Warhammer Feeling the Crunch

Is this the first sign of danger for the release of WAR? I’ve been concerned about the state and how WAR would be received for some time now (not based on my beta experience, but rather on the still-very-short development cycle.)  This game is still really only in it’s third year of development. This is not usually when a triple-a MMO is released.  They have been working hard to get the game ready and released for a while now, and some information is finally forthcoming.

According to Mark Jacobs in an MMORPG.com interview;

A number of months ago, we sat down and looked at where we were with our Capital Cities and we looked at what we were doing with Altdorf and Inevitable, we looked at the Greenskin home, the Dwarf home and we went ‘there’s an awful lot to do here and there are some issues‘.

we decided to focus our energies on two capital cities; one for Order and one for Destruction, and make them fabulous. Not good, not great, but fabulous.

We wanted to make our Capital Cities the best cities in any MMO. We think we’re doing that, but it came at a price and that price is that the other cities aren’t going in the game right now.

In other words; “We’re running out of time.”

I’m not too mad at them about this, although I suspect that many of the “hurry up and get to level cap” style players are going to be chomping at the proverbial bit.  This also plays into the “is anyone going to ever ship a reasonably complete MMO again?” concerns that are out there.

(Starting to look like the correct answer to that one is “No.”)

In addition to the four missing capital cities (is there just going to be a vacant lot where the cities are going to go?) there will apparently be some other things missing from the game at launch that most people were expecting.  Evidently there will be four fewer careers (classes) available at launch than were originally announced.  More Jacobs quotes;

“Four of the classes that we’ve been working on, we just couldn’t get great,” he continued. “We looked at them and we said these careers are just not great… and we tried, and they weren’t coming out well.”

This left them with a decision similar to the one that they were left with for the cities, do they continue and try to get it, or do they shelve them? In the end, after looking at the metric data that they have been collecting throughout the beta process, they saw that there were four careers that just weren’t working for the players.

“We tried,” Jacobs said, “we tried to see if we could make them better and we just couldn’t make them great. So we had a choice. Do we put in some non-great careers just because they are iconic, or we cut them out and put them in post-launch if we can get them right, or do we not put them in at all?”

Those Classes?

Choppa (Greenskin)
Hammerer (Dwarf)
Blackguard (Dark Elf)
Knight of the Blazing Sun (Empire)

This means the removal of two tanks and two melee DPS classes.

“I wish we didn’t have to do it,” Mark said, “I really do. Unlike the capital cities [which provided a silver lining in the end], I can honestly say that I really wish we didn’t have to cut them out, but it’s better for them to be cut out than to have classes that aren’t great and that we would spend more time trying to make them great post-launch than we should have to.”

In the end, the team felt that adding careers into the game that weren’t up to their standards would have hurt not only the game and the company, but the players as well. Trying to fix classes (that are already in the game) post-launch can cause a boatload of nightmares as players not only of the careers involved, but of other careers as well. Many MMO players have experienced the nerfing and other annoyances that are often involved in a great deal of tinkering with an existing class, and Mythic didn’t want to put anyone through that experience unnecessarily.

“We’ve been down that path before and we’ve seen other companies go down the exact same path. We’re not going down that path. We’ve launched too many other MMOs and seen too many other guys go ‘it’s not quality, it’s quantity’… Bad move, especially in an RvR game.”

“Of all of the news in this interview, this is the worst. Having to cut these guys out, even though it’s the right decision, I am really sorry that we have to do it. I truly am. I don’t like going to the guys and telling them ‘hey sorry, we’ve got to cut these guys out. They’re just not good enough but that was what we had to do.”

I’m really starting to get concerned that WAR is going to be a (relative) market flop.  Not because of the quality of the game.  Not because of anything I have seen in beta. I’m just concerned because I’m hearing way too many people put their eggs in this basket.  They (EA Mythic) have really put themselves in a bad position with all the hyperbole and the aggressive promotion of the game from a very early stage.  I’m hoping that their strategy is going to work, and that when they ship there will be enough game there.  Honestly, I wish they would push it back to next year, get things done, and avoid the WotLK pressures that will go with a 2008 release.

I’m not calling a fail here but I do want to say that I’m starting to see more red flags than I am comfortable with. I think the game is going to be really good, I just don’t know how they are going to live up to their own hype. Add to that the fact that they are removing the class I was planning on playing, and this news just bums me out a little.

This is beginning to look like just one more MMO that is going to promise a lot and then ship too early.  In that past, that hasn’t worked out too well.

What do you all think?