Mythic Entertainment closed

[Nebu]

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.

[Venkman]

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.

[Rendakor]

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.

[HaemishM]

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.

[01101010]

Getting a bad deja vu feeling reading these posts. 

[Rendakor]

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.

[Venkman]

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

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.

[Simond]

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.

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

[Rendakor]

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.

[Outlawedprod]

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.

[Senses]

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

[Nebu]

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.

[Nija]

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

[Rendakor]

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

[Nebu]

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

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.

[Kail]

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.

[WayAbvPar]

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

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

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

[UnSub]

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

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

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.

[Lantyssa]

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.

[Xanthippe]

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.

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

[Nija]

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

[Numtini]

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.

[Sjofn]

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.

[Paelos]

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.

[Fordel]

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 

[Soln]

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.

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.

[Merusk]

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?

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." 

[angry.bob]

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

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.

[SurfD]

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?

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 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.

[Tmon]

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.

[Sjofn]

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.

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."

[Fordel]

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.

[Ingmar]

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.

[UnSub]

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'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. That's what allowed Mythic to spend "south of $100m" on WAR's development.

[Setanta]

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.