f13.net

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=827410

Not gonna link directly to Kotaku, but:

Didn't think they were still doing anything.

Yeah really... Warhammer was the last thing I heard out of that studio.

No tears from me after WAR. They didn't deserve to be a studio anymore.

Was only a matter of time.  Though as a Dungeon Keeper player, I ponder who will take up the reigns now.

Shocking news that not a single person could have seen coming.

For more accurate snarkiness.

Like Warhammer Online, I'm surprised they lasted this long.

Another fantastic acquisition that flourished under EA's leadership and management.

 :heart:

Zynga!

I'm not a fan of EA, but the fact is they gave Mythic every opportunity to succeed. They supported WAR development for many years. It was a fantastic license and was extremely well promoted upon release. Mythic wasn't Origin; EA didn't kill them then rape the corpse. Mythic was the agent of its own destruction.

This.

I like how they state that Mythic wasn't the 'makers of' but was responsible for WHO and the mobile Dungeon Keeper.  :grin:

Mythic should've closed after Trials of Atlantis, let alone WAR.

Bring back Imperator, beyotches!

I bet Paul Barnett still has a job :awesome_for_real:

Fordel wanted that game so bad.

I wonder who's gonna hire Paul Barnett to be Bez again.

I really did, but it's probably for the best it never came to be. It would have only left me with sadness and tears.

So much hate for Mythic.  Warhammer was flawed, but still better than a lot of the garbage that has released since.  I had a good 6 months worth of fun playing WAR and 6 years worth playing DAoC.  That's more than I can say for most dev houses. 

Barnett needs to find a job as a carnival barker.

No hate for WAR. Still the best first 20 levels I ever played. Will probably always be. That is, like you said, better than most shit that comes out.

I do detest Barnett though.

Mythic did the best lady dwarves. :(

WAR was flawed in the exact same way DaoC was flawed, to the point where I never even bothered to try it, since it was obvious Mythic had learned NOTHING. WAR just followed DaoC's game plan on a accelerated timeline. They managed to fuck it all up even FASTER then their original game!  :why_so_serious:

Dude, did you enter a 5.5 month coma while logged in or something? How?!

This is essentially why I bailed on WAR so fast. I enjoyed the first 20 levels or so, but definitely knew I had danced that dance before, and had no real intention of doing it again.

I played the hell out of the first two battlegrounds with friends and leveled one toon to 50 to see how broken it was. 

This.

And the dwarf-copter.

(http://www.pwnsan.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/01/paul_barnett.jpg)

Mythic seconds.
The game was shit and broken for the most part.

I feel bad in a vague nostalgia sort of way, but I can't say that their demise wasn't just. I knew the first time they said they were going to gather "metrics" that War had no future and they hadn't learned a thing. They thought they could pull the same stuff with War they had with DAOC and the world had moved on.

This makes no sense to me.  WAR was nothing like DAOC.  Nothing at all.  The mistakes they made in WAR were very different mistakes.  If anything, they made the same error as every other game that came out around the time of WAR.  They were trying too hard to emulate WoW. 

Not the game, their way of doing business.

This.

And it really wouldn't have mattered had they not got bought out. WAR would have been a relatively narrow title for the subset of RvR seekers who finally outgrew DAoC but continue to be a proven sustainable market.

Unfortunately, once they opened the marketing floodgates, all expectations become unmanageably unrealistic. This made WAR seem like a big failure when in reality it never should have been considered as a potential big success in the first place. There just wasn't any precedent that said they could go from a competently built title with some appeal into this mass market multi-mode multi-audience experience in the space of exactly one game.

Basically, I don't blame Mythic at all. I blame the expectations they inherited.

Buy buying the 'Warhammer' brand, didn't Mythic bring the expectations on themselves?  They had to recoup those expenses.

Good question. Not sure I agree though.

At the time, the Warhammer brand they licensed (RP) was not the Warhammer brand everyone I knew cared about (40k). My interpretation then was that it was an interesting but niche brand for a relatively niche developer in a genre heading towards mainstream (by a very different company), and for an audience already accustomed to largely-working but kinda-janky/still-incomplete experiences.

DAoC was a fine experience, but it wasn't for nearly the everyone WoW ended up being, and for a lot of reasons that Mythic the company were never going to scale or redefine themselves to solve.

So WH for Mythic felt perfect for the game they were capable of making for the audience they apppealed to.

But then all the marketing that showed up painted this completely different picture, because it was big-company thinking driving for big-company metrics. All in

Had they licensed the 40k version, or gotten, say, LoTR or even SW, I would totally agree with you. The game they made would likely have ended up in the same shape, but the "fail" would have felt more appropriate to the inflated expectations of the IP.

I don't really think your point about expectations is true. WAR wasn't a bad game because it didn't measure up to WoW; WAR was a bad game because after level 20 everything fell apart. And if you did manage to cap, you didn't get a fun RvR experience because the endgame city sieges were broken as fuck and the territory control mechanics were fucking nonsensical. It wasn't a plucky, janky, could-have-succeeded-if-not-for-those-meddling-Warcraft-kids game. It was a bad game, that happened to have some early fun.

The Warhammer fantasy license should be a license to print money - not quite as much money as say a Star Wars or something but it shouldn't have trouble making money. The fact that it does is as much down to Games Workshop's piss poor choice of dev houses for their games as well as their idiotic insistence that video game properties should not seek to recreate the tabletop experience (which is where they would really be able to print money but that ain't fucking happening).

Not down to expectations or any of that bollocks. Warhammer should make money unless the game is a colossal clusterfuck.

You could see in those first 10 or 20 levels, they had SOME good ideas. But they lacked the ingenuity and plain competence to pull it off, as well as lacking enough time for their 3-star talent to competently execute the vision of those first 20 levels. A year's delay in release MIGHT have been enough but once released, they weren't getting over their self-inflicted fuckups.

Also, Paul Barnett, who is to game marketing what venereal diseases are to genitals.

Getting a bad deja vu feeling reading these posts.  :why_so_serious:

I'm not sure why you think the Warhammer license is worth much; WHFB is much less popular than 40k (last rumor I heard put WHFB at only 9% of GW's revenue, outsold by a single 40k army), itself an exclusive hobby of neckbeards. D&D, LotR, SW, pretty much any other Sci-Fi or Fantasy IP seems more popular.

This is where semantics matter :-)

I'm not arguing whether WAR was a good or bad game, nor what reference point to use in that assessment.

Rather, I am arguing that the feel of it's "failure" is related to the expectations that were raised by a marketing spend that wouldn't have otherwise happened if they weren't acquired, and that the value of the IP is inflated (I disagree with Haemish).

Or basically, imagine Mythic developing, publishing and marketing WAR all by itself.

Would it have been a different game? No, because Mythic is Mythic and most of the choices probably still woulda been made.
Would it have impacted a lot fewer people? Yes, simply by virtue of fewer of them knowing about it and therefore fewer of them showing up.

Still would have been plenty of ranting about incomplete and unbalanced and the usual blarrdy blar. But it would have been by "this is not DAoC" sized community, not the "this is not WoW"* sized community.

So: I'm arguing it all would have gone exactly as it did, just with a smaller damage radius :-)

* Note: that's the only WoW reference I'll make. It's not about the size or style of the game in this regard though. It's simply about the size of the audience they were able to talk to after acquisition.

Well what do you expect from a Warcraft rip-off?  :oh_i_see:

I guess I just didn't see a lot of this marketing hype, so I can't really argue there. Regardless of the expectations set by EA and/or Mythic, I think a lot of it's early popularity and later dropoff can be attributed to timing: WAR launched 2 months before WotLK. BC had been out for nearly 2 years, so WoW players were at their most burnt out and looking for something new. Even if WAR didn't have EA moneyhats for advertising, a bunch of bored WoW players would have tried it just because it's a fantasy Orcs vs Humans MMO. Then WotLK hit a few weeks after the free month ended (and after everyone had made it past the level-20-honeymoon) and the playerbase just died. If the game had been good all the way to 50 and launched when it did, it might have retained a good chunk of WoW players.

WAR was a lot more important than people are giving credit.   It helped pave the way for Wotlk success by reminding us just how much better WoW is than the other mmos of that time.  WAR also gave us the great guilds like "Two Months Tops" as people worked quickly to eliminate their boredom of WoW via the Mythic WAR experience.

Warhammer would be a great crash course on everything that's wrong with gaming since WoW released.

You must not like PvP.  It wasn't that bad.

You're literally the only person I've heard of that played longer than the free month.

I think I lasted a second month; I had 5 characters in the 20s by the time I quit for LK.

I played with a solid group.  We had a great time and melted some faces.  Lacking that, I never would have played longer than a month.  For me MMO's are mostly about the people.  I've gone on record as saying that most MMO's are little more than a chat room with a 3D interface.

It's funny to read this stuff now.  When WAR was in beta, the people on this forum were surprisingly positive about it.

I played WAR a fair bit, was even guild leader of Bat Country by default for a while.  I've heard of a lot of games where "it only gets fun after you get to level XY", and it was neat to play the opposite, where you could have fun right away, and once it got boring, you could reroll a new class if you felt like it or quit or whatever.  I never made it to level cap on any of my characters, but I had fun playing what I did play.

And while there were some problems wtih WAR, it did a lot of things that have since been picked up by WoW (and subsequently everyone else ripping them off).  Stuff like leveling solely through PvP and being able to queue for it from anywhere in the world were both game changers that WAR pioneered, if I remember right.

That's because it was surprisingly good in beta, at least until the very end.

And that's because parts of WAR were good in isolation. Everything jammed together as an overall gameplay experience? Not so much.

I agree that blaming EA here is the lazy thing to do. EA poured a lot of money into Mythic in order to create a MMO success for them. From there Mythic dug its own grave.

Didn't EA buy them out at, near, or slightly after launch?  It was wholly on Mythic, especially their attempts to be WoW that fans forced them to change late in the beta process.  I remember Jacobs defending all that crap and us telling him no, stop that.

I may not be remembering correctly but I believe that you could level through the battlegrounds in DAOC after the second expansion (Shrouded Isles).

You could "level" via PVP in UO and I'm pretty sure you could gain health (levels) in Meridian 59 by killing other players.

War was fun, but there were serious problems with both specific systems (handling large sieges) and with the general approach (too much PVE). The big problem was that instead of admitting this and fixing it (see the Marvel thread), Mythic gave their usual "we're gathering metrics" excuse to ignore the problem and in some cases even made things worse by requiring more PVE.

There was no reason that game couldn't be made into a good one other than Mythic Entertainment.

All I know is, at one point not long after WAR released they used the "it's HARD CODED" excuse to not fix something, and I hit the eject button.

What does that even mean? I'd love to hear what that was.

I don't remember what it was referring to in WAR, but back in DaoC, it was their excuse for not adding more character slots. You originally only had... four?

Well people wanted more and Mythic went "We can't add more character slots, they are hard coded into the game."... because that's how software works, rite?




This was just one of many gems they blessed us with.

I'm still partial to Double-Frost Math myself. This is where they decided to literally double the damage of a entire weapon line, based on really shitty math that wouldn't get you out of 7th grade. Which made that weapon line completely overpowered to a comical degree... like two-shot anything that wasn't a Tank class silly. Anyone who played the game for ten minutes could see this shit was broken, but nah man, Mythic did the math, this was totally balanced! It took the playerbase reverse engineering the entire combat system and then explaining the proper math to Mythic for them to even considering looking into the issue. I'm sure there's some archive of the Camelot Herald news posts that has them finally going "oh, umm... we're bad at math" when they finally fixed it.


Then again, I'm not sure what we could expect from them. They didn't even know which stats were relevant to which classes. Not in some Min/Max raid DPS gearing sense. I mean in they would tell you X class was a strength class, would have the strength stat increase as they leveled up, fill their gear with strength on it and oops it turns out the class uses dexterity for it's attack stat. Something that the playerbase had to explain and prove to Mythic again, because  :why_so_serious:

Heh I remember that.  And then someone pulled a code comment out or something.

I never bothered with WAR.  I had some great times in DAoC.  And then, the industry innovated, matured and better games came out.  

Edit:  guess I should finally change my Sig.  Server name from Asia WAR server now long gone.

Blizzard has used the same thing for not increasing the size of your permanent bag.  I think it's a problem in translation from database dev. to comm. manager.  "Hey, we were stupid when setting up our DB and can't change the value range for this field without fucking it all up/ costing $x so it's not happening." 

I played about four months and then came back and played a bunch when it was free to play. I thought the pre 20 experience was without peer. After that it got progressively less fun the higher up you went. I put the blame squarely on World PvP being to spread out and the instances being horrible when combined with AOE knockbacks. They needed to restrict world PvP to only one continent at a time and rotate it weekly or some such. stuff was just so spread out that it was impossible to find.

Also, they needed to have had the 4 different chaos sects, the tzeentchy generic one was boring.

I dont know, from the way they describe the problems they have with the initial 16 slot permanent bag, it seems to me to be more of a problem surrounding the way they intially coded the character storage system to begin with.  My interpretation of it (from the way they have described the problems) is that when they set up "character inventory", they chose a value (lets say 500).  That covers your TOTAL character inventory.  Then they permanently coded the first 16 slots to be "main bag", and then allocated variable sized chunks in the array after that to things like swappable bags of various sizes, the key ring, etc.  So slots 1-16 are "main bag", then 17 through 56 are "variable sized bag 1" (at a 40 slot max capacity say), then 57-96 are "variable sized bag 2", etc.   Their problem seems to be that they have no simple way of going "expand main bag by 10 slots by bridging to end of array":  IE: adding 10 slots so that your main bag is now slots 1-16 + slots 400-409.   It seems to be that, for whatever reason, attempting to expand the main bag would instead force it to look at the main bag as slots 1--26, and attempting database wizardry to safely migrate the contents of EVERYTHING in the array 10 slots up might potentially cause problems depending on what kind of bags you are using.

Not sure if that made any sense, but that is what I think they are trying to say.

I really enjoyed the first 20 or so levels of WAR and thanks to some unfortunately timed travel my trip through them lasted just long enough to convince me that extending my initial sub was a good idea.  My favorite Mythic moment was when they finally were forced to admit that your contribution for group events was determined randomly when the event popped.  What you did during the event had absolutely no impact on your award when it was completed.

Fordel sort of downplayed how "it's hard coded!" was used as an excuse to not do all SORTS of shit. The character slots thing is the easiest example, but I am pretty sure no respecs for a long time were hard coded (to be fair, those weren't really a THING yet, I don't think), not being able to change certain keybinds because hard coded, we know your weapon uses Stat A to determine your damage but you gain Stat B on level up but we can't fix that because it's hard coded, etc. It was basically shorthand for "Man, doing that would be a huge pain in the ass."

That's giving them too much credit, I'm betting they honestly didn't know how to fix half the shit they used that excuse for, because clown shoes company.

Yeah Friars not leveling their stats properly was something they claimed they couldn't fix, same thing with cloth casters pointlessly getting quickness increases, etc.

I'm pretty sure EA bought Mythic after Mythic announced that they were doing a Warhammer MMO, but a good way before WAR launched.

Quick check: yes, they did - EA bought Mythic about 3 years before WAR launched (http://www.ign.com/articles/2006/06/20/ea-buys-mythic-entertainment). That's what allowed Mythic to spend "south of $100m" (http://evilasahobby.com/2012/06/12/great-mmo-company-collapses-of-our-time-mythic-entertainment/) on WAR's development.

GW2 ranger pets are "hardcoded" and would apparently cause the universe to implode if they gave you the opportunity to run pet-less

White Lion in WAR was shite and never really useful in PvP - never seemed to be afix for it either.

The white lion pet was soooooo derpy when I played one (for about an hour), it made me year for the buggy-ass bonedancer pets.


THIS ONE'S MINE
<runs over the horizon>

Those guys were the best. Sometimes if you followed them they would lead you to a stealther 3 zones away.  :why_so_serious:

Three-star ability with five-star drive.   :awesome_for_real:

The most dreaded thing to hear that wasn't Ukobat-related in Darkness Falls was the group's bonedancer saying, "Hey, where's my pet?"

Hah, yeah. I forgot about that quote. WAR was such a delicious source of schadenfreude.

Shame they weren't smart enough to turn the first battlefield into a class-based all PvP MOBA with diablo-esque loot that was all cosmetic and levels akin to passive gems.

3-star talent can't think that three dimensionally.

I was one of those positive people until Mythic made a whole bunch of changes late in beta that were bad for the game. I believe at the time it even generated a thread here that Mark got involved in that then spiralled out of control. Anyway, nostalgia makes me sad to see them go but reality is they've been dead as a studio for a long time and MMORPG PvP of the style some of us like is not really popular and fuck it get off my lawn I have to watch House of Cards.

Edits: off vs of and fuck it I'm old and drunk go away

I didn't mind the leveling cause you just go RvR battleground queue over and over - it was actually fun when the map didn't suck.
But once they put you in those craptastic map like Serpent's Passage and Tor Anroc where it's melee getting knocked into lava 75% of the time - I decided I've had enough.
Tried rerolling ranged class but by that time desire to play is dead.
I tried the end game raiding PVE - it was awful.
Tried the end game capital World RvR - got to final zone but no Order showed to challenge, hence points won't hit certain mark to trigger invasion.
Hahaha. Fuckno.

Tor Anroc

Swordmaster. ;D

Ironbreaker.  :drill:

Heh, yeah, the guys I ran with had a running joke that "Tor Anroc" is Dwarven for "Golf Course."

I miss my little ironbreaker sometimes, she looked awesome.  :heartbreak:

The crowning achievement of my dorfy healbot was the match in Tor Anroc where he managed to punt five dudes into the lava.





At once.

That was hilarious. I remember around the time the game first came out, my buddies were doing a public quest and I was sort of close by. So I high-tailed it over to their area, while I can see the bosses health go down on my room-mate's screen, making a final dash to get into the area hoping to tag the boss and maybe score anything at all.....only to score 1st over all in contribution points. That's when we clued in, oh yeah, 3 Star Talent, 5 Star drive.

I came to this very forum as a WAR fanboy. And quite fittingly it was the MMO to kill my MMO drive. Such high expectations... Me and a buddy spent a weekend travelling to be able to get a preview on the game and also got beta keys. Man, did that beta wear out fast. Never bought the game then. Still LOVE the class designs and I again had quite high expectations when they tried to do that MOBA spin off. I have no idea how they managed to take the best parts of WAR, the PvP and pure class designs and FUCK UP SO BADLY there, too... Good riddance.

Edit:Exactly that.  :uhrr:

If you had high expectations of this game in the first place, you were broken. At best it was going to be a fun game.. maybe. Which it was for a few levels. I was in the late alpha or early beta and it was pretty awful back then.

Was this supposed to be green?  Someone tell me this was supposed to be green.

 :oh_i_see:

But they totally ripped Blizzard off!

pa_comic_song_that_ends_the_earth.png

I was *this close* to linking that.

Please don't.