Mark Jacobs on WAR release and more…

August 7, 2008 – 10:39 am

Mr. Jacobs made an announcement to the fans about the September 18, 2008 release, NDA liftage, open beta, and much more. Here are my takes on each of his points.

1) Our launch date of September 18th is indeed official. Last week I had said that this week’s news wasn’t going to cover the release date but some things came together just a wee bit faster than we expected (and how surprising is that?). Plus, with the retailers announcing the date (though some did put in the wrong date), we felt that we owed it to the community to announce our release date a little earlier than planned. Coordinating all the partners, retailers, etc., is as usual, *interesting* so we made the decision to announce the date today. As always, that date is still dependent on the remainder of beta going well, but as of this morning we are still on track for the 18th. As to why it’s on a Thursday, in order to ensure a simultaneous launch in North America and Europe and Oceania, we determined that Thursday was the optimal day and date. Coordinating a simultaneous launch in North America and Europe alone is quite challenging and because we did not want our European customers to have to wait even a few days longer than those in North America, we chose Thursday as the best possible day of the week to launch. With a launch on the 18th, WAR’s development time will still rank as one of the shortest of any major North American and European MMORPGs to date. I am amazingly proud of our team’s effort and I hope, in about a month, you’ll agree that WAR is a great MMORPG.

Glad to hear it! You had to assume there was some kernel of truth to the various retail announcements, however, given that there were so many dates tossed around, it was hard to predict which one it was. I’m not really sure why a Thursday would be optimal for a simultaneous NA/EU release date, and he doesn’t really explain, but I’ll just take his word for it. At least we’ll only be one day away from the start of the weekend.

2) As to the subscription pricing, this subject has been debated continually since we announced the development of WAR. We have been very upfront with the community about our willingness to charge more than what is the current “established” MMO subscription rate, just as we did when we launched DAoC. We have seen lots of polls, heard lots of comments and after much thought and discussion, we decided to keep prices on the same level with the competition. We know that the vast majority of the community will be happy with this decision so we’re happy to be able to do this for our players.

It’s nice to know they listened extensively to community feedback on this. I guess enough of us spoke out about how pissed we’d be to pay more than everyone else to play this MMORPG that it made an impression. Times change and inflation rolls ever onward, so I have no doubt we’ll see an increase in monthly subscription fees for MMORPGs some day. I can’t remember who said this, but I agree: Blizzard’s next-gen MMORPG will probably be the first to push past $14.99 per month because they have enough clout in the industry to pull it off. Once that happens, I think other studios will follow suit.

3) Regarding the pre-order, Collector’s Edition and the Standard Edition, I’m pleased to announce that we will be holding a special “Preview Weekend” in addition to the normal Open Beta. Those people who pre-ordered the CE will be given priority entrance into the PW. You will need to download the client (of course) from one of several download options, none of which will require any additional payment of any kind. Once the CE buyers have had their chance to register and download the client, we will allow our Closed Beta testers into the PW as well. We would like to have around 100K people load testing and playing the game so depending on how many CE purchasers sign up for this, we will invite other people into the PW as well.

Nice perk! My guess is that the Preview Weekend will be August 15-17, with Open Beta servers officially launching on August 18/19… but wait a sec… Read #5. This doesn’t make sense.

4) Regarding the pre-order, Collector’s Edition and the Standard Edition, we are extending the Head Start for the pre-order CE (not the SE) buyers by at least an additional day as an added thank you for buying our CE. Just as with the PW, no additional fee will be required to play in our Head Start.

Using Thursday, September 18 2008 as the official release, my guess is that CE pre-order customers will gain entry into the Head Start program on Monday, September 15 and SE pre-order customers will be let in on Tuesday, September 16. Given that CE customers are only being given ONE extra day, I can’t foresee the Head Start period being more than three days total.

5) Regarding the pre-order, Collector’s Edition and the Standard Edition, we are pleased to announce that we will also be inviting our pre-order CE buyers into our Closed Beta test starting next week. There will still be some hardware spec requirements (but they are much lower than our current requirements) since we are still in Closed Beta but we expect that the vast majority of our PO CE buyers will meet the lowered requirements. We gotten a lot of feedback from the community on this point over the last few weeks asking for this and we are now going to make it happen.

Wow… that’s about 60,000+ new potential closed beta testers. That’s huge! However this is somewhat strange, given #3 above. If CE/SE pre-order customers are getting into closed beta next week, how can they be part of a “special” Preview Weekend unless that weekend is THIS weekend? After all, Mark clearly separates the CE/SE pre-order customers from the Closed Beta Testers in #3. The Preview Weekend would be kind of meaningless if all pre-order customers are already in Closed Beta… previewing the game, no?

6) Regarding the start of OB, we are still working out all the details and when we are 100% locked into a date, we will be happy to confirm it unequivocally. As the history of MMOs has shown, a bad OB can hurt both the long-term and the short-term the success of a game just as surely as a great OB can help the game succeed and we need to make sure that we are ready for OB on the day it begins.

This makes sense to me. You definitely don’t want to have people coming into your game and having a bad experience when release is a few weeks away. That will turn many people off WAR considering AoC’s recent launch. Then again, I don’t know how negatively AoC’s open beta actually affected their release. 700,000 gamers still bought the AoC even though many people were concerned after having played a very restricted and unbalanced open beta. Ultimately, time will tell how well AoC does in the long due due to their bugs, balance issues, and lack of content.

7) Regarding the NDA lift, we hope to lift the NDA next week, one month before launch. I wish I could lift it right now but as I’ve said elsewhere, we need to take care of a three issues before the NDA is lifted. One has already been taken care of and I hope that by the end of next week, the other two will be taken care of as well. Once we lift the NDA I’ll go into more detail as to what the issues were and why I wanted to hold things up. The remaining two issues are not earth-shattering by any means but when I explain things, I hope you’ll understand why I wanted to wait another week.

You can’t imagine them opening beta without first lifting the NDA, and given these remarks, I’m pretty certain that Mark will announce these two occurrences as simulatneous events. I have tried and failed locating the quote where Mark talks about how NDA lift dates in relation to launch are also related to your product quality… Any help on that one?

Overall, these announcements have been pretty good!