Warhammer Online shuts down December 18th

[Feverdream]

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.

[ghost]

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. 

[Malakili]

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.

[ghost]

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.

[Sir T]

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

But hey, we will always have Doorhammer

[Ingmar]

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.

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.

[Hawkbit]

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. 

[IainC]

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.

[Typhon]

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.

[Maledict]

 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.

[Kail]

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. 

[Ingmar]

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

[amiable]

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.

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

[Nebu]

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

[Evildrider]

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.

[Setanta]

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.

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

Seconded - I'd love the insight

[Fordel]

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

[Riggswolfe]

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.

[BoatApe]

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.

[Fordel]

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


MYTHIC SECONDS


 

[Sjofn]

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.

[Feverdream]

[/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.

[Malakili]

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.

[Fordel]

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.

[Modern Angel]

Testing specific level ranges without integrating the entire leveling curve into the process disguised serious flaws.

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.

[Sky]

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.

[raydeen]

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.

[ghost]

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.

Which was all the time....

[Fraeg]

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

[Riggswolfe]

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?)

[Fordel]

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

[Kail]

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?)

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.

[Rendakor]

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.

[HaemishM]

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.

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.

[luckton]

And it's over. 

/pours out a 40