Warhammer Online RIP

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Randin

Trakanon Raider
1,922
872
The sad thing about this is the fact that the IP has so much potential, but it was never fully realized with Mythics implementation.
After all these years, I'm still kinda bummed the IP got yanked from the last guys, and given to Mythic. I have no clue if they actually had it in them to pull it off, but the basic concept was really awesome: a more sandboxy game that was based more on the WHRPG, than the PvP translation of WHFB Mythic produced.
 

Kharza-kzad_sl

shitlord
1,080
0
I think if they had checked what people were doing right before quitting, most would be dead in lava in tor anroc. The rest were dead after being pulled through a keep door by that ability that didn't check LOS.
 

Sabbat

Trakanon Raider
1,831
755
I really, really want to post up a thesis on this game, it's the sole reason I bothered to actually register an account back on FoH that didn't get approved until just before the big shit show because it was the first time, in a very long time that at least someone didn't have the same experience/opinion as I had within 5 posts (I had lurked since 2000-2001).
 

Beef Supreme_sl

shitlord
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0
tumblr_me9q1e24d61qc8t1to1_400.gif
 

vishnu_sl

shitlord
50
0
Looks like another game I never played getting 86'd. Must have been total shit. Guess it's time to make some room for more shitty MMOs
 

RobXIII

Urinal Cake Consumption King
<Gold Donor>
3,616
1,680
I really, really want to post up a thesis on this game, it's the sole reason I bothered to actually register an account back on FoH that didn't get approved until just before the big shit show because it was the first time, in a very long time that at least someone didn't have the same experience/opinion as I had within 5 posts (I had lurked since 2000-2001).
Now I'm curious: What was different to you?
 

Dulldain_sl

shitlord
210
0
The end is near, go back for free.
http://ageofreckoning.warhammeronlin...e/Parting-Gift

"To give Warhammer Online a proper sendoff we are opening the game to anyone free of charge that has or had an account in good standing starting October 31st, 2013. We will be adding new NPC?s to the game in order to power up your characters as well as other unique experiences for everyone to enjoy as we say goodbye to Warhammer Online over the next few weeks. So please join us and help say goodbye to Warhammer Online in one last big WAAAGH!"
 

Erronius

Macho Ma'am
<Gold Donor>
16,456
42,340
It sounds like GW wasn't getting anything back and had no desire to renew the license for a WOW clone game.
I like to stay somewhat up to date on various things like GW, and I ran across some of this a while back while reading random stuff:

Games Workshop abandons fantasy for plain speaking - Telegraph

Games Workshop, which makes and sells fantasy games such as Warhammer and Lord of the Rings and model figures with which to play them, posted pre-tax profits of ?19.5m for the 53 weeks to June 3 2012. But royalty income from licences sold to computer games companies fell ?2.5m to ?1.0m.

?We expected a significant decline,? says Mr Kirby, who says the traditional computer games industry has been ?changed utterly and permanently? by the arrival of smartphones and iPads.

?We switched as fast as we could,? he confesses. ?But [we] were limited by the constraints of the deals we already had in place.?
 

Zaphid

Trakanon Raider
5,862
294
I think GW turned their attention to tablets when they realized they can nickle and dime people there just like with their tabletop games. Any consumer will tell you that they want a 20-60$ game where they can build any army and battle against a friend, but it's exactly what they won't do, because that would kill their whole portfolio, just like WotC won't release another edition of the 97 (?) Magic game, because free deckbuilding.
 

kitsune

Golden Knight of the Realm
624
35
2) Some genius decided that every class should be totally unique. The three most OP classes in the game were on the order side. They learned from their mistakes and mirrored the classes in swtor.
actually, the imperial versions were stronger at the start. Notable example: Shock vs Project, Inquisitor/Consular abilities. One was instant, other one was not. More similarities that I can't remember now, but empire was slightly better and obviously way more popular, causing population imbalance on servers
 

axeman_sl

shitlord
592
0
At release, the destro classes were much better as a whole. Order had several classes that were completely worthless until like the second round of buffs. Shadow warrior, engineer, that dwarf priest one, archmage... frankly the only two order classes that weren't average or worse at launch were bright wizard and ironbreaker. The former was slightly better than its counterpart (sorceress) while the latter had no counterpart class at launch, it came out a few months later. Aside from those, basically every destruction class was significantly better than its order mirror.

It caused almost every server to start out completely dominated by destruction because their classes were simply so much better that they won most of the PvP. Out of the worst six classes at release, all were order except for squig herder. Destro had insanely broken shit like witch-elf instakills, unkillable black orcs, DoK which beat literally every class 1v1, and that magnet pull thing the magus could do which the engineer couldn't do until later on. The few cool things available to order classes were extremely situational, like the ironbreaker knockbacks which were good in one specific scenario because it had lava. Destro classes had all the group PvP synergies and the mechanics that worked well in the zergfest environment that was WAR PvP, such as the fact that the marauder pull was just basically death grip - instant and unavoidable - while the white lion pull required your pet to be alive and make it to the enemy lines which was nearly impossible because there were six layers of AoE plastered everywhere on the field, and then the skill missed like 30% of the time because it was a pet. The destro classes were just so much more complete.

This changed after a while, but the damage was done by then and there were like two servers where order weren't basically non-existent. Almost every EU server was 80% destro after the first month. This is why they overbuffed the order classes. My entire alliance disbanded because nearly every player who hadn't quit the game instead rerolled destro. Everyone who was remotely serious about PvP either started or rerolled as destruction, half the order classes were utterly worthless and the races also looked like shit and had useless racial abilities. The high elf ones were terrible for every high elf class.

Even the destro gear was better because the resists it gave were actually effective against the stronger order classes while the order gear gave resists against the weakest destro classes, like a piece being plastered with elemental resist which for order only worked against magus which was about as offensive a caster as Everquest's enchanter, while the equivalent destro piece was vastly better because order's elemental-based class was the bright wizard, its main nuker. Each side's gear sets had an emphasis on two resist types and the order gear often had half of its item budget wasted on the resist type that protected against the destro healers while the destro gear had resists against the classes you'd actually want it for. A lot of the order sets had spirit resist as the main stat which none of the destro offensive classes had as their main damage type while the destro sets had elemental resist which was crucial against the strongest order class. Order also had no dual-wielding class at release while destro had two. Witch hunter could use a sword and a pistol but couldn't attack with both at the same time, and shadow warrior could just use a one-handed sword and literally had no off-hand slot which was a huge loss of stats and DPS. There were so many little details like that which favored the destruction side.
 
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Kinda sad and nostalgic for my Warrior Priest (was in Ruin on the Open RVR server Dark Crag) so I checked out the forums. WTF isthis sticky thread?

"I wanted to say some hurtful things about WAR's management right here. The fact is, though, they've never so much as laid a finger on the forums and certainly have only lied to me. Hey, they lied to all of us. My only request is that they not be set in an undeserved positive light by the gaming media over the coming days.

Note that Carrie may have posted a goodbye sticky on the forums, but I had her removed from the mod list months ago. She isn't part of the WAR project and should not be pretending that she is.

I'll see you all in-game over the final few months, I just wanted to make a point of what happens when you cross your lead moderator with no backup plans. "
So the lead moderator quit, put up a sticky talking shit about the company, admits to removing mod powers from the game's lead developer, and that thread has been sitting in the general forumfor a month? Truly nobody at Bioware gives 2 shits about Warhammer. Wow ....
frown.png
 

Qhue

Trump's Staff
7,465
4,413
The game had a lot of style to it and the whole notion of the Public Quest was pretty damn revolutionary at the time.

Too much of the world was predicated on assumptions that there would be a roughly steady state population of players of both factions throughout three parallel levelling paths. Their method of beta testing, whereby they would lock players into a certain level range and/or faction subset provided them with misleading notions as to how the game might work in terms of population balancing.
 

Sabbat

Trakanon Raider
1,831
755
Axeman, you've got some massive blinders on in that write up. There's so much wrong with it, it would take me hours to write it all up, plus several more hours to find the links required to prove it.

Order classes at release where stronger than Destruction classes or at the very minimum their equals. The exception to this is Witch Elf vs. Witch Hunter in which (lol) the Witch Elf pretty much shat all over the Hunter.

The reason why Destruction dominated the WAR early game is all down to style. It's something that anyone that knows the Warhammer Universe could have told you. You had a choice between pansies and poofs with stupid hats, or badarse muthafuckers that eat babies. It's little wonder than Destruction outnumbered Order for the first few months.

I also have a hard time taking you seriously when you say that Black Guards were the same as Ironbreakers, but just released later.
 

Vardisk_sl

shitlord
139
2
Best part was making all the Order class variants be stronger than the Chaos variants because... Chaos outnumbered Order, so they needed an edge in RvR? Nevermind battlegrounds were even numbers of players. So when everyone rerolled Order and RvR swung massively back the other way, they rebalanced the classes right? Nope! Or most of the Order classes being shorties, so their knockback abilities were angled up and launched Chaos players 30 yards. Chaos knockbacks were angled down though, so you'd be lucky if you sent an Order player one foot. Great mechanic! Now lets give every single class knockbacks and throw them all in lava arenas with tiny bridges everywhere!

And sure Mythic Seconds were terrible, but even beyond that, your abilities were just super unresponsive. Though they tried to hide that even more by making your ability animations go off every single time you hit the button, regardless of anything actually happening. Whiff, whiff, whiff, whiff!

Tried so hard to like the game. Great game world, great art, lot of great new ideas. But centering the entire game around PvP where you're fucked no matter what you do because the control responsiveness blew and the sides were super unbalanced. By level 30 it was just aggravating as hell, and my whole crew gave up.