Why Warhammer Online failed

oakpack4 — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 17:46:16 GMT

Alright this won't be like failblog fails, this is just whhy it was a failure as a game.

-the business model-

This has been joked about before, but is seriously very poor. They chose to *rush* (but not really) the game into gold and not include 4 capitol cities, 4 classes (which 7 months after release they've put in) and *much more content* and they've followed through on that, but it's just not a vviable business idea/plan. You don't buy a car without back tires, windsshields, or a radio and get them added later.

-rewards-

The influence and renown rewards, (mainly gear) are definetely grinding. So is levelling once your in tier 3. You queue up for scenarios while swapping between pairings doing the same chapter for all of them. Its not even worth your time to do ORvR until tier 4, even though you want to keep your renwon up. At tier 4 the game begins, but is mostly still a grind for rewards.

-zones-

There was a lot of complaints from people who got into the warhammer lore (myself included) about the geogrophy of the game being inaccurate to the actual warhammer world. But that's not the worst part. The loading screens switching is an unpleasent reminder of what other mmos do from your typical wow convert to the game. With the fact that WoW is seamless, this puts Warhammer at a disadvantage. But the true disadvantage is: There is no way to walk/ride between pairings. This is a majour bummer for people who want an actual *World*.

The classes:

22/24 classes sounds great to most people. Butu that's before you really look into it. There's all in all really 12 classes that got mirrored, with minor changes across the board. Anyone who has played many mains in the game can see the similarity in abilities, and a tactics/morales alteration when you look into the mirror. However it's not an original tactic/morale set, for another class of the archetype has that. (I.e. engineer is the Magus' mirror, but they have squig herder's tactics/morales in common, its not original tactics and morales, but its a different class style). But 12 classes is still more then WoW, right? I'm not going to say that the archetypes are all really similair, because they're not (except maybe a bit in tanks/mdps). I will say though that the classes do not feel as full as a WoW class does, (e.g. the death knight feels seperate from the warrior in WoW, but the knightr of the blazing sun does not feel totally different from the Swordmaster).

Between all of these I'm honestly surprised warhammer has the 2/350000 subscribers still. With EA's financial status it looks like the game may be shut down by august.

Gaming with Oak

Why Warhammer Online failed