Warhammer Online Delayed Until 2008

To the surprise of almost no one, EA Mythic has announced that Warhammer Online won't be out until next year. Eurogamer reports: "'Since our acquisition by EA, we have been afforded many wonderful development opportunities and we plan to take full advantage of everything that is available. This includes taking several additional months to make the best MMORPG possible,' Mythic's Mark Jacobs wrote in a community newsletter." They're going to use the extra time to go back over the Dwarven and Greenskin areas to implement new ideas they've had since working on the original content. With the successful launch of LOTRO this week, and the continuing crash and burn of Vanguard , MMOG developers seem to be wising up to the importance of a really good launch.

Sounds like a Blizzard

You know, Blizzard is infamous for releasing games when they deem them ready, and not shoving them out the door unprepaired. Remember starcraft's release date problems? Remember World of Warcraft's? I really wish more game companies would follow this trend, releasing finished and high quality games rather than shoving stuff out the door and hoping to patch it later.

Re:Sounds like a Blizzard

I know there's a Duke Nukem Forever joke in there somewhere, but I didn't get it finished so far.

Return soon for a new release date of the joke.

Re:Sounds like a Blizzard

There's that quote by Miyomoto: "A delayed game is eventually good; a bad game is bad forever." Some companies, I think, started to realize: "Hey, with patching capability on most consoles and PCs, we can release a game bad and make it good eventually!" The trouble is this never works the way they want it to. If the game is buggy when you ship it, people will always remember it as a buggy mess, and if it's bad, people will not give it a second chance.

Then there's another category of games: self-consciously shitty exploitation games. A lot of EA's brands fall into this category, for instance. They develop because the marketers say that there is no way Madden 08 cannot make a profit, and they ship because anyone muscleheaded enough to buy it will buy it bugs and all.

Is there a market for this?

I'm wondering if there's even a market out there for all of the "soon-to-be-released" MMOs/MMORPGs that are currently being developed. Given the amount of time that needs to be put into any of these games from a player's standpoint, is there room for another WoW? It seems as though when developers saw the subscriber numbers and cash that WoW was bringing into Blizzard, they all jumped into development of a "new ground-breaking MMORPG!"

Er...?

Why couldn't they of made a Warhammer 40K MMORPG first? In my opinion it's setting is more compelling than more dwarves and elves. Do they want to be blown out of the water by the juggernaut that is WoW?

Read between the lines

From TFA:

"Since our acquisition by EA, we have been afforded many wonderful development opportunities..."

Translation:
"Since we were assimilated, EA has separated our talented team and distributed them amongst several teams of numerous EA projects so that we can try and fix their problems. By the time we get back to working on OUR project, we'll be so burned out by EA politics, unrealistic timelines and 100 hour work weeks that what we have for Warhammer right now will be what we ship in 2008. We'll let the live product be the beta test and patch it every month, the EA way."

I hope the best for the Mythic buys, but according to history everything EA touches turns to crap.

Or maybe...

Maybe, though this is fairly far fetched and borderline insane talk. The development team looked at what they did and looked at World of Warcraft and said 'You know, these things are really similar. I mean I know Warhammer has been around a lot longer than Warcraft, and technically they're ripping us off, but the majority of the population doesn't know that. You know.. Maybe we should just do something different. Why not Warhammer 40k? That'd be interesting'

dwarven district?

Will I be able to transfer my dwarf character from WoW to WarHammer? I've been a long time bf2 player and EA tends to create products and fix everything except the actual bugs people complain about, the way i see it warhammmer 40k is just around the corner just like bf2 and bf2142

Warhammer 40K MMORPG

FYI, there will be a Warhammer 40K MMO. There is a story http://www.gamespot.com/news/6166560.html?sid=6166 560 [gamespot.com] here about it.

Happy

I'm happy they went ahead and delayed this so that they could layer on the extra polish. More game companies (including EA themselves) should take note.

Vanguard vs WoW

Vanguard is bugged, deep but unfinished. WoW is shallow but polished.

But that is not what sets them apart. The biggest difference is the playerbase. In many ways it reminds me of the difference between Operation Flashpoint and Counterstrike. Both are military first person shooters with counterstrike clearly the more polished easier to get into version. Yet if you desire to play with people whose balls have actually descended your choice is clear.

I tried Vanguard (Sony is one of the few MMO companies willing to accomadate non-credit card owners. Blizzard thanks to its huge success is lucky that stores stock its gamecards) and was amazed to find that you did not need to join a RP-preffered server to be able to be in a world were the majority of players do not use numbers in their chat.

In fact, the majority of players in Vanguard use plain english, are polite and helpfull and even those who still got crap nicks like 'warlord' at least manage to spell it correctly.

If you ever played WoW, well. You know.

Pity then that the game is so fucking bugged. In between the bugs it is actualy fun, and has a lot to offer. I might even say that it is a ton of fun, compared to wow's 1 kilo of fun. Pity that vanguard also gives you two tons of bugs while WoW has by now reduced it to a few grams.

So why am I not playing WoW? Two reasons, the population but mostly the kill X till Y drops and X turns out to be a number just short of infinity. Vanguard improves on both counts but geez gods, FIX THE BUGS.

But what about LOTRO. Well, I am looking at it. Just that so far I can't see any class I like to play. I wonder what route it will take. For me the real killer thing I am looking for in a MMO is for it to be playable and for it to reserve a few servers with a queens english only policy and a naming policy that is enforced with permanent bans. Enter a stupid nick and BAM, banned. No warning, no suggestions, no arguing. Instant ban.

On the other hand, you could just make it an 18+ server. Make that 30+. Nobody born in the 80's or later allowed. And get OF MY LAWN!

Imperator Take 2?

While on a smaller scale, isn't this just like the Imperator cancellation?

...our tremendous success with 'Dark Age of Camelot' set the standard for Mythic of releasing nothing less than triple-A games, and 'Imperator' was simply not meeting that standard.

A game shop so good that it can not produce a game good enough to be made by them! This should come as no surprise to players who would read the "Grab Bag" posts where weekly Mythic would correct themselves on how various aspects of DAOC worked. They didn't even know how their own tremendously successful MMOG worked under the hood, how could they design a new one?

Imperator was a miserable failure despite being hyped by Jacobs as a ground up rewrite designed to be ground breaking and compelling title. The concept of a game which was fun PvE and PvP turned out to be too hard to write, so they fell back to PvE only and still couldn't do it...

The problem is that because of the complexity of having both a PvP/PvE game, it is wisest for us to focus on one of those two elements.

So now they landed a juicy development deal with a preexisting ruleset and a decent budget backed by a large set of resources (albeit the overworked and inexperienced resources of EA) and they are going back to re-do things?

Sounds to me like Mythic again has produced content which wasn't good enough to be produced by Mythic.

(All quotes from Mark Jacobs)

re:WARHAMMER ONLINE

i'd like to play warhamer online .... you know,it is so intersting!u can find wars everywhere....which you will like [slashdot.org] Drawing from a quarter century of highly detailed source material, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning will bring Games Workshop's fantasy world to life in a way that will allow players to create characters destined for great deeds and glory on the field of battle. besids,i want to gain more money making tips [slashdot.org],that's very useful for me.

Re:Bunch dorks

Sorry I missed church; I was busy practicing witchcraft and becoming a lesbian.

Re:Thank you for playing, but...

But he did get you! So as a troll.... success!