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Warhammer Online : Age of Reckoning: Correspondent - About Those Cuts...
Stradden
Managing EditorMember CommonPosts: 6,696
MMORPG.com Warhammer Online Correspondent Tom Giblin pens his debut article on the recent Mythic Entertainment announcement that four classes and four capital cities had been cut from the game.
Over the multi-year development cycle of a game, many things change.Features are scaled back or cut, others are added, designs change; it's a reality of game development. No developer can say with absolute certainty that a specific feature will be in game at launch with months or years left in the development cycle. Due to that, it should come as no surprise that information is released slowly rather than all at once. Despite slowly releasing game features and designs, things are still bound to change particularly with MMOs, which have dozens and dozens of interconnected systems.
As you're undoubtedly aware that Mark Jacobs, Vice President and General Manager of Mythic Entertainment, revealed to MMORPG.com's Jon Wood earlier this month that four capital cities and four classes would be removed from Warhammer Online. The news quickly caused a stir among those following the game. Some stated the game's release should be pushed back to allow for the cities and classes to be included at launch. Others defended the move to release the information rather than springing it on customers after they had already purchased the game, as other companies have done in the past. Still others simply said they cancelled their pre-order or claim that they will not purchase the game.
Read the whole thing here.
Cheers,
Jon Wood
Managing Editor
MMORPG.com
Comments
Ya just go watch the interview with AOCs Erling whatever and see what company really knows what they re doing. Mythic is doing it right.
As long as it means the game will actually be polished enough and not feel like it's a beta then I completly agree
While dissapointed, I fully support the Mythic decision to release a better, if smaller, game. After the recent round of buggy, unfinished, broken POS MMORPG releases (you know who you are), I am looking forward to another Mythic title that has more quality and polish.
I'm a tad out of the loop....which classes were being cut? I agree with the cuts so as not to overstep their capabilities at launch. A solid MMO vs a broken one will surely keep me interested enough to spend countless hours playing to my heart's content.
I dont really care the citys being cut out of the game. If I remember correctly WoW has/had 3 capital citys too in the original game. As the other citys were less interesting most people gatherd in Ironforge rather than Stormwind or Darnassus. So having only 1 capital city at the beginning would be so much of a loss.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warhammer_Online <<-- overview of careers
Hope there is an open beta.
Lets hope this doesn't become a new marketing tactic for future MMOs. Promise the world. Screenshots, gameplay videos of characters, writeups on home cities.. Then just say we can't make them great so we are giving you this instead. Cheer me for my sage wisdom for not meeting my goals.. Meanwhile I will devote teams to go to gaming conferences, put out the word to hire GMs instead of more designers/ coders, divert programmers to create strange things like plungers which smash a player who strays off the remote corners of the gaming map and such..
Don't get me wrong, I am going to play the game. I expect a LOT from it now. I just can't wrap my puny brain around the fact they had the resources of EA behind them and they could not pull it off.
I just hope game companies don't overpromise/ underdeliver BUT admit the cuts before launch so lose little PR as a tactic.
There will be
fileplanet though
I would infinitely rather see them launch a good, solid game with well-rounded classes and zones than try to launch poorly developed classes or sparsely populated areas. How many of us were excited to play Vanguard with all the promised features only to find that they were either broken or poorly developed. Nothing is more frustrating than to have all the hype about a game and then have the reality not live up to the promise.
I applaud them for having the guts to step up well in advance of launch to say "Hey...we want this game to be great and these classes/cities would not have made the cut". The same people who are threatening to not buy the game are the same ones who would have been lighting up the forums with "My class suxxors" if they had launched a poorly developed class. Or they would have been screaming that "there aren't good enough quests/armor drops for my class" if they had launched the cities incomplete.
The developers made the right call. So your class that you have dreamed about playing since the dawn of Warhammer 40000 isn't in the game. Get over it and play something else until the next expansion comes out when suddenly a lost race of greenskins will be discovered on some island somewhere and the Choppas will be back in the game.
"One spell to mez them all,
One spell to charm them,
One spell to drain their mana,
and in the... Oh, HELL! Who's not assisting!?"
After what happened to a lot of us with our purchase of AOC I welcome the changes Mark announced. I'm also glad that Mark didn't wait until after the game was release. Imagine buying a game that had this great PVP idea, posted it all over their website, developers Youtubing the way everyone was going to fight these big battles only to buy the game, that had it posted all over the box and nothing, you have nothing, no real pvp, no big battles.
Now if Mark would have done that they would just put themselves in the same boat AOC is in now. 700K sold, 500K leave after first two months. It's better to have 250K to start and build to 1, 2 or 3 million from there, it's how Blizzard did it. Get a good basic game out there and build from that. People are getting bored with WOW, I know I am, and if you are upfront and honest with us we will buy your game and if the game is polished we will pay you 15 bucks a month to play it, O and we'll tell our friends who will tell their friends and so on.
Thanks Mark, like the way you handled this dude.
Peace
Tom Giblin got it right when he said,
Why does there appear to be so much animosity regarding cuts?
I believe that we as gamers have expectations of every MMO in development that have gone beyond reasonable.
The MMO community is a jaded bunch, so used to past failures that we're getting pickier and pickier about what we choose to spend our money on. Our cynicism with most gaming companies turns any potential bad news into a reaction of, "OH GOD, HERE WE GO AGAIN". But who could blame them for feeling cynical with the lack of the industry's innovation in the last several years?
Mythic, as the article stated, is doing something differently this time out: They announced the cuts early and spent a lot of time in face-to-face interviews at conventions explaining the process behind them. And the answers weren't canned either. This is a team that is not afraid to be honest with the public at a time when 99% of companies are downright scared of negative publicity.
It's that confidence -- not the "cheesy melodramatic marketing hype" confidence that Funcom's Erling Ellingson uses with Age of Conan, but the real, thoughtful confidence the Mythic team seems to bring -- that has rubbed off on the player base.
Let's hope people's expectations aren't so overblown that they get disappointed because a "great" or "excellent" game isn't "perfect".
I am totally in support of the cuts as well. I would rather see things done right and introduce the other later.. As stated earlier "quality over quantity" will make the game go further as a whole.
We need more quality releases to "help" restore some of that lost faith in the genre. Lets all hope Mythic can do it, and from what I read it seems as if they are going to at least try to do so.
While I do appreciate the honesty of Mythic in their disclosure of the cities and classes cut, I do not like that much their attempt to pass to us this news as partially good news.
I do not see anything good in having less cities and less classes.
Mark Jacobs argument was that as they cut 4 cities, they can concentrate on the last 2 to give us something awesome, but I do not see that as a positive, because WE were expecting to have 6 awesome cities, from what we had been told about.
So it is not that we pass from 6 good cities to 2 awesome cities, we pass from 6 awesome cities to 2 awesome cities, a net loss of 4. I would have appreciated more if Mark Jacobs would have not tried to sugar coat the pill by trying to make it seems as a good thing that the game is smaller.
The classes cut might also seem a small things, after all there are 20 classes left, right? WRONG!
2 of the classes removed are TANKS. anyone that has played mmorpgs knows well enough how important tanks are to the PvE (and PvP in WAR) groups. "But you still have 2 other tanks on your faction!"
Indeed, that is correct, but this is WARHAMMER, not "insert generic fantasy game here". It is one thing to allow the other races as an ally, it is another matter entirely to HAVE TO DEPEND on them to work as a group! The Imperial Army does not need Elves Swordmasters to go to battle! And neither should Imperial players have to depend on the charity of the other races to do fun stuff!
I'm sure countless people were looking forward to having all-Empire or All-Dark Elves guilds, now you can still have those guilds, but you won't have tanks in there. Also, how nice will it be starting as an Imperial character and not having tanks in the newbie areas? "But people can travel from the other areas as well!"
Yes, indeed they can! But! first we do not know how easy it is to do so, reports talks of a long run to move zone, second, WHY would they? Oh, if you convince a friend to play a Dwarf and come to play in human zones, well, great for you, but I do not forsee many dwarves/elves wanting to move to Empire areas right off the bat. They prolly want to see their own race areas first and who can blame them? I certainly can't.
Sure, later on things will get better, a few months down the road, prolly when the cut classes will be introduced (if they get introduced of course).
Finally, here we are NOT talking of content that was just in the air or a mere thought in the Devs' minds. These classes were not promises, they were reality. Many people played those classes at various game days, conventions and they were available in Beta (At least I think they were) for testing. Existing content was cut here.
In the end, the game will suffer for this. Maybe not much and surely it was the right decision but as we are not supposed to overexagerate this cut, let's also not discard it as minor, inconsequiental and just forget about it.
"If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, if you teach him how to fish, you feed him for a lifetime"
"In recent memory I can't recall any game developer announcing cuts to a game several months before it goes live."
DDO
Vanguard
Conan
Non MMO's:
The Witcher
Oblivion
Still a short list, but it does happen. Because as the correspondent said, there would be hell to pay, if they pulled a bait and switch after release.
Yeah I respect your opinion but one thing has been nagging the back of my mind. I've always thought that tanks in MMOs are unrealistic. Why should the giant beast attack you instead of 9 other friends who are hurting it? Because you have heavy armor and use some taunt, like calling its momma fat? Now, I'm not saying this will be the case, but it'd be cool if it was...listen to what you said.
"2 of the classes removed are TANKS. anyone that has played mmorpgs knows well enough how important tanks are to the PvE (and PvP in WAR) groups. "But you still have 2 other tanks on your faction!
Indeed, that is correct, but this is WARHAMMER, not "insert generic fantasy game here". It is one thing to allow the other races as an ally, it is another matter entirely to HAVE TO DEPEND on them to work as a group! The Imperial Army does not need Elves Swordmasters to go to battle! And neither should Imperial players have to depend on the charity of the other races to do fun stuff!"
Mythic is not inexperienced, this isn't their first MMO. They are more than aware of the problem of removing two tanks. Again, I can't confirm or deny this, but why should WAR have to be like "insert generic fantasy game here" when it comes to tanks? What if the PQ content and the low/mid-level PvE content for the races with missing tanks was not quite so tank dependant? I know, this is breaking the holy trinity of tank, DPS, and healer, but it'd 1) force DPS to stay on their feet, 2) force healers to stay on their feet, and 3) be more realistic.
I dunno, I guess just part of me hated sitting in the back in those WoW raids clicking three buttons (max) because I was DPS. I could pretty much close my eyes and do it (unless the boss had alot of AoE/reactionary attacks, which some did, but it still felt boring after a few times). Am I alone in this? Probably, haha. I don't like dying, but I like doing more than spamming a few attacks because one heavy armored guy is drawing all the attention away.
--------------------------------------
A human and an Elf get captured by Skaven. The rat-men are getting ready to shoot the first hostage with Dwarf-made guns when he yells, "Earthquake!" The naturally nervous Skaven run and hide from the imaginary threat. He escapes. The Skaven regroup and bring out the Elf. Being very smart, the Elf has figured out what to do. When the Skaven get ready to shoot, the Elf, in order to scare them, yells, "Fire!"
Order of the White Border.
From playing alot of MMOs I've come to the realization that if you have a solid concept, polish really doesn't matter. Atleast at launch. Patches are a developers best friend. Personally, if the WAR cities were soo horrible they needed to chop 4 of them before launch; then it wasn't worth it in the first place to include them..
I think it's going to be another AoC. Wayy to much hype put forth by the devs and not enough actual game...
You cant always make people happy...
I whole heartedly agree with the ppl who say quality over quantity. You ALWAYS hear of ppl bitching about how buggy the game is, how bad the performance of the game is and than go on into a tangent of /cancel threads on the forums cause of bugs an such.. Mythic has a wonderful background of releasing a polished game such as DAoC. If anyone has played that, you know how well they do things and how well the game will be. Im excited for War as I miss the days of castle sieges and massive battles that DAoC had. The "pride" for your own realm was amazing as you saw ppl flocking in massive packs to hold back the enemy invaders. God that was some fun stuff and Im glad its coming back!.
People always bitch when a game releases and then the company decides to not add stuff for some reason. I personally would rather have them do what Mythics doing by taking them out BEFORE the release and try to polish all of the classes/cities more. Than release them. People might bitch that its just for money. Its a business... Thats the whole point of making these games is to make money if you guys havnt already figured that out. Theres just different ways how companies go about doing it. Some might be more honest with what their doing while others(Funcom) may have no damn clue as to what their doing. I honestly thought Funcom was going to do a wonderful job with AoC after the many years of working on Anarchy Online. But I started to see a trend with their patches as they progressively got worse and worse. Performance went down the shitter... But thats a whole different story, Back to War.
And to those bitching about the class removal. Theres still 20 classes... Thats a lot, It may not be the classes you want in at release but still. 20 Classes is still more than most games out there.
All in all, Im glad what Mythics doing. Their being responsible and letting the community know whats going on behind closed doors. Many other companies wouldnt do what their doing and just hold onto it until release. Im not this so called "Fanboi" nor am I a "troll". Im just stating my own personal opinion about their decision. By the way, Those fuckin terms fanboi and troll are so fuckin lame.. Grow the fuck up for christ sake.
The problem is how long "post launch" is. Weeks, months, without 4 cities? Doesn't sound great to me...
The only difference here is that WAR is saying their game is incomplete, while Funcom kept it a secret. While I applaud Mythic for their honesty, it is still an incomplete game...I'm not a fanboy, not a troll, but I realize that when a game is missing four cities, that is NOT good.
What about other things? What if there is more than just cities missing? This just leads to more speculation overtime.
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In memory of Laura "Taera" Genender. Passed away on Aug/13/08 - Rest In Peace; you will not be forgotten
i love the posts from all the silly little ants
lets see - lets put a thimble full of sugar water over here (marketing jibber-jabber about being honest and open)
lets put a thimble full of acid over here (the real truth - we are releasing this game according to schedule so lets chop up the game since we cant get these parts done and poilshed in time)
now lets see where the whittle ants flock
"oh, yes - yummy yummy, how very sweet - thank you mythic we wuv you too - we didn't really want all those silly cities and those horrible classes that you cut for us anyway"
"I am in the beta. There is a beta."
That's all I can say about that. What I can talk about is my recent experience with AoC. Many people played it, and enjoyed it, as long as there was content. I levelled slow, and took my time, experimenting with classes, so I hit the brick wall late in the game. At level 63, I went from two or three levels a day to a level every day or two. I picked up the last of my quests between 60 and 62, and when they were done, that was the end of the road until I hit 70. What did I do for all of those levels? Grind. Hours and hours and hours of grinding. At 70, I picked up a whole crapload of quests from Kheshatta, did the 5 that weren't bright, blood red, and guess what? I'm back to grinding again.
Well, not entirely. I haven't logged in two weeks. I can't say why, but let it suffice to say that I'm distracted. I've found something much, much more enjoyable to do with my time.
What I learned from AoC is what I should've learned from Vanguard. On paper, something can sound incredibly amazing, but when the developers fail to execute, and instead of cutting the content that isn't any good, they fast track broken and downright missing content into the game. Developers either have too much pride to say what they have sucks, or they've oversold the hype, and are backed into a corner of failing to deliver, or losing 100 boatloads of cash.
I applaud this decision. I can only speculate to say if it was the right one or not. For the last year or so, I've looked forward to a Choppa. I wanted to chop chop chop with a fun dual-wield melee class. I'll have to learn to make do. At first I considered cancelling my Collector's Edition pre-order (that rings in at about 100 bucks) because I felt the game was going to the crapper. However, after much consideration, I recalled AoC's developers and the PR-approved lies they sold us in the last hours before launch. Every answer to every question sounded like it had been parsed and double-parsed by PR and marketing. They were sugary lies. Instead of finishing the DX10 client, building tons of new quests for high-level content, and fixing classes like the Dark Templars (that have been broken in the exact same way since beta), the guys in Norway have been busy building a broken PvP system that is going to be yet another broken and poorly implemented (rushed) game mechanic (which is already evident on the test live forums).
So, coming from a fanboy that swallowed every bittersweet pill FC sold me, I have made too many excuses for the BS that SmilesCo put out there, with the expectations they have that as long as you keep lying, and saying the fixes are coming next Wednesday, people will keep playing (and paying).
If cutting some content early keeps players from hitting the upper echelons of WAR only to find that the game falls into a black hole, then they should go for it. However, Mythic has to deliver on their promise that it makes the game better. Otherwise, it goes from being a faithful promise that builds trust between developer and player to a little white lie that keeps growing and growing until, ultimately, the game fails.
Up to this point, we don't have developers that are involved in a discussion with their playerbase. HappyInc promised to do that, and what they delivered is a poor CSR staff, and tons of feedback from players, but no responses from the devs. They promised to deliver changes that the playerbase wanted, but instead, it's a one way street with communication. Players give them TONS of insight and assistance on what needs to be fixed, but never get a reply, a response, or even acknowledgement that they can Eff-off. I don't feel, with these honest but risky decisions, that Mythic is giving this brick wall approach to the developer/player conversation. They're being forthright about what's going on during the development process, and I'm sure that it feels a little strange to us all. We're all so used to being lied and marketed to, that it feels a little odd to get the honest inside scoop.
Let's all have faith, at least until launch. If it's bad, it won't take long for us to see it. But, if it's good, we'll know that right away as well.
I wish this wasn't so long, but I had to find a way to say what needed to be said without saying anything more than,
"I'm in the beta. There is a beta"
_____________________________
Ham sandwiches and roadblocks are a bit better than total destruction.
If there was no media about this game and it just came out of no where without the cities and classes, you'd say "Damn! This game is good!".
Instead they let you know whats going on, they told you what they hope to accomplish, then they had some troubles so they cut some things to make the game better overall and you're pissed beyond belief. Game companies need to not be so open with what they are trying to accomplish, all it does it fuel the fire of people who want to hate things.
BTW, great blog post Jon Wood.
Another person who doesnt actually read anything. I remember correctly that Mythic stated that the cut classes and cities would not be in at LAUNCH, yea you hear me right at LAUNCH. it has been stated that the cut classes and cities would continue to be polished and fleshed out AFTER launch and at the very least would be part of a free content update AFTER launch. So quit your worrying.
Are you *insert insult here*?
The game is not incomplete, all of the gameplay features are still intact, you can still raid, craft, city siege, PQ, ToK, quest, RVR, shall i continue? The only thing you wont be able to do AT LAUNCH is siege more than 1 city and you get 4 less classes, yet still have 20!! TWENTY! Also all of the race specific zones are still intact, instead of going to your home city, you go to one city.
Again they have said that they will continue to polish and work on the cut cities and classes after launch and at the very least will be part of a future content update. its not like your going to be city sieging at launch anyways, jesus.
so how is this game any different then any other new MMO? One thing i already dislike is the 80's style graphics...lol comon..there is some very poor graphics in this game, feels like i am playing a game that was already made about 4 years ago or so....nothing new or interesting with War...they should have just teamed up with Blizzard to make a game...