 WAR because I was in an unstoppable trio: two AoEing Sorcs and whatever the Chaos healer was. We rushed Lighthouse then literally corpse camped their graveyard the entire game; the ridiculously overpowered AOEs combined with unlimited in-combat rezzing was awesome. The only time they scored more than a few points were when their whole team made it to the center base (I keep wanting to call it Blacksmith but that's Arathi from WoW) then took our starting one.

WAR also had a lot of things going for it; it came out two months before WotLK so standard late-expansion burnout had most of my playgroup itching for something new. PVP began immediately (instead of making you wait until level 20 which I think was the min in WoW at the time) and gave good XP (again, compared to WoW), making scenarios viable as a leveling path. The early tier maps were also smaller than their WoW counterparts which meant getting into the action faster; queues were also quick but that might just have been my server/faction. It was basically WoW Battlegrounds but improved in a lot of ways and accessible from level 1.

By the mids 20s, however, a lot of things started to fall apart (which have been discussed to death here and elsewhere), then LK came out and we all went back to WoW.

[UnSub]

I'm still amazed that Warhammer hasn't gone F2P yet.

It's got what? One active server left? I'm surprised that WAR hasn't been fully shut down yet. F2P was an option a long time ago, but Wrath of Heroes came out instead.

[HaemishM]

I'm still amazed that Warhammer hasn't gone F2P yet.

It's got what? One active server left? I'm surprised that WAR hasn't been fully shut down yet. F2P was an option a long time ago, but Wrath of Heroes came out instead.

If the way EA seems to be benchmarking success these days, I'll be surprised if Mythic makes it out of the year.

[Hayduke]

I didn't like WAR on release and didn't even play out the 30 days, but I came back after the Land of the Dead content patch and liked it quite a bit.  That solved the xp grind issue in t3/t4, and the game was a good deal of fun if you had a semi-static group of people to run rvr and scenarios with.  It was also casual enough that I could play it unguilded without joining a guild of people recycling lines that aired on Chappelle's Show five years prior.

Unfortunately they came out with that patch which put the focus of t4 almost entirely on city sieges and that just killed my interest in the game.  Those were just terrible especially when you were defending all the time (I was on an order dominated server).  I roleplayed my zealot and chosen as conscientious objectors against shitty game design by not showing up in the hopes that Order would wipe our city faster so we could get back to the fun bits, but unfortunately most people didn't follow suit.

It's really a shame, from the beginning they never had a great game, but they could have had an adequate game had they not had such an obsession with having some sort of convoluted endgame.

[luckton]

I'm still amazed that every game that carries the Mythic label hasn't gone F2P yet.

FTFY

[rk47]

 

[ghost]

Mythic has apparently chosen to not take this past the beta.  Servers will close at the end of the month.  Which is interesting, but not nearly as interesting as this:

According to the recently published FAQ this is because “Mythic as a studio is undergoing a paradigm shift as we shift our focus to mobile. As part of this pivot, we had to make a few changes and reallocate resources to support this new direction. As such, we took a long look at Wrath of Heroes and despite its strong IP, gameplay, and community support; we decided not to continue the service past its Beta and instead concentrate those resources on our new endeavors.

I guess we can look forward to Mythic skating on the coattails of Zynga?