Announcements of Mythical Proportions!

July 11, 2008 – 12:11 pm

Mark Jacobs announced yesterday that several major announcements would be made today, but that are not about the beta and release date. This whipped speculation up into a frenzy, but now we’re starting to hear it from the “horse’s mouth” so to speak. Here are my thoughts…

EA Mythic is Mythic Entertainment once more

I don’t think this news is important to the average gamer, but it does show the change in philosophy in the upper ranks at Electronic Arts. For years, they have been seen as the Borg of game developers, assimilating smaller studios, integrating them into the larger collective, and stifling everything that made them unique, original, and awesome in the first place.

Allowing Mythic to go back their original name goes to show that perhaps EA is giving individuality and creativity back to their studios. Maybe they’re allowing them to operate as they once did in an insular, yet still part of the team, sort of way.

Punkbuster for Warhammer Online

You can learn all about Punkbuster here, but it’s basically an anti-cheat security program that tries to bust a cap in hacking suckas. It’s kind of similar, at least in intention, to Warden in World of Warcraft. I wrote my thoughts about these kinds of anti-cheat, yet possibly invasive programs here.

Mark Jacobs just announced that Mythic Entertainment will be partnering with Punkbuster to prevent cheating and hacking in Warhammer Online.

“As you know,” said Jacobs in an interview, “we have fought a long battle against hackers, cheaters and other assorted slimeballs who think that it’s both fun and fair for them to have an advantage over other players.”

“We obviously did a lot of things in Dark Age of Camelot that worked,” he continued. “ We banned cheaters whenever we found them. We made a tremendous effort to sort out and deal with hackers and companies or individuals who promote this sort of stuff. Did we do a perfect job? Absolutely not, nobody does, but we did a pretty good job.” - Source: MMORPG.com

I’m not too keen on the possibility that Punkbuster may be able to monitor other processes on my computer, the websites I’m visiting, and banking information I’m using. I’ve never cheated in an MMORPG, but I still don’t want to feel as though someone’s looking over my shoulder as I play the game.

At the same time, I really hated the cheating that took place in DAOC. Window dragging and radar were two of the most joy-killing activities I’ve seen in a game where competitive PvP is the focus. I don’t support cheating in PvE, but it is way worse in PvP/RvR imho. For now, I’ll just have to accept this and hope my details don’t go into some massive database sold to the highest bidder wanting to market the next generation of toothpaste my way.

Warhammer Online is only launching with two capitol cities

“A number of months ago,” Jacobs began, “we sat down and looked at where we were with our Capital Cities and we looked at what we were doing with Altdorf and Inevitable, we looked at the Greenskin home, the Dwarf home and we went ‘there’s an awful lot to do here and there are some issues‘.”

There was something missing. It wasn’t enough fun, it wasn’t interesting enough, it wasn’t “alive” enough. From there, the team was faced with a choice. They could either keep going down that path, working on all six cities and trying to get them finished before launch or make the hard decision to shelve four of the cities until post-launch and make sure that Altdorf and Inevitable were as full and rich as their design had intended. Mythic chose the latter. - Source: MMORPG.com

To get the full scope, you really need to read the entire article, but I have to say, I am really disappointed in this regardless of how awesome the two cities are going to be and how much positive spin they try putting on it. I think these guys are extremely hardworking, passionate, and have so many awesome ideas and yet it took them years to implement… two cities. To me, that sounds like they bit off a lot more than they could chew.

Launching with two capitol cities isn’t the end of the world or completely game-breaking (however lore-breaking it is), but I’m curious, if it took them so long to implement and polish two cities, how long will it take to finish off the remaining four? Are these going to be implemented in free content patches a couple months in or saved up for pay-to-play expansions? To me, it should be the former because these cities are core to the original game design. Want to introduce new cities we’ve never heard of? Sure, I’ll pay for that, but I’ll feel ripped off if I have to pay for something you’ve been promising for like, forever.

This brings me no happiness, but I just want to report I won one of my bets with a fellow beta tester.

Oh, and Warhammer Online also shipping without four classes

Wow, come on guys! You’re killing me here! MMORPG.com is now the official bearer of bad news (at least in my eyes) for the second half of 2008! I also want to report that this is the second bet I won with my beta friend. We really should have put money on it…

“This isn’t something that I can say that it is really a good thing for the player,” he began. “We’re cutting out some classes. I can say that we are doing this for quality, absolutely. Unfortunately, what I can’t say, and I won’t because I’ve never lied to the player base and while this would be a great place to start, I’m not going to.”

“Four of the classes that we’ve been working on, we just couldn’t get great,” he continued. “We looked at them and we said these careers are just not great… and we tried, and they weren’t coming out well.” - Source: MMORPG.com

Unsurprisingly to any hardcore followers, the four classes we’ve heard the least about lately have been cut for release plans and perhaps permanently. My sympathy goes out to everyone who wanted to play a Choppa (Greenskin), Hammerer (Dwarf), Blackguard (Dark Elf), or Knight of the Blazing Sun (Empire).

In the end, after looking at the metric data that they have been collecting throughout the beta process, they saw that there were four careers that just weren’t working for the players.

Were the NDA not in place right now, I’d have some pretty scathing remarks to make here, but I do value my status as a beta tester so I’ll keep my mouth shut for now… It is, however, pretty frustrating.

The ONLY positive I can take from this is that they don’t appear to have thrown a huge monkey wrench into class balance. It would have been way worse to launch with the Choppa and not the Hammerer as well as keeping the KotBS but canning the Blackguard. These classes are supposed to cancel each other out in the battlefield, so thank the heavens they got that right.

On a personal note, I’m probably more pissed off than most here because one of the careers I really wanted to promote on this site has been cut. I had been planning some really cool Choppa features for TheGreenskin that aren’t going to happen anymore. Also, the Choppa was my first go-to class if I didn’t end up enjoying the Shaman at release. Ugh.

Are the Warhammer Online Collector’s Editions nearly sold out?

Let’s try ending this on a spectacularly speculative good note.

According to the Waaagh! Blog, the WAR CEs might be sold out as soon as this Monday. One could take a pot shot at Mythic here by saying, “Hmmm, waiting until the CEs are almost sold out before making these some questionably negative announcements. Way to go guys.” However, I said I wanted to end on a positive note, right!?

I would address this by saying that if these things piss you off enough, you can still cancel your pre-orders. Even though beta codes have come out, I don’t believe our credit cards have actually been charged yet for pre-orders, correct? I know mine hasn’t from the EA Store.

Will this make me cancel my CE pre-order? I don’t know to be honest. I’m quite disappointed after today’s announcements. I predicted the capitol city and class cut announcements months ago in my circle of friends, yet I was holding out hope they could work things out.

I’m going to take a couple days to think all this over and get back to you with some calmer, more rational thoughts. There’s nothing worse than firing off statements in the heat of the moment that you regret later. Well, actually there’s a lot worse (human rights atrocities and all that fun stuff), but I’m going to play it safe on this blog.

Talk to you soon once I’ve cooled down.

I do want to add that I appreciate that Mythic is up front with us with both good news and bad and I’m not trying to be overly negative towards them as a studio. I am just really sad/mad that some of the things I was most anticipating will not make it into the game.