These are his failures? Talk about over-complicating the issues.
WAR shipped without a general chat. This was such a simple and essential element of multiplayer games whose absence fractured the entire population.
The LFG system was zone limited. Further compounding the community fracturing, and resulting in many instances (even when PvE areas were populous) of people unable to complete the public quest system (the main advancement of WAR).
PvP battlegrounds were highly rewarding, so much so that when combined with the horrible community features meant that 90% of the players stuck to grinding scenarios. Not only this but in order to get 50% of the reward from the scenarios you needed to stick close to pvp camps, meaning that even while queuing PvE groups were unable to spontaneously form.
RvR zones, encompassing 25-50% of maps were devoid of any content or mobs. This meant that they were consistently empty. Without content to keep people busy in the areas players needed to either AFK within the areas (something no sane person would do) or wait until another group AFKed in the zone (which never happened). With public quests within RvR zones (that had higher rewards than PvE zones) there would be a constant flow of players throughout the zone.
The things this EP thinks were the problems are so convoluted and false that it seems they've been created by committee. Problems are never this conceptual, they are concrete failures in features or the flow of gameplay.
For a MMO to work content must be easy to locate, for content that requires other players communication tools to group together must be accessible and easy to use, for systems requiring opposing players there must always be a reason to participate even when opposing players are not immediately available, and reward systems must be pretested to ensure one path isn't overly rewarding when compared to another unless you want everyone using that path (humans as a rule are mix/maxers).
'Economy', 'Solo content', and 'Difficulty' are some of the worst excuses I've ever heard of. None of these problems, apart from difficulty, are immediately important.
Hickman: Warhammer Mistakes Have 'Haunted' Mythic
The Austin Game Developers Conference is currently under way, and Mythic Entertainment Executive Producer Jeff Hickman spoke candidly about the mistakes the company made with Warhammer Online that have "haunted" the team for the past year. According to Gamasutra, Hickman outlined the three main errors that Mythic "should not have made" with the game:
- PvE is too easy in the beginning. "It doesn't make you thrilled to do it," Hickman said. "The game has suffered immensely for it."
- There is "little reason to socialize" in the game since friends aren't required to play, which is partly due to the fact that you can solo a lot of the content.
- The team "missed the mark" on the game's economy.
With that being said, Hickman did emphasize that public quests and open grouping are "major breakthroughs" for Warhammer Online. He also discussed the changes that will need to be made to the game to localize and culturalize it for a Korean audience. "If you have a successful game in North America, you have this tendency to go 'we have a great game.' Don't do that. Learn from the past," Hickman said.
Tags: News, WarhammerOnline