f13.net

For good.

http://massively.joystiq.com/2013/09/18/warhammer-online-to-close-december-18th/

And this is why the making of MMO server emulators is a good thing.

Yeah, that's what the holdup was. 


There had been some speculation as to why they were still keeping this thing afloat.

I was always surprised they never transitioned this to F2P, but I guess what is hinted at here is that they must have known GW wouldn't renew the license after the game tanked, so why bother.

This game and the drama that ensued is the reason I started reading this forum heavily.

 :cry:

It will always be first in my heart.

The reason WAR failed was because t

Kinda sad about this, even though I haven't played in years.  There were a lot of things I liked about WAR, and it spawned a lot of good ideas that other companies have since copied.  It's just the snags they hit with their core gameplay kind of trumped everything good or interesting they did with the other aspects of it.  I was still holding out hope for a F2P savior or something that would fix that somehow, sigh.   :oops:

I honest to god though this had been shut down a few years ago  :uhrr:

Same, I didn't realize it was still up.

Same. My very first post on this forum was a reply to Arthur_Parker, assuring him that we wouldn't fuck up the launch.

It's a little sad.  I really enjoyed playing this at release.  Grinding my squig herder and shaman from 1-20 almost entirely by pvp was incredibly fun.

So many good aspects of this game were utterly fucked by Mark Jacob's insistence that XP gain was perfectly fine and that there was no content gap. Also felled by completely fucking clueless PVP arena design. Fuck you, Mourkain Temple and Tor Anroc. Joy-killing LCD shit shows of horror and despair.

I believe it has been down to only one server for at least 12 months.

This may be my new favorite recent quote. 

You're such a giver.

(http://www.blogcdn.com/massively.joystiq.com/media/2008/09/warinpax08tervew1311.jpg)

Guess I'm gonna have to change my sig!

That was seriously the best server name ever.

This game made me sad. There was potential everywhere, but it was just so ... well, most of you were there. You already know! My ironbreaker was fucking adorable, though.

Those stupid white sunglasses. Though I don't think I've gotten as much entertainment out of a game fiasco before or since. The youtube videos were great. Barnett is still at Mythic isn't he?

/shrug


Does Mythic even exist anymore?

Mythic is a carbunkle on the ass of EA's failed online MMOG division attempts. It is the branding for a corporate blemish.

WAR brought me to these forums as well, via Wayfarer if I remember correctly.

Best First 20 levels I've ever had in a game, even beating out Tortage in AoC. I usually don't even like PvP, but the game made it fun........right up until Tor Annroc :argh:

But yeah, count me in with those who just assumed it had been closed.

Of all the MMO disappointments over the years, this is probably the one I was most excited for.  I had visions of epic night long castle sieges and private channel planned and coordinated city attacks in my head.  Instead what I got was a handful of scenarios that got stale after the 3rd time, and an RvR system characterized by the factions effectively coming to a gentleman's agreement to trade objectives in order to get the maximized reward for completing the associated quests.

The beta was great because everyone knew their character would be wiped.  The result was that everyone just played the castle siege stuff, even as early as Tier 2 when they started showing up, just because it was fun.  

Such a shame.

WAR was great from 1-20 and crap after that.  Such wasted opportunities.

The most fun I had with WAR was trolling that one giant fan forum that was the unofficial forums for the game.


The game was doomed from the start because Mythic had learned absolutely nothing from DaoC. Not only did they repeat all their mistakes, they managed to repeat them even FASTER then DaoC originally did. Efficiency!

This thread made me look up my first post. Was like 6 years ago. G'damn.

They still run Ultima Online, Dark Age of Camelot and Ultima Forever, the iOS version of UO. AFAIK, they have no new projects in the pipeline.

So I'm guessing they'll last until EA feels the need to do some more cost cutting.

They put this game on life support around a year ago, 1 server and no patches or updates since.  I was going to play around with it before FFXIV came out and found out it still had a sub and well yeah...f*ck that.   I had some fun with the game but let it die.

I thought something was afoot when this vanished off Steam a while back.

I barely played, I personally lost interest in Warhammer Online when the original Climax version died and it then became DAoC with a Warhammer skin.

If only. Mark Jacobs and his hard-on for bad EQ-lite PvE. He had no idea what was good about DAoC. :heartbreak:

If only. Mark Jacobs and his hard-on for bad EQ-lite PvE. He had no idea what was good about DAoC. :heartbreak:
[/quote]

This

Echoing others, the best intro experience to an MMO I've ever had. Those first 20 levels. So good. I still think about them.

And that's why this makes me angrier than any other MMO. It did NOT have to be this way. Jacobs should never be allowed near a game again.

Paul Barnett is going to be employed for longer and better than anyone posting on these boards. That should enrage each and every one of you about what an easy lay gamers are.

Everyone, it's going to be ok!  Surely DAoC 2 will save us all!

Got my Ironbreaker to 30 and remember it being a hell of a lot of fun. Post 30 killed the game for me.

I loved TA in PvP, but I was a punting class and lava was my friend. The game had so much potential it makes me sad to think of how badly it was stuffed up/ignored.

This had some of the most fun classes I've played in an MMO.  I loved my squiq herder and shaman.  The rest of the game wasn't so fun, esp. after level 20 or so.

:oh_i_see:

I usually don't get emotionally invested in game companies/the personalities involved, etc.

But Warhammer was such a huge disappointment.  I feel like that failure contributed to the current dearth of good PvP-focused MMOs - companies just aren't willing to take a chance on it.

Paul Barnett is toxic - genuinely useless except in the fever swamp of his own mind, where he's sure he's special and creative.  He's one of those vipers who will remain best buddies with the boss while he serenely watches everyone around him lose their jobs.  Fuck him.  Fuck EA.  And fuck Mark Jacobs for being unable or unwilling to do what was right for DAOC as well as for Warhammer.

If nothing else, I hope someone eventually writes an honest and thorough description of what happened from development through release.  It'd be a good object lesson.

I love the fact that there is any nostalgia at all for this game.  It was awful, from A to Z, and a clusterfuck all the way around. 

It really wasn't though.  It was a Clusterfuck from say, B-Z.  But that A man, that A was really good.

I can't say that there is a single thing about that game that was really good.  Not a single bit of it was worth a shit.

mark me down as in the "great first 20 levels" camp

But hey, we will always have Doorhammer (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEedUeDJ7Us)

Nah, that's not even close to true. Some of the class design was really entertaining - my dwarf healer was probably the most fun healing class I've played other than TBC/Wrath-era tree druids, for example - and the visual design knocked it out of the park. The lorebook thing was also fantastic. Level 1-11 PVP was also immensely entertaining.

EDIT:

Also, public quests, while not executed anywhere near perfectly, were a good first stab at that concept.

What Ingmar said.  There were some great core concepts that made it (or need to make it) to today's games.

In fact, there was a lot of really fun PvP integrated PvE, right from the early levels. 

Remember that the team that began working on WAR by and large wasn't the team that shipped it. A lot of Mythic employees moved over to Bethesda along with Matt Firor after a lot of prototyping had been done for WAR. I played some early alphas of the game that were fun as hell and had almost nothing in common with the game that was shipped. After the exodus, a lot of seniors and leads at Mythic were people who had been relatively junior on DAoC and a lot of new people joined. That's why the game design and some of the decisions taken often felt a bit schizophrenic, because one set of people built the framework while a different set filled in the rest.

I also agree with Ingmar.

Dark Elf healer was the only healer that I've played that I actually enjoyed.  Really liked the Chosen as well.

1-20 WAR PvP was the most consistently fun PvP I've had.  Daoc was 10 minutes of fun every couple hours was the high mark at the time, but I'm not sure that I ever want to go back to that.  I have much less patience for low fun to waiting ratios in my game play now.

 I can agree with the class design and the integration of PvP and PvE, but have to disagree with the visuals. Warhammer Online was an incredibly ugly game, with low quality textures even at the highest settings. I never understood why it looked so poorly given when it was released.

There were some implementation issues with the visuals (animations were particularly twiggy as I recall) but the overall design was pretty sharp for an MMO I thought.  Each class had a very strong and easily identifiable visual style, as opposed to something like WoW where there is no real "look" to any of the classes, and a lot of armor is reused. 

Yeah that is why I said "visual design" and not "graphics".

Iain, you really need to write a book...

I think this covers it for me as well.  Very well stated.

I actually had a lot of fun with WAR in the time that I played it.  I played enough to see all the PvE endgame content as well as be on a couple successful city captures.  Open world PvP was still pretty damn fun too.  What really killed it for me was the buggy city captures and the overall PvP lag.  I actually think I liked WAR's PvP scenarios more than I do SWTOR's current warzones.

Seconded - I'd love the insight

You really wouldn't though, you'd be sad and depressed instead.  :why_so_serious:

I saw a discussion in Lotro where someone claimed Mythic employees actively tried to sabotage WAR because they were pissed at the EA buyout. Complete with "I heard this from insiders!!!!"

Sadly, the product is so terrible I can almost believe it.

WAR had moments of stark brilliance that were initially hamstrung by their segregated beta. Testing specific level ranges without integrating the entire leveling curve into the process disguised serious flaws.

Then they shut testing down and made all the wrong moves days before launch. The Metrics (Praise be thy numbers) told them nothing or they ignored them in favor of...I'm not really sure, possibly a fever dream of what might have been.

I had some of the most amazing PvP I've ever experienced only to find that that the game that launched was not even a pale shadow of what we had tested.

Mythic invented doublefrost math, which among other things, created a new unit of measurement for TIME. Mythic Seconds.


MYTHIC SECONDS


 :why_so_serious:

Mythic was some sort of idiot savant when it came to large scale PvP. Through all the derp, they still managed to make a large-scale PvP enviroment I actually wanted to participate in. But because they didn't want to let me love them, they piled the derp as high as they could, and ... whelp.

[/quote]
I had some of the most amazing PvP I've ever experienced only to find that that the game that launched was not even a pale shadow of what we had tested.
[/quote]

Your memories of PvP in beta are certainly different than mine.  Yes, the PvP in the early levels (1-20) was an absolute blast.  But I'll never forget being involved in one of the first beta tests of a city siege and capture when Mythic's bizarre instanced scenario mechanics became clear.

Devs were present in the siege and had been commenting, but when beta participants started first noticing, then asking questions, then expressing dismay with the city siege mechanics ("Wait. This doesn't feel like a siege at all. You're just breaking us up into more little instanced groups?  And suddenly, in the midst of supposedly capturing my enemy's main city, I'm sitting in a queue to enter one of those instances?  And now I'm not in the same instance as the rest of my team? Really?"), well, that wasn't OK at all.  They muted all chat.

I had been getting progressively more disappointed throughout beta (and ever more disgusted with Jacobs and Barnett as it became clear that all of their big talk had been at best empty if not just plain dishonest), But I think that moment when they muted all of us because we could see what a mess the city sieges were was the moment when I knew that the game I had been looking forward to for so long was really just a sham.

The city siege stuff was definitely not the best part.  But the non instanced Keep defense/attack stuff was very good - when it didn't devolve into intentionally letting each other capture your keeps so you could capture them back and get the rewards most efficiently.

I'm not even sure they were idiot savants at large scale PvP, or if they were just the only ones who ever bothered to actually set it up that way. The only other RvR style pvp I've seen is from GW2, everyone else has these stupid visions of fake UO/EVE or whatever.

Man, so much this. I remember logging onto a beta, eager to get on my level 24 dude only to find myself bumped to 31 or whatever and teleported someplace I'd never been to. I was shocked. Everyone in my guild was shocked. You can't test like that.

I never played in retail because of that schizo testing. There's no way that was going to end up well. Had fun for a while then I was another level in another place and lost and then just getting trampled by enemy hordes and yeah, life is too short.

I tried to have fun in this game, I really did. Wasn't a big fan of the scenarios or public quests but liked the open world PvP. And I did have some fun there but what killed it for me was when no one else wanted to join in the open world PvP and also when I stuck one tiny toe back over the invisible border between level gaps and became that fucking 1 HP chicken. God I hated that. They didn't have to do that. They could have enabled level scaling between players. I know they could have because the fucking game glitched on me once and sent my Level 2 character into a Level 20 scenario and made me Level 22. I didn't have the gear but I was able to compete with the regular level 20's to an extent. There was absolutely no reason that they couldn't have implemented a level scale between low levels and high levels where the lows could do some damage and the highs could do reduced damage in a PvP setting. But what the hell do I know.

Good. Fucking. Riddance.

Which was all the time....

It was fucked the minute they decided to use the same engine they used in daoc

I remember one of the major reasons I quit besides the game sucking past level 20 was how horribly balanced the classes were and I'm not just talking about between different classes types which were, IMO, objectively unbalanced but between the corresponding classes across factions. I remember being shocked that each faction had 1 or 2 classes that were much better than their counterparts. I vaguely remember Bright Wizard being one for the Empire and on the Chaos side I remember Marauders being far superior to their counter. (Witch Hunters?)

Which is just another lesson they did NOT learn from DaoC.

The only real issues I had with inter-faction class balance were the classes with no real mirrors on the other faction: Squig Hunters, White Lions, Marauders, and Shadow Warriors.  The pets were usually so glitchy and ineffective that it really hurt the classes that relied on them, so having their "mirror" not need a pet kind of unbalanced things.

The overall class balance was weird, yeah.  I got the impression that they were designed for some weird scenario that never occurred, like the devs were picturing these big open field battles with ranks of characters charging at each other or something.  But the actual PvP game was all focused on things like capturing flags or smashing keeps, where half the classes are situationally useful at best and pointless at worst (I had a book to read when my White Lion did sieges because there was jack shit all for him to do there until the door broke). 

But for the most part, I thought it was still fun.  There were a few annoying battlegrounds, but for RvR at least, it was still neat because you weren't penalized for bringing weaker classes or players.  You just tagged along and plinked away and nobody cared if you only did 2 points of damage because that was 2 points of damage more than they would have had if you'd stayed behind.

I agree that class balance was off, but Bright Wizards were not more powerful than Sorceresses (or whatever they were called); a Sorc with a healer could kill an entire enemy team because their ranged AoE was their hardest hitting attack.

Considering all of the classes came from troop types in the tabletop battle game, then you are correct. All of the class types were one of a unit of identical troops in a game that involves lining up in mostly static formations and crashing into each other. White Lions were sturdy Elf troops, Witch Elves were kind of assassin characters, Squig Hunters were wild card types, Bright Wizards and sorcerers were special character types, etc.

And it's over. 

/pours out a 40

Such a great opportunity wasted.  I will miss my squig herder and shaman.  I had a lot of fun in the early stages of this game.

 8-)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWvAznIRVLA