One thing I have tried so very hard to avoid when lighting a fire beneath this blog again, was a Warhammer Online post-mortem.  The more I thought about, I realized that I would just be beating a horse that had been thrashed to death, pummeled while dead, resurrected, then flogged some more for good measure.  But it has been with a potent sadness that I have watched the WAR blogging community shrink over the past few months.  Players are growing increasingly frustrated with recent changes, and it really is no secret that WAR finds itself at a fateful crossroads at the moment.

With only a few servers left running, there is no question that the vultures are gradually beginning to circle…eager to pluck the meat off of WAR’s fragile corpse.

I still play it all out in my head like it was some sort of dream.  To this day I can acutely feel my initial reactions from WAR beta all the way to launch, its historic rise, and ultimately its plummet to the depths we see now.  But if I sat here and attempted to chime in with my thoughts on how WAR got to where it is, I would only be regurgitating analysis from many other sources that are already available to you.

 

 

Now one thing I would like to say at this point, is that WAR isn’t dead yet.  It’s getting a little too close to the scythe for comfort, but hope springs eternal.  And I am one to always believe that it’s never too late to stem the tide.  But up to this point, Mythic just doesn’t seem to possess the ability to fix the problems.  Much of this is because WAR’s issues are all so deeply rooted in its design that they would truly need to revamp much of the game.

This is not going to happen, period.

So what we are left with are small bandages patched onto a titanic leaking damn that is eventually going to break open.  But rather than sit here and write what has been said before, I am going to try and aid my catharsis for WAR by linking to some of the most insightful comments I have found regarding why WAR ended up the way it did.  I am doing this as much for myself as anyone else, as I am still coming to grips with the fact that WAR is the game I really want to be playing.  The problem being that it just isn’t the game it should have been in the first place.

So let us hold hands and pray as we open our hymnals to page 113.

 

Where did Warhammer Online go wrong?

 

This article touches on many of the most popular points…the lack of a third realm…few viable in-game options other than PvP…horrible class balance…population imbalance…terrible performance given the look of the game…all of WAR’s sweet spots of pain, if I may be so bold.  :)   It makes for a fairly accurate read so I think it’s a useful place to begin.  But the source which offers some of the most interesting and less well-known facts on WAR’s happens to be a thread on the Warhammer Alliance forums.

 

The Main reason why WAR failed

 

This really does have just about all you need to know concerning WAR’s troubled development.  Though I advise immediately skipping to page 8, as the first 7 pages of the thread are hijacked by a troll who constantly argues the meaning of the word “failed”.  I am not really sure what point he is trying to make here, as I think its safe to say that going from around 80 servers to 4 can be considered a failure.  But hey, some people love denial and cling to it until the cows come home.  So rock on there.

But back to the WAR discussion…some of the finest criticism in this thread comes from Sir Robin.  So start with page 8 and move on from there.  I will still be here when you return.  :)

 

 

So there you have it…they were planning on totally instanced PvP to setup the realm war.  That doesn’t really sound like the game we all wanted, does it?  But by the time they realized the problem they were already in beta, so they were forced to shut things down to add an Open RvR system that is borked to this very day.  So WAR really has been in fix mode since before it even launched.  Keeps were never supposed to be there in the first place, which is why we got keeps that were not even as well developed as the ones in DAOC, made over 7 years prior to WAR’s release.

But to bring this distasteful rehash to an end, I can only say that I will continue to follow WAR in the future and may even log in from time to time.  But I just can’t see myself spending any significant amount of hours there unless we see some drastic changes.  Though I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that there is still a small part of me that hopes…that waits with baited breath for the final realization of the game I so wanted to love that just never really seemed to love me back.