3rd
pussies
As much as I read about how Warhammer failed this and that I can’t help but think about the fact that at least they tried to do what people had been demanding for the past year-plus; that being to make a PvP centric game that had a PvE focus to it in an attempt to drive two different types of players together.
Sure it didn’t quite work and there’s still a struggle to put it together, there’s plenty of bitching on what they did wrong and right and how much money was wasted, why the game will go down the plug hole and all the design mistakes which were made but truth be told, in my eyes they (Mythic) did alot of things right, or at least did something different, attempting to turn the direction of games into something more than what they were.
WARs been out what, 6 months? AoC a year? Darkfall, 4 months? And already we read of people falling back to Aion because it’s very similar to what WoW is, but also polished, and people are happy about this, because it’s different from WoW, in an aesthic sense but only in that sense and nothing more. Yet a year and a half ago people were demanding innovation, next generation design and begging a company to get some balls and do something exciting and new.
I’ve always felt AoC attempted that originally before either running out of funds or simply pussying out, where as WAR dedicated themselves to pushing two different coins together. Even if it does fall on its face eventually there are lessons there and design concepts used we can learn from, take, adapt and adjust.
WoW never did that - they threw in tid bits covered up in polish and pretended it was similar or like-wise, when in actual fact alot of their newly brought in changes (until recently) weren’t pushing anything. Even now the changes proposed won’t change much (XP in battlegrounds! Except if you turn it off… which means you won’t get XP for other activities… /care?). There were no fecking influences or reasons to even bother with some of them (PvP objectives in Hellfire, WPL/EPL, Silithus and Nagrand anyone?). The achievements were dead-pan and meant for the house wives of the gaming world, Wintersgrasp was closer to a PvE event with player griefing thrown in because quite frankly it was about the vehicles, not the players (and they didn’t even manage to include all the vehicles in! Yet we don’t hear much about that) and raids haven’t stepped up, which isn’t something I find exactly wrong, but the lack of mechanics employed across the gaming world havn’t been seen, at least not directly, within the raid environments.
The obvious thing is that WoW is a PvE game, with PvP being a mini game that holds little skill, ability or demand across the majority. It’s seen as a route to PvE, a means to entertain ones self and a joke to any game that takes the Player vs. Player route ‘seriously’. It’s got a broad audience because it’s simply and requires only basic AI to player (or visa versa) interaction - which isn’t a problem, but that is what keeps it chugging, not the PvP, the battlegrounds or the attempt at a faction based fight. WAR tried to be different and it didn’t work but that doesn’t mean it won’t work.
But at least Mythic had the testicles to give it a god damn shot.
