Jul
2
WAR – Could-a, Should-a, Would-a
Very interesting pieces about Warhammer out there right now…all with the same theme.
First up is Massively:
Like I said before, Mythic screwed up royally in implementation. By broadening their appeal to too many people they diluted the quality of their feature set and in the process made some really odd design decisions (e.g., Let’s ramp up this huge RvR campaign and then put a bunch of city PvE at the end of it – an attempt at balancing RvR and PvE content that failed abysmally).
What are the two biggest complaints leveled at WAR by ex-WAR players? One: The RvR endgame is meaningless, boring, and repetitive. Two: The exact same thing can be said about PvE – except all the way through.
How can you make RvR the main focus of your game without pissing off PvE folks and vice versa? You can definitely try and balance them 50/50, but let’s be real here. Mythic can barely balance their classes, let alone entire aspects of an MMO. Let’s also be fair — it’s a pretty damned hard task to achieve.
Second one comes from Snaffy’s:
The basic idea behind it is that I believe WAR really could have done well if they focused entirely on RvR. Unfortunately, putting all their eggs in the RvR basket would have never produced an MMO capable of competing with WoW no matter how good it was (by sub numbers). There simply aren’t as many of those kinds of players out there. Instead, Mythic went with the wide-appeal WoW-killer model that tried to perfectly balance PvE and RvR. Unfortunately, trying to please too many people diluted the quality of their feature set because they spread themselves too thin.
The message here? WAR still suffers from an identity crisis. Take note of #1 prediction for 2009:
“Warhammer will continue to have it’s audience shrunk. This will not be a bad thing because they will also find themselves and start really coming into their own as an RvR (…not PvE…) alternative to WoW. They will fall into the same issues as Planetside does for new players.”
It’s not going to be a good summer for WAR as they continue to figure out what audience they want to appeal too. The recent shake-up and grouping with Bioware will hopefully help in this area, but time is running out due to the upcoming titles that might just have a better sense of self than WAR does.
Really, they need to go as niche as possible with WAR. Sure, the money is in the big WoW market but..seriously..this is about being realistic. Eve is a great template on how to stay niche, and then build an audience from there. Darkfall is kind of in the space where WAR should be. Mythic should go head to head with those guys…and they would win hands down. It’s not too late. It wouldn’t take much to turn WAR into an Eve-like game where PVP and PVE are in a healthy(-ish) balance with one another. Oh oh oh….here’s a nice little feature list. Cause we all like lists.
- Remove tiered approach to RvR. This is gating your community and you don’t need to do that. Open the world up. Make it dangerous.
- Make PvE support PvP actions. People want to build or repair a city…you need PvE people and the market to do it. You want weapons…yeah…PvE crafters will be needed.
- Despite opening the world to RvR, you need someplace where PvE players feel safe “doing their thing” to support PvP. Like in Eve, give it to them. Don’t you dare instance anything.
- Let players loose it all for high risk/reward scenarios.
I really think that there is a market where Darkfall is trying to land, but is missing. I think WAR can nail it.
D out.
