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Simply put, the absolute biggest reason that we saw Warhammer Online be such an abysmal failure is World of Warcraft.
Players had an expectation that WAR was going to be WoW with a Warhammer skin.
The end result game was too different to WoW to be a success in the climate of the launch, where WoW was in between expansions and had a stable game. Add to it that right as WAR launched, WoW started previewing Wrath of the Lich King and WAR never really had a chance.

Of course there were other things at play but the biggest reason is simply Warcraft has too big of a stranglehold. Until Warcraft is a dead game, pretty much every fantasy MMO is going to suffer a similar fate unless they offer something radically unique and different. Loyalty to a specific IP(Conan, Warhammer, or the forthcoming Elder Scrolls Online) can keep a game afloat for a bit but it just delays the inevitable.

There is some truth in that. However lets not excuse the very shoddy work Mythic put into WaR, the engine was blatantly broken and this has been alluded to a fair few times online, one of the reasons it was so hard to fix the game.
It was touted for example as one of the reasons why the f2p trial was so poorly implemented with all the factions bundled into the Chaos/Empire area.

However if WoW wasn't running, giving a place for folks to run back to rather than give WaR some time to fix its issue (like WoW was given in 2004/2005) then aye, I can see some logic there.

I do think WaR should have ignored Lick King and released the year after mind, who knows what an extra six months of polish might have brought.

At the time though I, Aura and a number of our WoW guild left for WaR with no intention on returning. The state of the game and the horrific problems it had in Europe especially is why we where back in WoW barely a month later.



I do agree mind, WoW is now hurting the MMO genre.

Wildstar?

Tbh I'm not sure if any company should look at subscriber style MMO's again.

I am sure many WoW players like myself, only come back to it due to the number of hours we've put into the game, the number of high level toons etc.

Others have proven you can make good money off the f2p method, but it seems LOL and DOTA is where a lot of gamers are going these days.
Take away the WoW hardcore who literally won't play another MMO, I feel the MMO fans are not as a big a pool as fresh developers think it is for money stakes.

I'll guess we'll see soon enough with Elder Scrolls and Everquest 2.

WOW can also be played on less than optimal computers. The main reason I never was able to stick with WAR was because I never had a computer that could run it decently.

Graphics a re great but there is something to be said for a game which anyone with a computer can play.

I would rather pay a subscription fee than play a F2P game and feel like i NEED to pay to enjoy myself.
SWTOR is a huge example of how not to do F2P, but i know it has worked well for other MMOs like DDO.

WoW is the MMO that i love to hate and hate to love. I do think that what Blizzard created was part perfect storm and part brilliance, but with that aside it really feels like a poor man's MMO.

Blizzard took their hugely popular Warcraft universe and expanded upon it and gave it a breath of life all while keeping the astetic style from their RTS series.
The graphics and textures are nothing to write home about in WoW but they keep the ongoing theme and make the game easier to run for PCs.

WoW borrows bits and pieces from many MMOs that have come before it, but i felt they watered them down so that the masses would enjoy it.
The game is designed to get as many people to play it as possible both with low hardware requirements and the simplistic gameplay.

I truely feel that many WoW players stick to WoW not only for the shiney new content or the collecting aspect but that any other MMO might be too hard for them.
In all the time i spent playing WoW solo i never really felt that the game was really a challenge, maybe it was the classes i was playing during each time i played the game.
It wasnt untill i started raiding in vanilla WoW that the game really felt challenging, raiding in WOTLK was a joke and became a dps race.

Each WoW expansion has taken more and more away from the gaming experience and has converted it to a rush to max level to start the gear/rep farming.

The game was great

Seriously, the first few months of it coming out it was the greatest, the keep fights were fun as hell, performance was improving, I was the tank in the first city raid, it was /GREAT/

what happened endgame was there was no reason to defend keeps, EVER, so no one did so, the fun fights stopped, everyone just zerged around taking keeps and re-taking them, it became stupid, fast.

But before people started abusing the mechanics to try and max out reknown, it was /awesome/

WoW had an absolutely disgusting strangehold on MMO's for a long while.

 Kanluwen wrote:
Simply put, the absolute biggest reason that we saw Warhammer Online be such an abysmal failure is World of Warcraft.
Players had an expectation that WAR was going to be WoW with a Warhammer skin.
The end result game was too different to WoW to be a success in the climate of the launch, where WoW was in between expansions and had a stable game. Add to it that right as WAR launched, WoW started previewing Wrath of the Lich King and WAR never really had a chance.

At the launch of WAR, on Sept 18, 2008, WoW was two months away from releasing Wrath of the Lich King. At that point, a lot of people had been playing WoW for years and were ready for a change. Many were very excited at WAR's offer of a game based around PvP, in stark contrast to WoW's PvP system that, while treated as important, was seen as not very well supported.

Warhammer was a huge name. There was a ton of excitement and a ridiculous amount of launch hype. People played the beta and had a lot of fun and were primed for the retail launch. I didn't know much about Warhammer-non-40k at the time, but the female dwarf engineer character was amazing and quickly sold me on the game.

But then...

 Kanluwen wrote:
Of course there were other things at play but the biggest reason is simply Warcraft has too big of a stranglehold. Until Warcraft is a dead game, pretty much every fantasy MMO is going to suffer a similar fate unless they offer something radically unique and different. Loyalty to a specific IP(Conan, Warhammer, or the forthcoming Elder Scrolls Online) can keep a game afloat for a bit but it just delays the inevitable.

With respect, I think your casting of the industry here is wholly incorrect.

The core reason MMOs keep coming out and failing* is simple: they offer no significant advances over WoW, but are not as good as it, having many issues of their own and frequently refusing to learn from WoW's own mistakes, which are often corrected by the time the new MMO launches.

Let's take an example from WAR. WAR's stat system was quite flawed. It was actually very similar to the stat system in WoW's current (at the time) expansion, which was very similar to the one the game had launched with. When you have a bad stat system, you screw up the way a class scales with gear, often making many of its abilities obsolete and reducing its gameplay to a shell of the initial vision. When WAR launched, WoW was about two months away from releasing its own expansion correcting those problems and making the game much stronger.

MMOs also frequently make huge mistakes when it comes to the feel of your interaction with your character. One of WoW's biggest assets is that the way your character moves, the way the enemies move, the way the abilities work, all feel very good. It's vanishingly rare for other MMOs to capture that same feel. I don't think WAR did too badly on that score, though it was certainly suboptimal (and it had some big engine issues at release in particular; snotlings running around with two frames of animation in their walk comes to mind).

WAR itself, though. Where to begin?

The Public Quests, or PQs, were pretty fun. They were a goodly advance the game had over WoW and a big selling point at the time. They had significant flaws, though. They didn't, IIRC, scale well (or at all?) to the number of players doing them, and they became exceedingly difficult to complete after a while when the leveling pack had spread out a bit and fewer people were around, especially outside the human starting zones. They also had issues with contribution not being awarded very well and people feeling like they'd been shortchanged on loot for no reason. They were one of the game's high points overall, though.

The battlegrounds, which they called scenarios I think, were also quite fun, but they immediately started running into problems. Many of the scenarios were terribly designed, seeming to have received very little playtesting. Most of them, past tier two (or arguably even tier one) just weren't fun to play. There was also generally one that was the most rewarding. Because of the way the queue system worked, that one would be played all. the. time. Just non-stop. This one scenario. Over. And over. And over. Until you were seriously sick of seeing the inside of it and wanted to see another.

Occasionally, enough people would get frustrated simultaneously (assisted, eventually, by the multi-queue mods that came out) that you'd get to play one of the other scenarios... and you'd find out why nobody played them. They were often quite broken - completely unfun, concepts that might have been brought to life with more time and polish, but that in the event hadn't received that attention and weren't ready to be released. Not a good thing.

The class design in the area of PvP, meanwhile, was bad. It started off fun, with really engaging battles and a quite kinetic feel of push back and forth that WoW didn't really have. Tier 2 was more of the same, but around the end of the tier, something curious started happening: control abilities began to proliferate. By tier 3 this control arms race was in full swing, and that sort of thing is a war that nobody wins. As it was you got stunned, disabled, interrupted, disarmed and whatever else with increasing frequency until you found yourself reaching, in vain, for your PvP trinket, now far away in Azeroth, unable to help you.

Remember Marauders? Good times. (Oh, the class balance was awful too. Bright wizards? Marauders? Terrible. And the aura twisting thing? Terrible gameplay.)

By tier 4, people pretty much just fell over a lot of the time.

Anyway, none of us came to WAR to play battlegrounds. What about the RvR?

Well, it turns out that was terrible too. Responding to requests from players of Dark Age of Camelot (and others who'd heard about the battles over castles there), Mythic moved away from their original plans of Battlefield Objectives somewhat reminiscent of Warhammer battlefields and added keeps to the game. These were capturable fortresses that could house (and be attacked by) siege weapons and contained a loot piñata raid boss whose defeat would grant you ownership of the keep.

Unfortunately, this had a variety of problems.

Firstly, the keep battles were, well, bad. They started off okay, when nobody knew how to play and they were new and exciting (though IIRC they had huge problems with framerate lag in particular). But all the keeps had one peculiar feature: they only had one internal staircase heading to the second floor, where the Keep Lord lived. This is a game that has some extremely powerful ground-targeted AoE. With the right combination of players, a quite small group could hold off more or less unlimited numbers of enemies, because they could AoE the staircase and the attackers had no way to respond. They had to move up that one path... and die.

So that was a big problem with making the battles fun, but there was another problem: faction balance. Because the game had two factions, the one with fewer players would often find itself on the back foot, getting pushed back to its invincible, camp-based static defenses until the other side got bored and enough drifted away that the defenders could push out again, crushing the attackers with superior numbers and pushing them back to their camp, where they would become the new defenders. It turns out this is really unsatisfying and boring.

But fortunately, salvation was available in a third problem. It turned out that the best rewards came from capturing keeps. What did you get from defending keeps? Well, not a lot, really. Eventually players caught on to this and stopped fighting, instead opting to both attack each others' keeps at the same time while nobody defended, taking them with ease and reaping the rewards. Then, when they could, they would attack each others' keeps again, never fighting, just picking up the rewards.

It turned out that this was not good gameplay.

What did the game offer in PvE? Well, it had some dungeons, but they were quite wild and wooly, a far cry from the much more polished experience that was about to be unleashed in Wrath of the Lich King. The questing was okay, but probably not why anyone was playing the game. WotLK, meanwhile, despite the penny arcade comic, had comparatively advanced and interesting quest lines and design, including some cool new stuff like vehicles.

And so, suffering from design flaws, technical issues, poor balance, lacking RvR, unfinished scenarios and humdrum PvE, the game sank quickly into obscurity and everyone played Wrath and lived happily ever after. Once you got past the (quite fun) first tier PvP, pretty much all aspects of the game had horrible flaws.

WAR had a lot of promise. Its art design was incredibly well done, with great art direction, which is an aspect WoW also benefits greatly from and isn't generally credited enough for. It also had a huge brand name to help it break into the market, and it worked: WoW players defected in droves. But they didn't stay, because it was a bad game. Not because they're too wedded to WoW, but because WAR was, despite all the promise I and you and many others saw in it, bad. It's a tragedy that potential was never realised, but there it is.

On the subject of players who don't want to switch from WoW because they're too invested, I don't think there are actually very many. A while back, Blizzard stated that vastly more people have quit the game than played it - I believe the number at the time was over 26 million who had quit, and that was back when the game had over 10 million subscribers, so there are probably over 40 million people who have played the game in total now. Only ~8 million of those are still playing, but of those who have quit, most of the ones I know are still interested in MMOs in concept at least, even if they aren't interested in playing WoW again.

WoW certainly started with a really unique confluence of events, but there's nothing stopping anyone from succeeding in its niche. They just have to make a game that's actually as good as it, and it turns out that's pretty hard.

Very interesting read guys, would agree with a lot of what Morathi and Hive posted.

Pity they wasted the potential. Barring the Star Wars universe (another poorly released MMO), Warhammer has such an absolutely incredible setting, background, character and history.
How they messed it up, depresses me greatly.

I agree with Hive and Morathi, but the main reasons why I played WoW for such a long time (It was dead to me after WotLK) was because it was just plain smooth and seemingly highly creative because of its novelty. Everything, even its mistakes ran well and the art looked awesome on my machine. As far as tricking a community with shoddy graphics masked by amazing art, this game takes the cake hands down, and I was fine with that. The skills were awesome and fit very well with the class / lore, Warlocks and Rogues were enormously entertaining, especially in PvP and the only thing that really drove me away from the game was the endless grind.

WAR on the other hand had pretty awful animations, some of the skills didn't really make a whole lot of sense other than to cram a class together out of stretching the lore to fit the game rather than the other way round, and though WAR had some "novel" ideas, they were just rip offs of other games that had existed before. RvR was a transplant from Mythic's older generation of games, PQs were a blatant ripoff of Rift. Sure, WAR benefited heavily by the inspiration of other games, but the simple fact that it really didn't have much of its own creativity to stand upon made sure that players were bored by the time they hit level ten in the first RvR lake.

Yeah well WoW is already toppling (a titan to be sure, but her time slowly approaches).

Now down to about 7.7 million
News from the land of World of Warcraft isn’t good. Activision Blizzard confirmed that quarter that ran from April to June saw another decrease in subscribers. Word is that WOW is down to 7.7 million subscribers which is down from 8.3 million back in March.

Loosing 600,000 subscribers in a quarter isn’t good news for Activision Blizzard that had around 12 million subscribers at its height. The game is still the number one subscription game, but it is unlikely to even return to the lofty number of subscribers that the game has had in the past. The continued drop represents a significant income loss for the company.

The reasons for the drop in subscriptions is long, but much of it has simply to do with the number of other choices that players have these days including free-to-play alternatives that many players are embracing. Rumors suggest that Activision Blizzard is looking at a number of options in order to increase the amount that the game is producing. While we don’t think they are looking at a free-to-play model, we do think that they are considering a number of things, but we will have to wait and see what they will try to help get the subscription game back on track.

Frankly though, the time of the subscription MMO is slowly coming. There are newer models that offer players similar service for free (STO and GW2 both have strong Micro-Trans models) and frankly, who wants to pay multiple game subscriptions at once? Most people will pick a game and stick to it, maybe making brief forays into others.

WoW indeed succeeded in part to its own titanesque size and early start but lets not fool ourselves. Rift, WaR, SWTOR, all had rather radical flaws in their design. Even GW2 much as I love her, has a lot of problems (fortunately the Devs maintain a constant stream of content to distract from said issues). WoW had its problems as well but by the time its challengers began to rise had already entrenched itself in the market and fixed many of the gravest problems. Even SWTOR and Rift who had very smooth launches failed to maintain themselves for long. GW2 is doing well thus far, but its a different enough game with a different model it was never in much of a direct competition with WoW. ESO, that's when we may finally get the blood some of us desire

Also didn't help that they butchered the Warhammer setting (Male DE Sorcerers, Goblin Squigs mechanic.....).

 purplefood wrote:
WoW had an absolutely disgusting strangehold on MMO's for a long while.

Was that WoW fault or other developers who made claims that their game would be WoW killer?, in my mind the only game that will kill WoW is WoW, they have changed the format over the years to stay with the current trends, not always succeeding tho.

 Ravenblade666 wrote:

 purplefood wrote:
WoW had an absolutely disgusting strangehold on MMO's for a long while.

Was that WoW fault or other developers who made claims that their game would be WoW killer?, in my mind the only game that will kill WoW is WoW, they have changed the format over the years to stay with the current trends, not always succeeding tho.

It's odd.
Because of WoW's success everyone wanted what they had so very few developers could get funding for a game that was noticeably different because people wanted to take a bite out of WoW. That kinda put a stranglehold on the entire MMO genre for a long time...

It's not like MMO's are alone in that respect. Go check out the FPS genre post CoD4.

No one has yet mentioned the "billing" issues in WAR's history where the subscription renewal fee hit many people's credit/debit cards literally dozens of times racking up hundreds of dollars in fees in moments.

I've lost the link to the actual official forum post about it but a quick google search would net some articles on the subject.

 AWesker1976 wrote:
No one has yet mentioned the "billing" issues in WAR's history where the subscription renewal fee hit many people's credit/debit cards literally dozens of times racking up hundreds of dollars in fees in moments.

I've lost the link to the actual official forum post about it but a quick google search would net some articles on the subject.

Here:

http://massively.joystiq.com/2010/04/08/billing-issues-hitting-warhammer-online-and-dark-age-of-camelot/3#comments

To be fair, the game was already dead at this point, subs had tanked, Land of the Dead was a bust, Jacobs fired, layoffs, former employees whistleblowing how everyone on the team knew it would fail well into development, no more updates, revolving doors churning out producers. This was just the double tap just to be sure it was dead.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I also seem to remember GW trying to C+D the Warhammer Herald forums.

 Kanluwen wrote:

Players had an expectation that WAR was going to be WoW with a Warhammer skin.

I had the expectation that WAR would be DAoC in a warhammer skin, given its pedigree thats exactly what we should have gotten. The end result was rushed, blatantly unfinshed and while it was fun for the first 'free' month I had no incentive to continue beyond that.

The real reason that WAR failed, just like the majority of MMOs is that people have simply become jaded with the same old mechanics. If people like that type of game then they will play WoW (although as linked above even WoW has a shrinking player base) but people who have grown bored with WoW seem to either give up on MMOs entirely or bounce around between its various imitators without spending much time in any of them.

In short WAR was never going to be a real success given the type of game that it was. Too similar to WoW yet not interesting nor sufficently well made to stand on its own merits.

WoW 'clones (although WoW itself is a clone) always follow the same pattern; pre launch hype, big launch, a sharp drop in subscribers after the free month expires, slow death or a desperate lurch towards F2P and then slow death.

The only way an MMO will have a truly long term future is to do something genuinely different. EvE is the perfect example, people will still be playing that (or some kind of sequel) 50 years in the future (barring the zombie apocalpse).

I loved the original WoW, in the beginning when it was a game about leveling and exploring new places and learning new things.

I hated the endgame that was just all about raids and elitism and nerdrage over not getting the pixels you want. Going to the same old dungeons over and over just got real old for me real quick. I guess that's just not my style, I usually play a game till I beat it and then it goes on the shelf, I rarely do a 2nd playthrough unless it's a couple years later and then I usually get half way through before dropping it.

Anyway that said, I tried WAR and I just didn't like it. I thought it was great that it was based on Warhammer, but that was about the only thing I liked in it. I did the free demo thing and to me it just wasn't fun at all.

loved the original WoW, in the beginning when it was a game about leveling and exploring new places and learning new things.

That was the beauty of WAR and SWs and Conan et al.
The problem was past level 25-40 it just.....didnt work imho. Zones were unfinished, classes sucked (as per what spec you chose), grinding kicked in (again : ( ). the "go to Zone X or Y" "magic" was samey, the mechanics didnt work and all the other systemic problems kicked in.

As a raw question to the WoW players, what is/are your favourite memories of WoW?

It might well be, killing Onyxia or Raggy for the first time. Granted.
But it might as well likely be , those first 20 levels around Goldshire/Redridge/Duskwood.

Magic and exploration was king, not end game bosses.

MMOs can only do those first "grab them by the balls levels" so much but WAR failed to do it well (with such a rich setting - depressing!)

My favorite memory of WoW?

Soloing Onyxia with my level 80 BE paladin bearing my own first name after 4 years of playing. It was the last thing I did before signing off for the final time. (had some other "greats", but the closure was pretty poetic. I felt like I beat the game (and the addiction).

My favorite memory of WAR?

Dumping the box into the trash. Or my very first RvR battle... and that's about it.

 Slarg232 wrote:
Also didn't help that they butchered the Warhammer setting (Male DE Sorcerers, Goblin Squigs mechanic.....).

There was no Male DE sorcerers, they were exclusively female along with the khainite assassins.

What was wrong with the goblin squigs though?

"PQs were a blatant ripoff of Rift."


Pretty sure Rift dropped 3 years after WAR.

PQs' was one of the positives in my mind to come out of WAR.

I'd say that time was agianst WAR abit, as a lot of people has already pointed out that by the time WAR was to be launched WOW was releasing it's second expansion.

WAR had great potential but i think that it feel due to a rushed production, and also the fact of trying to compete with WOW instead of just making a great mmorpg game that people could enjoy.

That saying, comparing every mmorpg game there is to WOW is also kinda crazy considering that WOW really hasn't brought much new to it..after all it has borrowed tons of stuff from things like Everquest etc so it's per say nothing revolutionary.

WOW's biggest success i think lays it in the fact that it's rather easy and not to challenging witch opens up for a broader market. that and being constantly update and having new material added to it all the time along with well the economical resources that Blizzard is willing to put into to the game.

Had WOW and WAR both been released that the same time and wit the same starting conditions in terms of money etc then things might have been different.

 ZebioLizard2 wrote:

 Slarg232 wrote:
Also didn't help that they butchered the Warhammer setting (Male DE Sorcerers, Goblin Squigs mechanic.....).

There was no Male DE sorcerers, they were exclusively female along with the khainite assassins.

There were Male DE sorcerers.

 purplefood wrote:

 ZebioLizard2 wrote:

 Slarg232 wrote:
Also didn't help that they butchered the Warhammer setting (Male DE Sorcerers, Goblin Squigs mechanic.....).

There was no Male DE sorcerers, they were exclusively female along with the khainite assassins.

There were Male DE sorcerers.

And they exist in the lore as well. They are just not common nor are they generally used by the various Houses because of the whole Malekith prophecy thing.

 SneakyMek wrote:


That saying, comparing every mmorpg game there is to WOW is also kinda crazy considering that WOW really hasn't brought much new to it..after all it has borrowed tons of stuff from things like Everquest etc so it's per say nothing revolutionary.

Or rather, WoW is so old at this point, that like Halo and CoD people have completely forgotten the little improvements they made to the genres. WoW used to be a lot harder back in it early years. Then Burning Crusade happened.

I personally quit because it felt dry. The combat was bland and lifeless and there was literally NOTHING to do but pv and level your character. The crafting was very bad, the social aspect was nill (even on a pvprp) server. And it just plain had no spark