Jandau said:
Vedrenne said:
I'm not wishing to instigate a fight over this, but it just appeared that you were immediately dismissing this game without looking beyond the front cover.
The thing is, there is nothing beyond the front cover. Heck, there isn't even a front cover at this point. All we have are a few pieces of concept art and some enthusiastic interviews with noting behind them. I'd love to judge the game on its own merits, but there are no merits to judge it by at this point. So I go on what I know so far...
Firstly, who's making it - a dev house with a long tradition of making crap. You mention that they're bringing in people from Funcom. You do understand that that's hardly a shining recommendation, right? Funcom has a long history of delivering unfinished products and underperforming games. So on that front, I am skeptical at best and outright dismissive at worst.
Secondly, it's an MMO. Again, MMOs tend to be bloated, disappointing and waste promising premises. Sure, there are some genuinely good games, but for the most part, they tend to be bad games that people endure from the whole "MM" part. Do we really need this?
And so on and so forth. There is nothing that would tell me "Look, this might be good!" and quite a bit that points to it turning out bad. I0m not trying to pick a fight either, I just haven't seen anything that would make me excited about this game...
I'm with Jandau on this one. There's not much of anything to go on. I haven't heard of it, that's always fishy to me. I'm pretty well tuned in to the games, series, genres and platforms that I like, from AAA to indie titles. Nowhere have I heard anything but rumors about a Warhammer 40K MMO. When I first heard those rumors, it was way back, around the time Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning was being hyped. I'd hazard a guess that those might have been the original devs trying to scrounge up some buzz for a planned game. Never heard anything else, and I guess this is why. Now the license has made it's way into the hands of the guys who brought you WET and the PSP version of Dante's Inferno. Most of their stable of games is made up of social games, including one title I thought was shareware. Do you guys remember Lord of the Rings Conquest? No? What about on the DS? Well don't worry, because the guys that Funcom didn't want are here to help!
The only redeeming thing I've heard is that Games Workshop's involved to some extent. That's not even close to a seal of quality, but if this thing's got a snowball's chance in hell of being good, having Games Workshop signing off is a start. Behavior Interactive have no pedigree, no prior successes that lead me to believe they have any idea how to create, launch, market or support an MMO. Not only that, but there's not even any idea of how they're handling gameplay.
An MMO as most developers do it is just not well-suited to the Warhammer 40K universe. It's not exactly engaging to right-click an enemy and wait as your Ork Boy smacks the dude up for you. There's just not the same feel when your space marine stands in place firing a steady stream of 10s and 14s at one approaching ork at a time. But maybe they're not doing that. Maybe you actually aim and shoot and slash, something like Space Marine meets Warframe. That sounds great, but these guys are going to pull it off? I'm skeptical at best. I'd be hard-pressed to believe that a big-name studio could pull it off with the best talent in the industry, let alone these guys. And then there's the gimmicks. Everyone plays Ork Boy unless they buy a different race? Well, guess it's free to play with microtransactions, so get ready for that whole load of potential problems. Again, a good studio has trouble setting up a cash shop, let alone these guys who have not only never done this before, but have produced mainstream genres with little success. How does playing an Ork Boy really work, anyway? Why would I ever want to play as one lone ork? There will either be too many or too few Orks. They seem to be under the impression that there will be millions of players, and that a ton of them will be fine with being cannon fodder. This game's not even on the radar, and likely won't be until nearer to beta or launch. There's no established playerbase, even among Warhammer 40K fans. Even then, there's just no MMO anywhere that's going to command the same number of players as WoW, SWTOR, Guild Wars 2, or even Age of Conan without a massive amount of resources. Resources this developer likely does not have. This idea could still be workable, if we could play as Nobs and summon groups of Ork Boys, or play as a small hive-mind controlling a group of Ork Boys, but as I've heard it this is a really flawed concept. You're either going to screw up the lore by making Ork Boys too resilient and competent, or you could go the other way and screw up the balance by keeping them as cannon fodder, making Ork Boys a terrible choice of race/class; both of which carry the problem that we're assuming that a lore-friendly number of people are going to want to play as one Ork Boy in a sea of other Ork Boys. On top of that, is the Ork Boy experience REALLY the way you want to introduce newcomers and F2P players to your game? I can tell you right now, any game that introduces me to it by making me cannon fodder until I pay out is already getting some points knocked off. Additional points are knocked off for making me play as my least favorite faction, but that's a personal thing. Speaking of factions, one of them is locked off. I can't play Tyranids, because that whole faction is cordoned off to be the dev's personal plaything. I don't mind Bungie getting their blue flames, or the customary fancy namecard for development teams, but claiming an entire playable faction seems a bit far. First off, I want to play as the Tyranids. Secondly, when am I even going to see the Tyranids now? How many devs are going to be playing? Most devs I know have trouble keeping up with regular updates to the game, and many times preoccupy themselves with other games and other forms of media when they're not working. Are you going to tell me that this small-time developer is not only going to build, launch and support a Warhammer 40K MMO, but also play an entire faction? This isn't something like the Eldar, where in-lore they're few in number. These are the Tyranids, they're supposed to come in swarms and consume entire worlds. Are you telling me the devs are going to have enough guys for that? Again, this could be addressed by controlling large numbers of units remotely, but even then I'd expect the number of devs playing at any given time to be unsatisfactory.
So that's that. A comprehensive and exhaustive explanation for why I'm not losing my mind, shouting "Shut up and take my money!".
But hey, let's end this on a somewhat positive note: I leave my opinion open to revision. It could be amazing, and I might have to eat these words. I have no problem with that. If anything, I hope for it. I'd love to see a good Warhammer 40K MMO. What I'm saying right here and now is that I don't foresee this being the game that causes people to doubt my clairvoyance. I'm not hyped, and I don't see myself getting hyped.
