It’s been a while since I posted last, because I decided that my blog would not be yet another news blog, where I write a bit about every single thing that happens, ever.
This is a spot for me to say what I want, and if you have my blog bookmarked, a place for you to read it.
If you like.
As of June 2010, I declare Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning a successful MMORPG.
Let me make it clear what I just said. I did not declare it a successful PvP MMORPG. It is the single best PvP MMORPG to come out since DAOC, that’s my opinion, but it’s just too much game to lump it all into one I’m also not saying that it’s a successful PvE MMORPG, because if you only PvE, I can’t imagine it’s very good.
I believe WAR is successful because it isn’t the best total game on the market for your general MMORPG player. Mythic wanted WAR to be a little less niche than DAOC ended up being, and let’s face it, they failed at that goal. That’s the only goal at which they really failed. Before anyone cites “and I heal, and I heal”, you have the potential to do serious damage at any given time. Your argument is not valid. My argument is not invalid, yours is. No you. Paul Barnett will fight you.
WAR has hundreds and hundreds of hours worth of content. Is most of it kinda grindy? Yeah, why not? You seem to have no problem remembering older games and talking about how big the grind was BUT it was a great game… well, stop your whining. 40 ranks are content. 80 renown ranks are content. Scenario weapons are content. Wards are content. Content does not mean little places you go into with your warband and spend 3 hours in a night killing heavily scripted bosses after reading about exactly how to complete it. RvR doesn’t work that way.
RvR is player driven. You. Are. Content.
Running into an RvR lake and taking the BOs and Keeps and waiting for the flips is the skeleton of the ORvR experience. It’s not THE ORvR experience. There are other players out there. You don’t know exactly what they’re going to do next, you don’t know exactly how many there are. What you do know is that it’s your job to make sure that they don’t ruin your day. If you’re complaining about the time you spend banging on a Keep door, you quite obviously just don’t understand this.
When WAR launched in later 2008, it was clearly overhyped. That didn’t mean that over a million people needed to buy the game and be disappointed, largely because they aren’t even real fans of RvR. Most of those million players aren’t playing the game today. Over 90% of them never should have tried the game in the first place, although I’m sure the initial money flow was nice. Those are the same players who flock to every game on release day, rip it to shreds, and laugh when it dies a year later. They were the reason that the game looked so grim a year ago today.
Let’s not forget that there were problems with the game. Patch after patch of huge lists of fixes were Mythic’s answer to this. Some things went unfixed, let’s be real about it. They were. It was frustrating, but what people need to take away from the launch of WAR is that every MMORPG that you play from launch is going to be as bad or worse than WAR. I’d be happy with saying that most games are worse at launch.
Server after server was shut down around a year ago. Our population obviously dropped by quite a bit. This does not mean that WAR, in the end, was not going to end up a success. It means that the kids that came over from WoW and whatnot weren’t meant to be here. We don’t really want them either.
That’s the thing. WAR is 100% a community driven game. Driven on our money, yes, but that’s not what I mean. It relies on us to have the fire inside of us that causes fights to break out in ORvR. It relies on us to spread word about how far the game has come since launch, for more people to come. We’re not going to get commercials with Ozzy in them unless Ozzy wants to buy a commercial to promote the game.
WAR today is a great experience.
You cannot get in-game and point a finger at the screen, running around going “there’s a bug”… “there’s another bug”… “there’s three more”. You cannot do it. I promise you this.
We have 4 servers. Every one of them is really balanced and packed full of players. The servers are incredibly stable, I haven’t been in a zone crash in at least 6 months. We have great communities, which usually are in the form of Alliances. Realm balance is incredible… not finished being balanced, but incredible.
We have PvE dungeons that are very long and take many runs to get the items you need. They’re really well scripted for the most part, and they’re some of the more difficult PvE I’ve ever come across in a MMORPG.
Finally, players are returning who quit in the early months and are very happy with the progress that the game has made. They’re staying… with a game that they swore sucked.
I could go on and on, but I won’t for the sake of my post being too long already.
All of that being said, let’s not forget the men and women from the Mythic team whose jobs fell in the line of battle while the game was improving, and becoming the success that it is today. A lot of them lost their jobs because of greed, like when EA bought Playfish right after letting go of a large portion of Mythic’s force. Many of them lost their jobs because of the initial sales vs. the amount of players that stuck.
No matter how much more successful the game becomes in the future, we cannot forget and stop honoring those people.
Gett are discussing. 
Saga, 
Jason, 
The Skuz Blogs 
Gett 02:32 on June 18, 2010 Permalink |
Amen. Its funny how even the trolls research so much that they even visit blog posts to spew their negativity. If I don’t like something I don’t play it. I may watch and see updates.
To go around and follow every post just to criticize, I just don’t get it?
Boruks 16:51 on June 29, 2010 Permalink |
I don’t understand most of the people that feel the need to bash a game they no longer play. Maybe its because it failed the hype they made of the game in how they wanted to be something it really wasn’t suppose to be?
BTW, I recently came back to the game after stopping after launch. I am like you in that I actually regret ever leaving the game. It really is fun and a lot better than it was at launch and I find myself glued to the PC fighting when I should be in bed sleeping, which makes the next work day all the more worst for being so tired.
While I am currently still subbed to both this and to WoW (don’t hate), WAR is tipping the scale more and more it’s way with the pure fun I get from ever changing fights.