Warhammer Team Hit By Layoffs 89
Zonk notes that Mythic Entertainment, developer of Warhammer Online, is being hit by another round of layoffs. The report estimates that between 60 and 130 staff were let go as part of Electronic Arts' reduction of its workforce. This comes alongside news that the number of Warhammer subscribers has settled to around 300,000. Mythic's Mark Jacobs was quick to affirm that while they were "resizing the team," their plans and schedule are unchanged, citing lower demands on QA now that the launch period has passed. Hopefully this means that their upcoming "live expansion," A Call to Arms, will not be affected by the layoffs.
Re:Warhammer sucks (Score:3, Informative)
I can think of several things, but as random blatant examples, as launched:
- if you kept beating on an NPC, at some point it said it runs away in fear. Except it didn't, it stood there like an idiot doing nothing. Then if he survived a few seconds in that state (quite easy for major bosses) it would suddenly heal back to full helt. How _that_ got through QA, I can't even imagine.
- enemies stuck in terrain, e.g., in the cave with the squigs in the greenskin starting quests.
- retarded pet AI. In WoW if your pet can't reach an enemy, it stays with you. In WAR it ran in some retarded direction and down some corridor, and only eventually it would figure out to come back to you.
And so on and so forth.
It was fun if you were one-track-minded about PvP. It was a one-trick pony with that being its only trick. Everything else was a half-arsed affair, if present at all. There was not much exploring to do. (What with the areas being so squashed that sometimes you didn't even have to move from the quest giver to shoot the critters you had to kill. E.g., in the elf starting area.) Crafting was a sad joke. Quests were a boring monotonous affair, where everything was a rehash of the same "go there and kill everyone" thing. Etc.
If you look at WoW or any other game, they allow for a variety of playstyles and whenever you're not in the mood for doing X, there are things Y and Z to do instead. That fact seems to have gone right over Mythic's head.
And again that applies to quests too. While Mythic and their retarded fanboys bleated about how they don't need no stinking "kill rabbits" quests, the truth is that those quests created variety in WoW. There were more activities and more bits of story in your daily routine than "it's a big war, now go kill someone again." There was a whole (uber-simplified) economy to discover, the (uber-simplified carricature of) the NPCs daily lives, there were areas to explore, etc. It doesn't sound heroic and it wasn't heroic, but it was more interesting than doing the same damned thing over and over again.
Re:I'm not the prior poster, & I'll this to yo (Score:4, Informative)
The Warcraft line of game was initially intended to be a Warhammer game, but they didn't get the IP. Those guys were around a long time before Blizzard existed. Blizzard's so famous IP is a Warhammer clone.
Re:I'm not the prior poster, & I'll this to yo (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/4/10/ [penny-arcade.com]
Re:I'm not the prior poster, & I'll this to yo (Score:1, Informative)
True, I remember the original story of how Warcraft 1 was suppose to be Warhammer. But since then, Warcraft 3's game engine was incredible change from 1's. And Warcraft Online DID come out before Warhammer Online.
Warcraft developed their own lore, if anything Warcraft ripped off it's game mechanics from every other game that came before it, but that's common place in the game industry.
So the only IP you're referring to is the concept of Orcs, humans, elves, and the likes fighting in battles? There's prior art that Games Workshop would never have the IP to it, and Blizzard is even less likely.
So I would not say GW ripped off Blizzard, but I would also not say Blizzard ripped off GW. They neither were very original except the lore, and even then, it's stretching it, since lore is basically fantasy books, and there's not that much originality in that field either. Don't get me wrong, I love fantasy books.
Re:Just started playing it last week (Score:3, Informative)
Destruction's army takes site 1, Order takes 2, 3 is left open, Destruction moves to 2, Order to 3, etc, then Destruction to 3, Order to 1 and so on. Each massive army seeing no actual Combat, except against the meagre force of enemy NPCs guarding the checkpoints, and all they're really doing is farming renown, XP and Influence.
You are playing on the wrong server.
Play on Dark Crag.
Yes, it is open and there is a lot newbie ganking on T1, but in T4 there are massive battles because it is the highest pop server.
Like 200vs300 battles... It helps to be in a guild like Ruin which basically has 1000+ members on its Roster so that you know where the action is.
Re:Let's get one thing straight (Score:3, Informative)
Warhammer Online has been in development longer than WoW IIRC, and it looked so often that it was going nowhere that it was cancelled and then continued after all a couple of times. The first cancelling I remember was in _2004_ FFS. And that's not the _start_ date, it's one of the dates when it wasn't going anwhere.
I have no idea how this got modded informative. This has nothing to do with Mythic. Keep in mind, when Warhammer was originally canceled in 2004, it was under development with another company: Climax Online. It wasn't until sometime in mid-2005 when Mythic Entertainment acquired the Warhammer Online license. And Mythic wasn't even under the EA umbrella until after 2006.
They effectively delivered maybe half the game they had been paid for, or maybe even less.
And I, as a fan, appreciated that. They did their fans a great service by cutting out the content that they knew that they couldn't get out on time, and concentrated on fixing the core parts of the game. The game came out way more polished than WoW did when it first came out, which was quite impressive.
Only a few months after the initial launch, Mythic announced that they were going to release the cut classes back into the game as part of a massive update.