Why did Warhammer mmo 'W.A.R.' never become big?

[Asehujiko]

W.A.R had a major surge of players at launch, it had brilliant ideas implemented which of many WoW later implemented as a blatant goddamned rip-off.

- Guild leveling
- Public quests
- DaoC style pvp play with zones and keep taking
- trophies!
- etc.

All of which were planned in WoW since 2003, EA exploited Blizzard's glacial development pace and stole their planned feature list.

lol@you

So now things that happen pre-WoW are ALSO WoW clones.

Sometimes I'm so proud of myself for never buying into that garbage.

Go read some decent gaming news site archives like Curse or something.

There's a big pile of Blizzard announcements going "we are planning to add feature XYZ to our game with the next expansion, 6 months from now", followed a week later by one from Mythic "We will add the never used before feature XYZ to our game that releases in 3 months" in a tone so smug that you will be expecting trollface.jpg every time you scroll down a line.

Then there's the features that have been in WoW since beta, whih EA then copies, renames and pretends it's something new. Faction pvp Realm vs Realm, I'm looking at you.

 

[Underground Man]

I played for a while but felt very isolated in the game. I rarely saw other players, which sort of defeats the purpose of an MMO. Also, it took too long to get out of certain areas.

Not to mention that the crafting system was just awful.

 

[Cridhe]

W.A.R had a major surge of players at launch, it had brilliant ideas implemented which of many WoW later implemented as a blatant goddamned rip-off.

- Guild leveling
- Public quests
- DaoC style pvp play with zones and keep taking
- trophies!
- etc.

All of which were planned in WoW since 2003, EA exploited Blizzard's glacial development pace and stole their planned feature list.

lol@you

So now things that happen pre-WoW are ALSO WoW clones.

Sometimes I'm so proud of myself for never buying into that garbage.

Go read some decent gaming news site archives like Curse or something.

There's a big pile of Blizzard announcements going "we are planning to add feature XYZ to our game with the next expansion, 6 months from now", followed a week later by one from Mythic "We will add the never used before feature XYZ to our game that releases in 3 months" in a tone so smug that you will be expecting trollface.jpg every time you scroll down a line.

Then there's the features that have been in WoW since beta, whih EA then copies, renames and pretends it's something new. Faction pvp Realm vs Realm, I'm looking at you.

Dark Age of Camelot, mother of Realm vs. Realm PvP and still the only MMO worth playing. Created by Mythic and now owned by EA (like WAR) and release October, 2001.

WoW, release November 2004.

 

[Windcaler]

I played it from launch and went through about a year of play till I quit and moved over to Aion. At first Warhammer was perfect, great world, great PVP in scenarios and open world. I couldnt have asked for a better game but as time passed imbalances became apparent. The first imbalance I saw was population, on pheonix throne server alliance usually had double the numbers we had and while we fought back hard we just got over run more often then not. Then there was an imbalance where we had the major numbers and were raiding the alliance city multiple times per day for a few weeks. Then it went back to alliance having the numbers. Many in the community said before the game even hit beta that population would need to be heavily controlled if there were only going to be two sides. Our concerns seem to have fallen on deaf ears.

Then there was the class imbalances where the alliance just had better abilities then their mirror on destruction's side in almost every case. Population and class imbalance combined made an excellent game turn into a horrible one

Then the "expansion" came out and pretty much killed world PVP. That was the straw that broke the camels back for me and I quit. Havnt looked back since but I am a little sad that what was IMO the perfect PVP game devolved into one that I cant stand now

Obviously opinions will vary but thats why I think it failed

 

[Raziel Evernight]

Well, I remember my server was the first to capture the goodies emperor Karl Franz (Mwhahahahaha!), but that was like half a year after the game started, or probably more. The game died out due to being hastily released before wrath of the ***** queen came, instead of waiting half a year or something, getting bugs and other annoying stuff fixed, waiting for people to leave wow, due to boredom incrased perpetually by the fact, there was no challange to be found there (untill Icecrown Citadel, but seriously, that's a long time to balance out casual against the hardcore ), and they could have made it a real rival of wow. The pvp was very nice, there were some ballance issues, but the playstyle was really fun. 12 classes in total, really unique looks for each class, and the pure fun of playing in the Warhammer world, which didn't receive enough love in favour to 40k. (btw, you can't say that 40k is better than the original, since it was the start of the tabletop battle games (with models statistics and game mechanics), while 40k jumped in way later. Additionally [almost over with the nerd rant] Warcraft is the first Warhammer RTS, in which Games Workshop broke the contract, since Blizzard was just doing two armies and stacking together unlikely alliances, and thus you got Warcraft.)
Boom, sorry, had to get it out of my system, since I still miss WAR :<