Anonymous Mythic employee dishes dirt on WAR and SWTOR

[AutomaticZen]

Almost none of us actually played Warhammer while we worked on it, it was so hard to get into, let alone Dark Age.

That doesn't make it sounds like anyone was doing their job.

OK. So some devs tried to blame Games Workshop for all their “restrictions” but that was just bs. Utter bs. Paul Barnett wanted this game to be DARK. The management demanded dark, chaotic settings and ugly ass character models.

You mean the management demanded you make a Warhammer game?  He mentions being forced to become WoW 2.0, but then is sad he couldn't put dancing in?  

The stuff listed in the rant is distinctly believable, but I get the feeling of 'it's their fault, not ours!'.

There's also a counter-point in the comments:

[Stormwaltz]

From his brief aside on SWTOR:

Something like a 20Gig installation, and most of it is voiceover work.

Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.

[Arthur_Parker]

I'm confused as to your post.

Join the club.  I asked you to take a deep breath, I was trying to be polite, put some thought into your posts, less than 3 minutes later you think I want a derail on the definition of "outsourcing",  .

[Mrbloodworth]

Not, really....

[Modern Angel]

Even if SWTOR launches fine, the community will be the downfall. My god.

Yeah, I've been around for a long time but these dudes may be taking the fanatic cake. Maybe some of the PvP-centric folks insisting the next one is the right game. Maybe.

Frankly, if that 300mil figure is correct... fuck, if it's off by 50-60%... they're fucked no matter what. That's an absolutely obscene amount of money that they will never, ever make back. Exploding MMO budgets are completely out of hand.

[NiX]

There's also a counter-point in the comments:

I don't get why people are so touchy over him writing this. He outright says why he's doing this:

I do not expect a happy ending, so I’ll be personal and selfish, and this is just for me.

As for the name dropping, who does he name that wasn't already known to the public? Some of the people he "gives away" were people I assumed had caused some of WAR's issues and subsequent failure.

[Arthur_Parker]

As for the name dropping, who does he name that wasn't already known to the public? Some of the people he "gives away" were people I assumed had caused some of WAR's issues and subsequent failure.

Yeah, but anonymous forum troll thinking Jeff Hickman is a bland waste of space takes on a whole new level meaning if he hears Jeff used to run customer service and has no relevant experience at running a game.  I bet he's incredibly pissed off, such a small industry, it's the type of thing that's worse if it's true.

[IainC]

I'm not going to get into the substance of most of the points he's making but I believe that his impression of the marketing for WAR was way off. Shitloads of cash was spent in Europe and the US on marketing WAR. I don't think that it's fair to hold up EA or Goa marketing as being particularly relevant to the problems that WAR faced; product awareness was at saturation point, interest was incredibly high (the WAR CE was the best selling item on Amazon.de the day it went on sale for example) and a huge number of boxes shifted as a result of that marketing effort. Now retention of course is a whole 'nother bucket of tentacles but that isn't marketing's function.

Interesting (to me at least) is his take on the split between Sanya and Mythic. Sanya danced around it while leaving the clues between the lines and now (allegedly) most people's suspicions are confirmed.

[Stormwaltz]

Interesting (to me at least) is his take on the split between Sanya and Mythic. Sanya danced around it while leaving the clues between the lines and now (allegedly) most people's suspicions are confirmed.

Sanya can speak for herself here.

[Murgos]

The marketing for WAR was fine.  Do you remember the invasion we got here?  WAR was well known and extremely visible.  The game just sucked and everyone in the beta knew it.

The things he knows personally about, the art sucking.  Well, he's the artist why doesn't he take responsibility for it?  You can make models with dark overtones and imagery that don't look like shit, you know.  The direction, to make it a 'dark' world was fine, the terrain and locations in WAR actually looked pretty decent IMO.

The rest of his rant sounds like some take-off on the allegory of the cave.

[Surlyboi]

Steve Zissou?

I love the fuckin' guy!

[Lantyssa]

Artist has distorted view of game development.  News at eleven.

(Not that a bunch of it can't be true.  And it's quite easy to believe management had their heads up their bums.)

[patience]

Head up their bums? His (non)ficiton read more like "Lord of the Flies" than a trashy romance slash novel.

[UnSub]

That post was truthy - it sounded like truth, but could easily have been composed from enough secondary sources and be a lot of assumptions.

However, I really, really want to punch people who say, "I played the game at a con and it was fun, so there's no problems there!". You played a game for 15 - 30 minutes at a convention. If a game dev studio can't make one section of their game fun for 15 minutes for a con, they probably won't put it out at a con.

[slog]

EA just isn't capable of doing MMOs successfully.  It's the wrong corporate culture.

[waylander]

Warhammer was a colossal failure because....................

1.
The RVR zone capturing mechanic was horrible and allowed an opposing side to win the zone capture battle by simply sitting out and letting the victory point needle to decay.

2.
RVR bottlenecked at fortress fights, they crashed a lot, people would flood newbies there to intentionally crash it to prevent a capital city siege, and a failure to capture the fort would reset all previous zone captures.  In a nutshell you would waste hours of capturing stuff just to lose to a cheese strategy.

3.
Capital City sieges, at the time, could be undone if the other side did not participate. Without people to fight you couldn't get the victory points needed to advance the city siege to the next stage.

4.
PVE was horribly boring, unrewarding, and public quests were poorly designed.

5.
Character advancement was boring, and getting an achievement every other level made people feel that character progression was too slow.

6.
Lag, crashes, animation issues that seriously degraded game performance.

As a player I can say none of us were buying into Mark Jacobs BS, any time players tried to tell Mythic what was wrong with their game we were threatened with bans, and in the end we all voted with our wallets.  We as players know that when EA takes over an MMO it usually gets worse, or it simply gets canceled before it is released.

I don't know if SWTOR will suck or not or who's to blame if it does, but if SWTOR PVP is just Warhammer 1.1 RVR then a lot of people will just not buy the game in the first place.

[Xanthippe]

I read the Jacobs stuff as "Yeah, he was bad but you have NO IDEA how bad these other assholes were."

That wasn't how I read it (I've only read the story, though, not the comments).  

I gather that Jacobs was the public face who got to take all the shit for the guys who were actually responsible for the shit.  

(Why do I always end up sticking up for Jacobs in these threads?  I can't help myself from liking the guy, somehow.)

[Arthur_Parker]

I believe Mark was very hands on lead designer, crafting as a minor example, was credited solely to him by Paul in a video somewhere.  Of course I didn't work there, so the truth may be different, that's just the impression that was presented.

[HaemishM]

Artist has distorted view of game development.  News at eleven.

(Not that a bunch of it can't be true.  And it's quite easy to believe management had their heads up their bums.)

Yeah, this. That rant isn't really particularly noteworthy for anything. Barnett's a douche, Jacobs was out of touch and untouchable, Jeff Hickman shouldn't be in charge of multi-million dollar game design projects.

He was most certainly wrong about the marketing. Marketing sold 1 million copies of the box. Game design sent 70% of those box purchases scattering to the four winds. As for his titular question "Why Warhammer Failed?" his article doesn't really answer that. Should be called "Why I'm Pissed at my Former Employers."

[Ghambit]

My fav. part of that post was that they never really even had a tool to make items.  They did em from scratch, by hand.   
...Until someone just nutted up and decided to make a tool at the very last second when it was much too late; then they got fired.   And people wonder why many games take so long to develop.

Also, the marketing for WAR was indeed atrocious.  The only reason it was so visible initially was because it's fuckin Warhammer, and once you go Warhammer the fanbois speculative forum/blogs ensue.  If you recall, it was only around the middle of dev. (almost at closed beta yes?) when they finally released Barnett to the world and started ramping up disclosures and marketing.  To the contrary, SWTOR's marketing although chaotic has been MUCH better.

Anyways, part of their failures were because they were extremely late to the game with their design disclosures (probably because they couldnt decide wtf to do).  You cant adequately gauge the success of a feature if you dont let it out of the bag early enough to fix a bad choice.

[Outlawedprod]

Reminds me of one of those forum posts some people like to make when quitting a game. You know so they can flame all the guild and PVP acquaintances they interacted with over the course of their career in the game.  Much drama and lolz usually ensue.  I suppose this rubs off onto some people IRL as the mmo lingo goes...

[Zzulo]

I liked the bit about marketing. Didn't War sell like a million copies or something insanely good like that? My memory is that it was a game that almost everyone was talking about, bought, tried, and left.

Yeah this part of the rant was weird. Marketing was the one thing they did really really well. The game was shit, the footage of the game was shit and they basically sold a million copies anyway and hype was through the roof.

[patience]

Yeah this part of the rant was weird. Marketing was the one thing they did really really well. The game was shit, the footage of the game was shit and they basically sold a million copies anyway and hype was through the roof.

Don't forget WAR like Conan was a bait and switch. The initial experience was awesome and as you got into deeper ends of the product you discovered it was half baked. Tier 1 being awesome and the marketing were the two things Mythic did right.

[Lakov_Sanite]

No one has mentioned the swtor comment I think is very damning, the size. I know lots of us have big ole honkin hard drives with all kinds of terrabytes or whatever but 20gigs for sound alone? I'm not sure people realize how big a barrier a game of that size will be to a lot of people if true.

[Mrbloodworth]

No one has mentioned the swtor comment I think is very damning, the size. I know lots of us have big ole honkin hard drives with all kinds of terrabytes or whatever but 20gigs for sound alone? I'm not sure people realize how big a barrier a game of that size will be to a lot of people if true.

I don't think that was sound alone.

[Zzulo]

Wasn't WAR and AoC around 15 gigs or so? I don't think size is going to become much of an issue to most people.

[Stormwaltz]

I don't think that was sound alone.

It sounds like that's the full client install. I did point it out above; the size of install and patches is one of the reasons I think VO in an MMORPG is a Mistake.

Points of comparison from my work HD:

• LotRO + Moria and Mirkwood + high def textures: 12.6 GB
• STO: 7.35 GB
• Guild Wars w/all expansions: 2.24 GB

[Nija]

Games are just big these days. Vanguard was the pioneer into the "holy shit this is huge" territory, but a lot of games are deceptively big. My TF2 install directory is about 9 gigs. My Borderlands directory is 12.5 gigs. Conan is about 18.

Back to the topic at hand - WAR was flawed all over the place and many people have talked about the flaws many times better than I can talk about the flaws. The big thing that stands out to me in this post is indeed the SWTOR dollar figure. It's probably ballpark, because honestly why would an artist know the exact number, but even half of what he thinks it correct is a big, big number.

This is concerning because this is another one of those strikingly obvious things, at least to me. The Starwars IP is tied for the worst possible IP to use for a MMO. It's tied with Lord of the Rings. They just cannot make a decent game within the constraints of the IP. It's been proven time and time again specifically with Starwars. Yet here they are, blowing $300m worst case on a flawed product. It really shows how out of touch they are with what they are trying to create.

[jakonovski]

I opened this thread, went to have a nap, then read it and clicked make new post:

Warning - while you were reading 32 new replies have been posted. You may wish to review your post.

[bhodi]

That's because it's dirty laundry - everyone can get behind that.

I see Lum has no comment either, I guess he's following his own advice from that presentation! (note that this doesn't stop the comments... from (in)famous names and others)

[jakonovski]

Indeed.

Stuff I was originally going to post: what happens to Bioware if their 300 million project does the WAR limbo? Could it conceivably affect their own IPs?

[Stabs]

On the point about Marketing it was poor marketing to launch against Lich King. Well done Marketing for getting a million customers! Slapped wrist Marketing for losing 700 000 of them after a month.

[Nija]

I don't think it's on Marketing to retain those customers. Unless marketing created Tor Anroc.

That would actually explain a lot, now that I think about it.

[Samprimary]

You would think that after the prequels, star wars fans like myself should not be vehemently incapable of accepting that this game could still be a big bag of fail.

[Zzulo]

Yeah, the people left because the game was bad. Not sure what marketing could have done to avoid that short of brainwashing them into thinking the game was fun somehow.