And then they say WAR released unfinished xD

[Dabbart]

With no pve or story, War would have been a boring snooze fest of nothing but zerg grinding. Seriously, you can't have single faceted games. Too many people say if it was just a pvp game, it would've worked. Really? How well did it work for Wrath of Heroes? Or an even better example, how'd it work for a big name huge hype game like Battlefront? The pve and story is what helped keep war alive as long as it was.

You say that, yet games like League of Legends and Dota 2 each made more money than WAR's initial budget plus all revenue earned several times over. Let alone games like Team Fortress 2 and CS:GO.

If you do what you do well, it will succeed.

I'm not sure of the math on that... $15 a month subscription add's up real quick. As of September 30, 2008, WAR had sold 1.2 million copies and had 800,000 registered users.[29] As of October 10, 2008, Mythic Entertainment announced that 750,000 people were playing Warhammer Online.[30] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warhammer ... _Reckoning

Profit wise is another matter, but raw cash, subscription MMOs raked in a fortune. But the money made is a flawed argument. Farmville made a fortune. Doesn't mean it was a good game... And comparing a fantasy MMO to a FPS is strange to begin with.

The fact is that all of the top MMo of that era had a PvP element. RO had WoE, AoC, Aion, DAoC, WoW, GW, Ultima, EQ, etc. Most of them had it placed fairly high up on the totem pole. What made MMOs fun was the PvP element. What made them a grind/the reason you kept advancing was the PvE largely.

And most of 'em had truly terrible releases. That's why we see so many Alpha/Beta's and early access these days.

[Zintair]

WAR was doomed to fail not because of the popularity of WoW on the user side, but because of the popularity of WoW on the industry side. Everyone wanted a piece of that pie, so the producers set out to reinvent the wheel in their own special way. WAR was no different. Some of the surface stuff was different, IE class set up, the presence of RvR lakes/keeps, etc. But full well half of the games effort (or more) went into the PvE side of the game, which was a hot garbage knock off in comparison to WoW, especially Wrath of the Lich King.

Had they gone a full RvR route with a few PvPvE public quests as a small distraction, the results could have been vastly different. There were also some issues such as poor overworld map design, vertical progression in a PvP game, and a curious lack of any compensators for population imbalance.

A lack of a third faction and server stability killed this game. Oh and EA. LOTD was also hot garbage.

Server stability was indeed a nagging problem, but I wouldn't have pinned it as a top 5 contributing factor.

EA I already mentioned. They were the ones pushing the game to mimic WoW.

The third faction, however, is debatable. People always hailed it as this great system wherein two smaller factions could team up against the big bad bully, but that's not how gamers of today think. In a 2 sided game, if one player wants to win, the other has to lose. There's no means of gaming the system. Add a third side, and suddenly the two bigger factions can take a path of least resistance and farm the **** out of the little guy. I'd much prefer a 2 faction game with a force equalizer.

The real tragedy is that Warhammer had a very easy lore friendly way to balance uneven sides. Let players from the outnumbered side control things like steam tanks, dragons, chaos demons, gyro bombers, etc. until they're relatively even.

Just from reading posts on this very forum when one side starts losing they log in their other toons. Not sure I give your example much credit of the 2 farming the one either. There would need to be some poor overall mechanics in place to make that common place.

Also in WAR on live it fluctuated between the two sides. The problem was people could just log their other side toons in. Aion tried 2 faction with a NPC third faction but can't recall if that worked or not.

Also how do you not consider server performance during end game PVP events one of the major issues of the game? It was practically THE issue why hordes of people left the game. Fort sieges game crashed. City sieges game crashed. That was the entirety of end game.

[Purestrain]

I played wow on release and WAR on release. WAR had HUGE glaring issues on release, everything 20m away from you was 2d not to mention huge balance issues that were never corrected, which still show. BW with a pocket healer out dmg anything ANYTHING, I mean i still see the threads on how mangus and engineers are under powered, THE SAME THREADS I SAW WHEN THE GAME WAS RELEASED AND SHUT DOWN.....??!?!?!?!?!?! However, as a long term relic player, relic wasnt the best company at balancing (i still think if bioware kept with this project they couldve done amazing things)

Dont get me wrong, I much prefer WAR OVER WOW.

BUT anything with a high learning curve is doomed to fail in this new age of gaming... where everyone with a smart phone is a critic apparently. My favorite franchise was MYTH (bungie pre microsoft buy out) which still has more advanced physics in its first release (1996?) the story was amazing, the multiplayer gameplay AMAZING AND UNIQUE, every thing from archers arrows being their own physical object and gaining greating accuracy and range on high grounds (mind you this released in the 90s!!) to microing melee, to countering melee with explosives, to explosive duds! with a AMAZING modding program released with the game, ranging from complete model overhauls to triggers. But it had a high learning curve, and failed and was eventually turned into the disaster that was myth 3.

I was an huge fan of DOW2 and was even the number 7 slot on the leader boards for awhile on release. Once again, high learning curve. It took tactics just like the myth server and people HATED that apparently. It had the preorder sales that WAR had, even that critics were saying it would rival starcraft. But as soon as people realized they couldnt just "zerg" with it, they dropped it.

The new age of gaming wants easy to play, spoon full of **** in their mouth and if they dont like the fact they cant learn the game in 3 days? they drop it, go on their smart phone and bash the **** out of it. Its sad ( coming from a gamer who's been online since the early 90s) but its true... It has nothing to do with timing or anything... everyone praised these games but no one played them after a month.

Another problem is the elitism that high learning curve games seem to cultivate. In the current TINY myth community, a welcome to the game is to smash the new players and treat them like dirt. Its the same in DOW2, Myth, COH. etc. and im slowly finding its the same in this community.

sorry, I rambled... im a lil tipsy... ok no Im drunk but its true... point is.. If a game has a high learning curve.. no one wants to play it (majority) and its sad because that the depth that I want to see in game which is what I love about WAR. or ROR. or whatver...

[Skarecrow7]

I always thought WoW killed mmorpgs because of player count more then anything. Before Wow if you had 350,000 people, you were on top. Now if you don't have a couple of million your mmo is a fail. EA wanted what WoW was getting.. a couple of million x $15 a MONTH.

If I ever won one of those huge lotteries, I would take 20 or 30 million and hire the people to make an MMO for me. If I can get even 100,000 people to think that it looks like fun and charge them $10 a month.. well, a Million bucks a month should be enough to keep the lights on and slowly pay back the initial investment. A big gaming company would see something like that and shut it all down.

[Koljan]

@Stmichael1989

There is also an inherent problem with what you describe also.
As the winning side, the joy of victory would be severely undermined by seeing the losing side be rewarded things that make him more powerful.
This is essentially what bothers me about wow-type games.
PvP and competition go hand in hand. A good game is a game (in my opinion) is one where losing doesn't make you not want to play.

So to me, fusing these two factors together triggers the following notion:
"It's not the outcome that should be fun, but the process".
Which brings us to WAR. WAR had a fun process even when the outcome was a loss. The only real negative outcome i recall from the old days is a lack of a fight, which would bum out both sides.

I think this is something they got right, until they changed some things, at some point (bad memory disclaimer) and on some servers things got very one sided.

Pardon the grumbling, first post on here, haven't got to play yet, my statements are based on half faded memories from years ago, around release time of WAR.

[Tiggo]

World of Warcraft was the first MMORPG anyway.

[charlysixb]

You dont need millions to be massively...games like UO , EQ and Asheron's call were first...not WOW

[Dalgrimar]

You dont need millions to be massively...games like UO , EQ and Asheron's call were first...not WOW

Baited

[Arteker616]

You dont need millions to be massively...games like UO , EQ and Asheron's call were first...not WOW

Baited

yet he is right . the main problem of war tapping into the wow scheme of making mmos is the fact it was rushed not very original and larguely unfisnihed product .

had it good pvp yes. was unbalance as hell. indeed . was it a fiasco yes .


yet i challange anyone to tell me something WoW pionered in the genre of mmos when was launched . outside making the game dumber and easier for players .

[Lemonpie1]

To be fair WoW had a huge hype behind it back then because of the WC3 community and it being the first accessible mmo out there.

The gear that guy has probably took longer to farm than rr 100 because you had to clear BWL with 40 ppl every week and since he played a mage he probably had lots of other people rolling for it. Also he cut out all the scenes where people resisted spells. (same as disrupt)

If you wanna see the best mage back then check out Vurtne he did things nobody thought of. Yeah im looking at you shaman casting hearthstone to fake cast.

The balance between dots, cc and burst damage was better which made the overall game play less tedious. Unlike Warhammer where everyone has dots that take away 50-75% of your health. Pots only had 1 min cooldowns and there were bandages with 1 min cooldown and some more stuff to heal yourself.

One thing Warhammer and WoW had in common was the unstable servers but then again that was in 2004, Warhammer was released in 2008 D:

And a HUGE **** up by mythic was the release date it was 2 months before the release of Wrath of the Lich King. Yeah that was when everybody actually got hyped about WoW and it had it's peak of 13 mio subs.