f13.net

Press Release here (http://www.warhammeronline.com/)


That's all I know, mabye one of the guys on the scene can say more. I wounder if it will be Warhammer Total War Online, or Warhammer the EQ (should I say DAoC clone?). Considering that would seema  conflict with DOaC's market share, I presume this will be answered at E3.

I got the press release earlier today.

I haven't stopped laughing since.

I can only assume they'll be using that phat romans in space money to produce it. Oh man, it'll be awesome. Hopefully I'll be able to play it on my Phantom.

It won't be as bad as SWG. Right?

WRONG.

You're going to get Haemish feeling stabby. We don't want that.

We don't? This should do it:

Romans. In. Space.

This has nothing to do with the previous attempt by (Climax?) right?

Anyways, this is bad news.

From the PR:
So that says to me that it's going to be DAoC 2 with Elves! Lots of Elves! On both sides!

If they were not assholes, they would do 40K instead.

It's already bad enough that they're going to shit on everything great about old WH. I'd prefer that they just completely forget about 40k.


I'm not sure why, but their use of the term "RvR" here really pisses me off.

I'm confused:  why is this so bad?  Mythic isn't that bad a company, is it?  As compared to SOE, fill-in-the-blanks... 

Edit: I left DAoC before ToA and never tried it or Catacombs.  Grind was too much for me.  Mythic designers are too "conservative".  But always liked the out-of-game PvP tracking and some the communications from the company.  Good company I thought, but tired game.

SOE deserves more hate for being the moneygrubbing bastards that they are, but on the basis of the games themselves, Mythic is just as bad, if you ask me.

And btw, it's not "PvP tracking", it's "RvR tracking".

The problem, as I understand it,  is that "Romans in Spaaaace!"  looks to be, other than the setting, entirely derivative.

If the company has so little imagination that they are going to jam "Romans in Spaaaace!" into the EQ grind-a-thon cookie mold regardless of if it fits or not then there is really very little hope left any kind of reasonable development of future products.

edit:  Be sure to read "Romans in Spaaaace!" as the announcer voice from the muppets "Pigs in Spaaaace!", it helps.

You hit the head on the nail.  Messing up a franchise is always a possibility, but it should be obvious that if they were actually trying to make something innovative, they would have chosen 40K instead of yet another elf-dwarf-wizard setting.  I don't think either choice would increase or decrease the chances of the game turning out like a DAoC clone, particularly since DAoC is supposedly an incarnation of their RvR text MUD.  Seems like a missed opportunity in the name of safety.  The nongamer is probably more interested in guns and marines than wands and elves.  I know I am, at this point.

I know I read a quote from Jacobs about how building a new "brand" was preferable to licensing. Just entrepreneurial idealism, I guess. Always goes bye-bye when the money hats get made.

You know, Marc Jacobs head is so big you can whisper his name and he'll respond from anywhere on the eastern seaboard. It's why I never read my posts aloud.

The guy I work with and I, who are both vets of GW games (he still plays) both got our WTF moment from this announcement. I mean... WHAT THE FUCK?

So the buncha millions of pounds they spent on the Climax development goes down the drain. Yay? The Climax stuff looked and sounded good, so I find this announcement really fucking bizarre. Not only do they piss that money away, they go with an American company to develop a game that will probably not be ready for another 2-3 years? They also sound like they intend to do a very derivative RVR/DAoC clone, except using the classes and races from Warhammer. Does that mean there will be more than 3 factions, or will there only be good and evil?

Now, more than ever, I fucking hate GW. Hey, assheads, most of us who actually played your fucking games and paid out the ass for the privilege, would really just like you to translate your tabletop game DIRECTLY TO THE FUCKING COMPUTER WITH ONLINE PLAY. It won't kill your fucking business, you goddamn retarded limey monkeys, see Wizards of the fucking Coast for a goddamn example. The entirety of your electronic attempts, with the notable exception of the original Space Hulk and Dawn of War, have been unmitigated SHITE. Stop being pigfuckers.

Don't blame GW. They don't know better.

Blame Mythic. They aren't going to be able to do it justice. They bid on it. They are the ones who are the ball-lickers.

Did I wind up on MoviePoopShoot.com by mistake?  :evil:

I am willing to wait and see about Warhammer. I played the RPG version of it once or twice, and never had anything else to do with the franchise, so my childhood will remain pristine and virginal no matter how badly they fuck it up. Didn't Lum say he was working on another project that wasn't Imperator a couple of months back? I wonder if this is it?

Yeah, I'm sure GW had a sigh of relief when they knew it'd be a well known company like Mythic. Little do they know though. Climax may have been irresponsible, but Mythic is just going to do the same....In a different way (but it'll probably make money, right?).

I blame GW for having the asstardically backwards-ass view that making an almost exact electronic translation of their existing games will somehow hurt the sales on those games. Fucking retarded douchebags. They lick an entirely different set of balls.

They should make it an actual table top simulation. I'm sure they won't though.

three things:
1) GW stuff was always at least 25% more expensive than anything else I'd pay for in a hobby/games shop, not only because of import and markup -- so some definite pain there ($55+ for a module booklet??)
2) why is there no market for RTS Warhammer?  What am I missing?  Too Blizzard derivative?
3) I played Warhammer the pen&paper RPG and it rocked.  Still the most bizarre and odd system of gaming Ive ever seen.  Didnt lend itself to a lot of easy adventuring, but still really bizarre (read: creative).

I like Mythic because at the end of the day they are a small company.  And whatever dumb things they may have done (or will do), they are an order of magnitude less offensive than anything SOE can dream up.  That said, I haven't subscribed to DAoC for over 3 years, and I do find it boring and dated and over-conservative (read: grind).  And I will disappointed if they churn out another timesink/treadmill version with the Warhammer narrative.  And Romans in Space doesn't do anything for me.  Everyone's got their eye on Tabula Rasa for Space going.

Haha..."Blizzard derivative". Good one.

There is a market for RTS Warhammer (see Dawn of War), but RTS is such a stale genre. And I'm quite sure there's a larger market for accurate, multiplayer-capable tabletop translation than for an RTS version.

*snicker*

I' be a lot more excited about this project if they added a 40K after the name.

I'd sure as heck hate to be a hack and slash generic fantasy EQ clone going against the market right now.

I'm sure Mythic has a ton of innovative stuff planned to get the markets attention. They may be a fairly conservative company, but I don't think they are stupid.

AFAIK, there isn't really a single good online tactics game available. It would be so easy to just make the tabletop game, arrange leagues around different schedules, different point totals, etc. Basically MTG:Online but with Warhammer.

I don't see the strength in something like a Warhammer RTS or MMORPG. Just another fantasy RTS or MMORPG, yawn.

Madden :wink:

(or 2k5 if you prefer)

I'll be shocked if it doesn't turn out as DAoC2.

And grind aside, I'm not sure that's a bad thing for a Warhammer MMORPG to turn out as.

There remains nothing actually wrong with DAoC if you want to play a large guild oriented game with solid PvP and PvE. ToA was obviously a mistake, but it appears to have been recognised as such by the team.

If they take this as an opportunity to turf out concentration buffs (and hence buffbots) and have more objective oriented team play in the levelling process (start from Catacombs walk in the direction of CoH, then take another 10 steps beyond that) then I'll happily try it.


While some form of Total War Online is well overdue, you wouldn't want it to be warhammer, everyone would just end up pissed off because it wouldn't have 1 percent of the complexity of actual WFB.

As mentioned above, any Warhammer fantasy battle variant should be turn based and simply copy the tabletop rules. Anything else would be a letdown.


RvR remains the best^H^H^H^H only ever successful implementation of PvP alongside PvE in a level based MMORPG. Guild Wars might be the second but that remains to be seen.

And it fits the Warhammer universe perfectly. Empire/elf/dwarf vs Chaos/dark-elf/skaven vs Orcs/Goblins anyone?

Mythic are pretty much the only people I could even imagine building a genuinely playable pvp + pve license based MMOG, because the odds of them going off on one and doing something like HAM are nonexistant, and the odds of them getting overexcited by the license and becoming a slave to it are equally low.


It will probably suck - because GW computer games *always* suck, but that's a whole other thing.

I'm unaware that the Mythic team has recognized ToA as a mistake.  What do you base this assertion on?

That may be, but I just get irritated with some Daoc players I know (as well as seeing it on the net) who refer to competitive play as "RvR". When I say "PvP", they have no idea what I'm talking about. When they ask about a new game, like WoW or Guild Wars, they ask "Does it have RvR?"

Do you hit them in the head with a hammer soon after?

The fact that every two weeks they seem to put in a hotfix to make it just slightly easier.

Oh, and Catacombs, which is the polar opposite of ToA.

And actual statements from Mythic people saying things like 'hmm, we shouldn't have made you all choose an ML line but not told you how the ML abilities work'.

I think that's about as close as you can ask them to go without doing a Gerald Ratner.

Only the ones that aren't my friends. Some unexplainable force prevents me from harming the others.

Other than letting them continue to play?

This game will suck.


The one good thing is to see how many races they can cut before release, we should totally have a pool.

I'm going with:
Chaos gets cut entirely as a playable faction.
Skaven cut
Chaos Dwarves cut
All non vanilla empire stuff = cut
Lizardmen cut
Bretonians will make it and end up looking, sounding and being Albion so semi-cut.
Goblins will not be a playable race.
Undead or at a minimum all the new fancy undead (tomb kings, blood knights, ect) will be cut.

Is that more then horizons cut from release?  (god remember how great that game sounded on paper?)

WH fantasy does not convert to a vanilla EQ clone at all, in fact neither game does.  There is only one part of the GW lines that deserves (in fact BEGS) for a MMOG and that is Inquisitor.  *sigh*

As long as I've been associated with video game conversions of  popular tabletop games (about 20 years now), this has been the case, yet I have yet to see anything as good as the old SSI WWII games (Panzer Group, Kampfgruppe, etc) I played on C64/128s.  Lots of folks yearn to satisfy the grognard hidden within by playing a game that takes care of all the fiddly calculations and just let's them channel Rommel, whether it is with Legionnares, Tiger Tanks, Hellcats, Mechs, or Orcs In Space.  Myth is about as close as I can think in 'modern' stuff, and it is still RTS.  Well, Close Combat probably is the same general thing, and moved at a turn based pace for me, even though it was RTS.

The one case I do have inside knowledge on tells me that the core game got started, and then the people at the top, who created the original game, got seduced by the possibilities, and revised the game out of all recognition, producing in the end an unplayable abortion that couldn't be released and turned the whole thing into a pariah within the company, never to be mentioned again.  Maybe that is the problem; that tabletop tactics seems too simple to be good to people who have been designing games for any length of time.  Maybe they keep getting dragged off by the lure of the RTS, or the RPG, or Civ, and lose the simplicity of what people have said they have wanted for years.

Or at least what people have said they wanted.  Here is where I really want that game design notation system Raph talked about.  I want to lay out the generic tabletop next to the RTS and the RPG, and Civ, so I can say 'I want this!  Not that, or that, or that, this!'.  And maybe then they could show me that I really didn't want this, and really did want that.  Or maybe they couldn't show me, and would then go ahead and build the simple thing I want.

It's just that you would think, after all these years of lackluster sales on their video games, and constant bitching of the fans, they might fucking get it. Just might. But these are the assholes who think it's ok to charge $50 for a plastic fucking miniature that's 1/100th of your army. Cockslobber, all of them.

It isn't as if they can't make recurring revenue off of the tabletop translation. I mean, as often as they change the fucking rules and release expansions/addendums/codices/army books, they could have a constant stream of expansions, a la Guild Wars. But they refuse to see beyond the cardboard and pewter, like movie studios and the music industry.

Myth really was a fucking brilliant game, I do miss it and often re-find my MythII cd only to realize its broken when I try to install it.

Myth is one of the best things that ever happened to my computer. I still can hear my little explosive dwarves cursing and muttering. The multiplayer for Myth2 was one of the most strategically rich games I think I've ever played.  Supposedly there is still an active user community. I may have to go dig up a copy. Anyone tried to get it to work with WinXP?

"Fallout", "Myth", "Marathon"....And it was Pee Cee "gamers" who were always making fun of my Mac back in the day. Pfft...I was blessed before anyone else.

It's amazing too that Halo single handedly saved the X-Box from almost certain doom. That was almost a Mac thing as well.

Well, Wizards of the Coast did translate there entire pricing scheme to the online version as well, so your still paying the same amount online as you are offline.  I'm sure GW would happily make a direct computer version of the game if you had to buy virtual plastic elf models for $10 each to build your army, but I think even THEY know that probably wouldn't fly to well.

They're dumb ass's for not makeing a straight computer port though.  They could make tons of money selling the game, and even charge a subscription if they wanted for a really good online network.  I've been wanting to get into Warhammer Fantasy for years, but the cost always stops me.  Looks like alot of fun, but I'm going to have to wait till either they, or some board underground programmer, makes a direct version of their game online (Doesn't seem like it would be THAT hard to make a table top simulation).  Or they could just sell their products at a realistic price, but I know thats asking way to much.

I agree. The world in 2007 is not going need another Tolkein/D&D Fantasy MMORPG. On the other hand an MMOFPS set in the WH40K universe would totally float my boat. However if WH Online allows you to play a Night Goblin Fanatic I'll buy a copy just for that.

Edit: fixed my mixed metaphor

As I've said before, I've had no greater love/hate relationship with a company than with Mythic.  I attribute a great deal of that to the fact that DAoC was my first MMORPG.  The remainder I consider deserved.  I still remember some old blunders.  I could name instances, but I'd prefer not to alienate anyone.  There are some good sailors on that ship... it's just sometimes I'm not too sure about the captain or his navigator.  Most of the time, in fact.

Don't be so sure.  Everyone was convinced MtGO would bomb because no one would pay real money for virtual cards.  I bet if GW created a good, good-looking, free client interface to 40K, had a fully functional online mode with matchmaking and tournaments, and gave out free 'demo' armies with the basic grunt troops from each race, they could definitely charge full price for the other models and many, many people would pay.  The value of being able to fire up a game or a tournament at any time from your bedroom is enormous.  The draw of paying 'just $5 more' for that one model you need to make your army perfect is irresistable.

Full price? No. WH4k is far more tangible than Magic cards. Replacing cardboard with pictures is feasible. Replacing pewter with pictures is near impossible. And stupid.

Could they charge 25% of the market price? Yes. And they'd make a killing.

With a paint program that let you detail your army any way you want with mouse clicks (rather than huddling under a desklamp with a jeweler's monocle trying to get the eyesockets in the skull on the belt buckle right)?  You could charge full price.  Somebody do it right now, plzk.

I don't see whats so hard about replacing pewter with 3-d models, include a good editor for making custom maps and network/pbem code and they should easily be able to sell a few 100k copies.  I'm clueless as to why they didn't do it five years ago though.

Maybe it's just bad corporate thinking ala RIAA, "Our business model relies on selling pewter and game books, if we sell stuff digitally no one will buy our pewter and gamebooks."

You guys are missing the point. Games Workshop has fucked itself to the point where they’re dying off. Their rules systems are complete and total shit and are only fun for retards. All their rules, including WFB. Here’s a secret for you: The “Old World” is fucking Europe. The “fluff” that people cum over is European history slightly modified and with Chaos instead of Mongols. There is nothing new, interesting, original, or compelling in GW fluff. Sure they started out pretty good, but at this point they’re nothing more than Yahtzee while you push some miniatures around a table while you wait for this months overpowered new release that costs $15 (for a single metal trooper). Their rules are shit so no self respecting adult wants to be seen playing them, and their products are now so expensive that parents won’t buy them anymore for the early-teen mongoloids the games cater too. The one advantage they have is there are still a lot of people with their miniatures out there playing in stores. That would be good, but they’re being suck cocks about only allowing the “current” releases of their miniatures being used in official events.

The bath they took on the previous incarnation of their online game coupled with no one actually buying their latest round of re-re-re-re-re-re-released armies is making their stock tank, and tank hard. See? (http://www.lse.co.uk/SharePrice.asp?SharePrice=GAW) They need an announcement to buoy their stock price. This is it. You shouldn’t be sad for GW, you should be sorry for Mythic for getting this pig of a license. GW is no longer relevant. They’re not going to die off completely, but the amount of space they get in stores is already much smaller than it was a year ago, and completely gone in many cases. They’ve been replaced by Rackham, Privateer Press, and even Mongoose’s new SST game. All three of those companies produce games for far cheaper, have far better rulesets, and quite frankly produce far superior miniatures-especially Rackham. Even their trooper miniatures are tear inspiring works of art.

If someone's going to make an online "miniatures" game, I'd much rather it be Privateer who have a genuinely interesting and unique world, as well as a good rulest. W40K, and to a lesser extent WFB, is shit for idiots. It's crap for spotty dorks who are afraid to talk to girls. If you think they're good for anything other than making the hobby much dumber for about a decade, please get the fuck out of my hobby and collect pokemon cards or something. Though if you're a dedicated player of the "Games Workshop Hobby" it looks like the hobby might be getting itself gone for you.

Don't tell me you've never downloaded the demo for Combat Misson?!!? (Or for that matter, even if it is 2D, the free versions of Steel Panthers).

I would be onboard with this.  Seems like a no-brainer.  Babies can't eat virutal soldiers.

Angry:  Its a bad idea to discount GW, they have had great ideas/systems in the past.

Necromunda was fucking genius.

Blood Bowl is always good for a laugh.

Inquisitor is one of the best rpg systems ever made.

Oh and I didn't know that WFB was supposed to have good fluff, no shit its just european history.  You can't really say the same about the 40k universe.  Furthermore, I've played the highly praised Confrontation, I started to find it stupid, fast.  I'm sure GW is suffering, they seem to have lost their way (fell into the money hat?) and keep boosting the price and re-releasing new editions before they've even finished the codexs for the last one.  If they hemmorrhage some money thats good, get rid of the jackass' and stop being the table-top gaming version of M$.

They just generally tend to fuck them up or discontinue them for a few years before bringing back the all new special re-release edition which invalidates most of your old models but gives you a new line of spanking new models at twice the price to replace them!

Quick! Quick! Call marketing and sales! They love new untested revenue models!

And the really sad thing is that this sounds to me as if a small team of permanent modelers could turn this into a more stable revenue generating structure than some of the ideas NCsoft has bandied about...

No need to be a heretical communist.

Ive mostly given up buying new GW products to play Star Wars Minis, collect D&D minis because Mage Knight ones are too big too ugly, and Wizkids now smokes as much pole as GW does.

I knew being bought out by Topps would kill Wizkids.  It has.  THANKS FOR INVALIDATING ALL MY MECHWARRIOR MINIS!

Its not just Games Workshop though almost every tabletop game out there gets a shitty bastardized action game which does jack shit to bring in new players to the tabletop game.  Yet fans on their own time have nearly rules perfect versions of Battletech and Blood Bowl available on freaking Sourceforge.  And people like them.

But what does Microsoft do with Battletech?  Makes 2 fun but stupid Mech Assault games that throw shitty metal band music during boss fights.  Games Workshop thinks the best way to promote 40K is to allow a mediocre Halo clone and an RTS that nobody would play if it weren't for the graphics and the liscense.  Im sorry but its true.  Its just another RTS with the same damn tech, build, and zerg trees.  Oh yeah.  And Mythic turns Silent Death, one of the best starfighter combat games into some wanna be Star Control without the humor or quality.

A good home version of the original games not only gives the companies unlimited playtesters to fix their shittily designed games, but it makes people hungry to play the real thing.  Cybersex doesn't replace actual nookie, and online play doesn't replace setting up my Eldar or Chaos Marines on a beautiful 3d table full of miniatures and scenery.

Hell, look at the AD&D Gold Box games.  Those things probably did more to save TSR and Dungeons & Dragons than anything until 3.0 and the D20 Open Gaming Liscense!  And they tried to be mighty accurate to the real AD&D rules.  They pretty much taught me the damn things.  Ever try reading the AD&D 1st ed manuals?  If you haven't already played some version of D&D its virtually impossible to figure it out.  Or know what bugfuck idea Gary threw in because someone might use it you should throw to the curb.

So fuck Mythic, fuck Games Workshop, and fuck every other hobby game company who lets some asshole developers who can't come up with their own hook for another generic RTS/FPS title so they namewhore.

And fuck me for not only caring about this, but continually being enough of a dumb shit to keep buying most of them hoping one day they will make accurate goddamned translations of the games I love playing in real life when I can find players and we all have the time and desire to play them.

You seem to have forgotten about BioWare and BIS.

Bioware and BIS came 15-20 years after the gold boxes. Hell, they came right around the time the d20 system came out and Wizards started courting TSR. Your timelines are FUBAR, young'in.

I would argue that BIS and BioWare did tons to revitalize the pertinent properties. CRPG's were practically dead before Baldur's Gate. This game, and the other games it spawned, led to a revival of interest in D&D and other related IP's.

If there was no BioWare and BG, there might not be a 3rd Edition. At the very least, CRPG's would be a lot less popular.

I know how "old skool" Gold Box is; I've (tried) to play them.

3rd Edition came out after Planescape bombed financially. I'm cool with giving credit where it's due, but BIS and Bioware did more to revitalize D&D Video games than anything involving TSR. Wizards revitalized paper D&D, though many would argue that the depth pretty much died (I'm not a big fan of D20, even Call of Cthulhu feels a little debased and I'd never played the original. I've only participated in the online campaign and read through the CoC book a few times).

Emphasis mine...

That is the biggest travesty within the Video Game Industry in the past 10 years. Worse than Enter the Matrix being profitable, or anything else EA has done.

Duh, thanks.

I still think Deus Ex only being posthumously famous was painful as well. But that's a discussion for another thread. Point is, don't give BIS and Bioware props for something they didn't really do. The original gold box assumption a few posts up by Jain Zar was correct.

Alright, I won't tell you that, but thanks for the info.  :wink:  There is always more going on than I know about.  I suppose all these independant/small press assets ought to be gathered on a central page where people could check to find them, although I bet this has been done several times already, and the results are just lost in the bandwidth.