Out of Pod Experience

After 5 years arguably one of the best PvP games, Warhammer Online, is shutting it's doors at the end of the year. Hopefully some of those bloodthirsty shut ins make their way here.

Blood for the blood god!

I have to agree with Michael. It had a lot of potential but this was spoilt by being rushed and then launching with a bajillion servers then dropping to around 10 in the first year. I migrated server 3-4 times due to heavy one sided balance and weak pve.

The game also felt too closed and not open.

Im sad, but not sad to see it go, sad to see such a great IP ruined by EA.

Wut.

Wut.

Wut??

Standards. They be low.

I've been through a lot of mmo's and usually when I leave them its usually with the impression of 'that was fun, lets see what this game is like'. But I'm upset with WAR because 1. I had been playing DAOC for 7 years which was a total blast and 2 This was Warhammer which I was already a huge fan of the RPG and Tabletop games. Who knows how many thousands of dollars I dumped into miniatures. I mean since the first announcement my friends and I tracked it and talked about it nonstop.

The first red flag for me was EA's purchase. The second was Mark Jacobs leaving. But I still gave it a shot and tried to stick it out for several months. Like Graygor said, the game was so closed, especially in the fact that you literally just followed the yellow brick road from town to town. No deviation at all. The dice roll system had nothing to do with time or effort spent on the event, it was just random rolling so you could literally show up in the last minute and win the top gear. They said that each race would get a major city and we ended up with 2. The Sun Knight was held off at launch because he wasn't completed yet and then they tried to sell it as a new class later on. In fact all of the classes were either a mirror of each other or a combination of 2, there were no real differences between realms. The aging of the characters as you leveled never happened. And then they showcased the slayer in one of the CGI's and didn't even introduce him until the first expansion/major update. I don't know about anyone else but that class to me is the center piece of the WAR universe. It was just insulting to do that.

I never even made it to max level; I think my highest was 27. After a while it just got really hard to keep pushing a character on through the monotony. I, and I'm many others, all knew that 2 sided combat would eventually lead to lopsidedness on each server because its always been the players need to play on the winning team. DAOC had this worked out pretty well because even if you had one over pop team the other 2 could gang up on them.

I had this written up on another forum, it was a list of things I would have done to the game.

• I would discuss doing a character class system like the one offered in the RPG. This means that you would choose a race and a barebones profession. From there, as you leveled, you would gain various skills. Once you’ve gained certain skills that met certain requirements, you could choose to advance into a more specific role. Something like basic fighter to either pit fighter or soldier, to warden or sergeant, and so on. The professions would basically mold your character, defining his offensive or defensive capabilities, allowing people to branch out rather than starting as X and ending as X with a higher number.
• I would have taken the warhammer map, and broken that up into several smaller maps like what we see in guild wars. Each map would have wide open land allowing you to wander where you may and take in the sights. Each race when have their own starting town and several areas to expand on.
• I would take a page from Eve and add territories between several of the lands that would decrease in security the further you go out. Of course this leads to PVP. But to make it more exciting, instead of having pre-planted castles and towers, players can form guilds and actually build castles and towers and claim territory which can be fought over, which would have resources.
• I would separate the races more, allowing them to become more individualistic. WAR’s idea of NPC reaction per race was an excellent one. Making a Dwarf or Elf earn respect to actually be able to shop or even play in the others lands. On the same note, I would expand that to the players as well, allowing them to make alliances or enemies between each other. This means that a Dwarf only army could actually choose to fight Elves in the PVP zone if they wanted, or they could make an alliance and fight alongside them.
• I would have expanded on the various races. Sure, they added Skaven later, after I and many other had already left. I would have brought in as much as I could. Skaven, Wood elves, Brettonians, lizardmen, Beastmen, even Vampires/Necromancers. Then I would break them into 3 separate groups: Good, Neutral, and Evil. Overall this would lead to 3 focused fights and a whole world of free for all random skirmishes.
• And to finish, I was always a fan of DAOC’s crafting system, where crafted material went hand in hand with earned artifacts. So to please the PVE crowd, I of course would offer dungeons to get special gear but also make it so that crafted materials, then move it to the player ran market that is pretty common place.

I'm sure that there are ideas out there that I may not have considered and that may be better but this is what I spent time thinking of. The short of it is that they should have focused so much more on the Warhammer world and open it up so that we could explore it and live it more. They had so much lore to go on its not even funny. I mean imagine if they took even a dozen of the campaigns and made them into dungeons. I think even with bugs we would have seen a completely different ending for this game.