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

[gamer_parent]

Because it was a poorer WoW clone.
You do not beat WoW at its own game.

Because WoW was the first MMO with quests, classes, PvP, different races and various crafting skills.

Oh wait... It wasn't.

But it is the biggest and arguably the best so it does not matter if something similar came before it.
People always use "Like God/Gears of War but..." even though they were not the first.
WoW is the MMO industry standard. Deal with it.

I'm sorry, it sounded like everything you said was an opinion, but you stated it like a fact. Am I making a mistake there? Obviously you wouldn't try and put forth your opinion as if it were fact. I mean, that would be silly.

Let me read it again.

Nope. Definitely opinion.

Also: because other people make the same mistake, it's okay for you to? Oh dear...

WoW is most definitely not the first MMO, but it is certainly one of the most successful based on subscriber size, monetary gain, and features. it's definitely got the biggest war chest to create new content easily, and it would be strange to say that it is NOT the industry leader. MMOs tend to be pretty time consuming and so usually subs won't be playing on multiple games at the same time. as such, any MMORPG that tries to enter into the same arena WILL have to compete with them, no matter what. Right now, WoW is what, about 6 years old? I would say that in a lot of games, that's WELL past it's expected lifecycle. Of course, this is blizzard we're talking about, which has had a history of making games that are played well into the decades.

At this point, I'd peg that WoW is probably somewhere around it's mid point of it's lifecycle, with each additional expansion adding maybe an additional 2 years or so to the life expectancy of the product. Maybe when WoW starts getting stale for the world and subs start dropping off we can start talking about a new successor. But at this point, trying to go head to head against WoW would take nothing short of a miracle to pull off. You need to be able to cover a 6 year gap of community development time, content development time, and countless versions of reiterative design optimizing. That means you would need a bigger team, more money, and even more know how. That kind of talent would be REALLY hard to find in the industry, and if someone can come up with some way of doing that, that man would be a veritable industry god.

 

[Atmos Duality]

Any popular MMO would theoretically monopolize a given portion of its playerbase's time.
WoW proves this is true, and its success ensured that no other MMOs could ever really compete with it, but simply co-exist for a while before guttering out and dying.

This is why future MMORPGs that try to go as mainstream as WoW are damned before they even begin.

Coincidentally, I think The Old Republic has a shot at actually competing with WoW, but only because people are finally starting to become tired with it for real. Had it not been for that, I would have guessed that TOR would be one of the biggest Hit-Or-Miss investments in gaming history (and it still could).

 

[jackpipsam]

I blame EA for what happened to WAR

Presumably because they chose the wrong Warhammer franchise to make an MMO out of.
They should've gone with the futuristic one. You know, the good one. The popular one.

The one that's getting all the other games.

also the boring one

 

[IzisviAziria]

Presumably because they chose the wrong Warhammer franchise to make an MMO out of.
They should've gone with the futuristic one. You know, the good one. The popular one.

The one that's getting all the other games.

Pretty much this. Although isn't there supposed to be a Warhammer 40k MMO in the works?

 

[Randvek]

There's a difference between industry leaders and industry standards.

I like to think for myself and not rely on sales figures to decide what is good.

Aion promoted itself as a WoW killer.

Rift promoted itself as a WoW killer, even using the tag line "You're not in Azeroth" anymore, for Chrissakes.

WoW may not be the best MMO around, but if you can't recognize it as the gold standard that everyone, everyone tries to measure up to, you are being incredibly dense, intentionally or otherwise.

You may try to think otherwise, but your stupid, solitary opinion about "what is good" does not change who leads the pack.

 

[Ogargd]

Because World Of Warcraft exsists and you're not going to beat Blizzard.... EVER.

 

[DanielBrown]

I didn't play for that long due to it being mainly focused on PvP. I'm a PvE player that don't find much enjoyment in PvP, but I did play a lot of it in WAR. It was fun, but you gained ranks way to slowly. Textures in the game also looked pretty weird when seen from a distance. Not sure what it was, but the mobs, NPCs and other players didn't really look right.

As for PvE: not enough quests(or great enough exp rewards) and mobs respawned way too fast. I recall one place while playing on my Warrior Priest; as soon as I had killed a mob another one spawned. It took me 15 minutes to get out of a camp. On other characters I ended up being overwhelmed by respawns, while fighting my way to a quest boss, and died.
The classes where all pretty intresting, but as an altoholic it was pure hell in WAR since it was all about PvP and your PvP rank. You had to choose one and stick to it!

Resubbed for a month a while ago and to my surprise NOTHING had changed. They still haven't added any new content since the game was released as far as I know.

 

[Bandvagn]

Being a huge fan of the game since launch id say this. First and foremost its not warhammer 40k, thus its less popular. Hopefully Dark Millenium will fill that spot up nice and tidy like.

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.

W.A.R was also not a quest heavy game. Since most of the players trying out W.A.R were former WoW players they simply realised this game was not made for them and thus left quickly. The one that were left were the old DaoC players and Warhammer junkies.

W.A.R had major issues with lag, poor goddamned technical support from GOA and made low end computers blue screen to the point where James Cameron would blush.

That was then.

Nowadays W.A.R has lost nearly all of its playerbase. Having now only two american servers and only two english speaking european servers, the french, italians were forced into those 2 servers. While this has made those two servers highly populated and fun, its hard to see how a major MMO like this can survive with such a small playerbase.

W.A.R has changed alot since launch, with countless new mage features and content. Simply put the game have more to do and its alot easier than before to enjoy.


For the future i think Dark Millenium will kill this game outright. We can only hope THQ can transfer some of the brilliant ideas from W.A.R into Dark Millenium. Since no self respecting orc will go into battle without a few space marine helmets on his trophy rack.

 

[Elderahn]

WAR online was simply not finished on launch, it was a buggy, unpolished, unbalanced piece of excrement. This can be dealt with by an expedient developer given enough resources, which was not the case here.

I played War online and I think its quite good as games go, but when I then compared it to WOW, I couldnt justify paying EA my sub fee. If I want to play a fantasy Mmorpg, I might as well play the one that isnt starving to death, and doesnt have a rapidly collapsing server list.

 

[Still Life]

See how I judged things based off my own subjective opinion, rather than looking at what is popular to define what is good? It's a rare skill.

I think it's great that you can judge the quality of a product for yourself. However, by omission of the industry itself, WOW is the current standard that most MMOs of its ilk aspire to. Google up dev interviews and see this for yourself how competitors are trying to take the successful elements of WOW and incorporate them into their own, unique products. And for good reason: Blizzard delivers a high quality service to a very large player-base, which has stood the test of time better than any other MMO on the market. The company constantly adds new content, and in general, consumer satisfaction is high.

For an individual, popular doesn't always define what is good. However, that's not to say that popular games on the market aren't good, or even great unto themselves. In the case of Starcraft, COD and WOW, for example: you can make a strong argument that they are -- in fact -- high quality products, which deliver a gaming experience which sets the overall standard for the industry and therefore are good/great, regardless of personal taste.

There's a difference between industry leaders and industry standards.

You need to define that difference, so that some here understand the point you're trying to make.

 

[distended]

You need to define that difference, so that some here understand the point you're trying to make.

I think the point is that he's a unique snowflake who doesn't like WOW.

 

[Canid117]

Presumably because they chose the wrong Warhammer franchise to make an MMO out of.
They should've gone with the futuristic one. You know, the good one. The popular one.

The one that's getting all the other games.

But then how would they convince their investors that it would have been as popular as WOW?

Yeah the whole idea was bad from the start.

 

[Tremore]

i came to play that game for a few weeks and it constantly made it very hard for me to roleplay. No chair could be used, doing emotes was a real pain ... and the time I started playing most roleplayers hat allready given up and went back to WoW, LotRO and so on ...

 

[Raddra]

Wasn't that the one with the PvP focus?

PvP focus games never work. While a good chunk of the playerbase doesn't mind a bit of PvP, only a vocal minority want it as a focus. A lot of MMO games have failed because the devs seemed to belong to or overestimate that vocal minority though. Too many horrible loudmouthes belong to that PvP community for most players to enjoy playing with them.

I probably would have tried it if they had playable skaven, but they skipped the ball on that one. If they want to stand out they need to do something different.

Allowing players to play a bunch of generic races already present in other games doesn't help the stand out. I mean, how many human and elf factions do they need?

Sneaky Ratfolk with steamtech warp weapons though? Awesome and stand-outish.

 

[Randvek]

That was then.

Nowadays W.A.R has lost nearly all of its playerbase.

The real problem with WoW dominating the landscape is that you don't have time to correct your problems. WoW 1.0, as shipped, was a terrible game. A game of that quality would simply not survive today. There's so little margin for error with someone so big around that it's very hard to beat, and other MMOs really only get a decent amount of buzz going when they launch. You gotta launch clean, and the "online" part of "MMO" makes that virtually impossible. DDO and LotR have done ok post-launch, but only by adopting alternative subscription models that may not be long-term solutions.

Having said that, WoW's current expansion is showing the first signs of weakness in the franchise since launch. It seemed crazy just a year ago, but Guild Wars 2 and The Old Republic may be launching at the ideal time to put some dents in that armor. Guild Wars is a franchise that has shown that it isn't afraid to try new things and think outside the box, while Bioware is probably the only other video game company on Earth that even come close to Blizzard in terms of a devoted fanbase. I think it's entirely possible that we won't be talking about "the big one" this time next year. I'm just not sure I would put money on it.