WAR deathwatch: Mythic backpedals on Expansion and new Classes

[ManaByte]

First, Mythic was working on a WAR expansion and new Classes (aside from the Blackguard and Knight of the Blazing Sun):
http://www.massively.com/2008/10/28/mythic-working-on-expansion-and-new-new-classes/



Now, Mythic says no expansion:
http://www.massively.com/2008/12/07/mythic-putting-off-expansion-work-to-focus-on-live-game/

"We are not pushing an XPack out the door at the expense of WAR. And once we begin work on an XPack, it's going to take us quite a while to do it."

http://www.massively.com/2008/12/11/warhammer-developers-explain-their-expansion-new-content-philoso/

Translation: Wrath of the Lich King came out, WAR's subs dropped so sharply that EA is now looking at a new grave next to Earth and Beyond, Motor City Online, and The Sims Online.

[Phoenix Dark]

You sure take pleasure in watching this game suffer. I kinda feel bad for them. Looked like a good game, was backing up a respected IP...but at the end of the day it tried to play in WoW's backyard. I just don't see a fantasy type MMO having good success while WoW is on top of the mountain. Something more sci-fi based - if done will with interesting new ideas (or a good IP)

[Fragamemnon]

WAR's still way, way better than WoW if you like to fight players in a meaningful manner. WoW has always been a pile of shit game for PvP and WotLK just made the bad joke worse.

Server populations are fine. My server has a healthy (and by that, I mean hundreds) of people RvRing every night.

[Fragamemnon]

btw 1 million copies sold is the new deathwatch. someone leper manabyte, thanks.

[demi]

The WAR guys are very nervous, this I will confirm

[ManaByte]

The WAR guys are very nervous, this I will confirm

They should be. Didn't WotLK sold like 5M units since its launch? WAR will never get anywhere near 40% of that.

And this is EA, who has shut down more MMOs than any other company. Mythic should never have sold out.

[Draft]

What I've read is 100k active subs. That's sustainable. Now, who knows what sustainable really means.

The only dudes defending WOW at this point are the hardcore DAOC fans. Bottomline is that the game had great PVP, but everything else ranged from merely acceptable to completely half assed. Performance was the worst culprit. For a game that barely looked better than WOW, it ran about 3 times worse. That's just unbearable.

[Fragamemnon]

If Mythic didn't sell out they wouldn't exist. They were never able to really cauterize the Trials of Atlantis hemorrhaging from the DAoC days, and the killing off of  Imperator put them in a position where they didn't have the capital to ramp up a new game.

A million or two subscriber base-something that isn't unreasonable, the game has been selling really well-for WAR would be a decent profit center for EA.

[Fragamemnon]

Last I heard they were over 700,000 subs and over a million copies sold worldwide. The numbers I see on my server certainly jive with that.

(btw, WAR has no free trials or anything)

also:

you want good, well balanced arena pvp: guild wars
good large-scale and persistent PvP: warhammer
good counter-strike like pvp battlegrounds: warhammer

bad class balance full of WILD IMBA in arenas and grinding for honor in battlegrounds: wow

WoW is a tremendous PvE game. It's what it was built for, and it shines like a brilliant star in that regard. It just falls flat on its damn face the minute people fight each other.

[Draft]

A lot of servers are ghost towns.

I bet they have more than 100k, but no more than 500k subscribers. That would be my rough estimate based on gut feeling.

[Fragamemnon]

500k-ish seems about on-spot, maybe more since I don't know what the continental EU scene is like (where Warhammer is a bigger franchise than it is in the US). The game runs a LOT better now than it does in release, though they still have one terribly nasty bug that's sort of goofing things up in fortress fights.

SPEAKING OF ALL THIS WARHAMMER, DID I MENTION DAWN OF WAR 2's MP EMBARGO DROPS TOMORROW? Now there's a game we can all believe in.

[Draft]

Well then, let us speak no more of the decaying husk that is Warhammer Online, and instead turn our attention to a bold new entry in the real time strategy genre.

Looting a +3 Bolter of Tenacity from a dead Tyranid feels equal parts wrong and right.

[Fragamemnon]

the preorder bonuses for dawn of war 2 are virtual loot.

from what I have seen of the squad leader paperdolls the game looks like it will have more itemization and more character customization than bioware's lastest RPG. 

I'm pretty sure that competitive multiplayer is going to be basically a team-oriented COH-style game  with warhammer 40k weapons and races. I'll probably have to keep soulstorm (which I never thought would be my most played game of 2008, turned out it was!) installed after DOW2 comes out for a more traditional game.

I do hope they keep DoW's hyper-agressive style around. One of the best things about DoW is that you generally fight nearly constantly from 1:30 on.

[Draft]

This sounds crazy, but I would be kind of hyped if online was persistent. Like, you have a squad or army or whatever, and you level them up by playing. So instead of you just earning a rank based on wins/losses, you have like a level 17 squad, and this squad's gear is just better than a level 1 squad, so the matchmaking puts you up against people of similar levels.

Seems like a decent enough fit for a game so loot obsessed.

[Fragamemnon]

This sounds crazy, but I would be kind of hyped if online was persistent. Like, you have a squad or army or whatever, and you level them up by playing. So instead of you just earning a rank based on wins/losses, you have like a level 17 squad, and this squad's gear is just better than a level 1 squad, so the matchmaking puts you up against people of similar levels.

Seems like a decent enough fit for a game so loot obsessed.

I'm hoping that there's persistent, closed server co-op play that is basically a sort of mashup between Diablo and Dawn of War-you fill up the game with the number of people, pick a map and a challenge level (higher difficulty=better loot),  and go to town. Squad leaders level up, with like an absurdly high level cap.

For persistent competitive multiplayer I hope it actually looks at the way the Tabletop game works and it's points system. You can bring in that FC with absurd epic wargear, but it'll mean that you might not be able to bring in more than a couple of land speeders for vehicles. At the start of the match you can choose your wargear and squad loadout based on the opponents you are facing and the map you are playing on-much like you can in Age of Empires 3, whose home city system is the very model by which competitive RTS multiplayer persistence should be build from.

[Phoenix Dark]

Why do you think WoW is horrendously broken? I don't like pvp but then again WG is fun.

PVE is where it's at concerning my tastes

[Fragamemnon]

Why do you think WoW is horrendously broken?

The PvE isn't broken, on the contrary it is some of the finest gaming ever put to code, seriously.
The PvP has a sort of original sin to it-it's based off of class abilities and designs that were made for PvE-and it really shows, IMO. Some things that are fine for mobs should never be used on a player.

[Phoenix Dark]

hence my initial disappointment when Taunt didn't do shit in pvp haha

[Draft]

Maybe the persistent thing in DOW2 could be your loot. And then you could have that sort of, do you want to play 500 pt games or 2000 pt games.