Warhammer online. Another example of a good game being tainted by corporate pig-dogs

[NeptuneUK]

Spoiler

Haters gonna hate.

I played this back when it was new. The game was a quite buggy at the time and suffered from a few server and account issues, but the features were great and I found it more sociable and fun than WoW. I recently resubscribed and I am impressed with how it's been updated.
I created a new character and quickly teamed up with loads of other players who have either just started or are making alt characters. Within 10 mins I found a guild and was having a blast for hours with the public quests and PvP. So why does a great game like this have to suffer from the wretched taint of EA's grasp?
I have to argue with the launcher for 5 minutes about my login name and password just to log in. I installed from the retail CD but I had to redownload the client from scratch anyway after getting nonsensical error messages for 45 minutes. I had to piss around with my old account settings for half an hour and contact tech support JUST TO ACCESS MY ACCOUNT because in my absence EA and Cryptic took over from GOA studios and raped everything.
Why do essentially great games like this get screwed over by publishers? I mean anyone with a braincell in the marketing dept. can see that if your game installs, sets up and plays easily you are more likely to turn in a revenue. I would put money on the fact that if games like Warhammer online had fewer bugs at launch and had half decent account and server support afterwards they would flourish. I've seen it on many occasions where great games have slumped because of shitty support.

I am currently downloading the BF3 data from origin so I can play now that it is available in Europe even though the rest of the world has been enjoying BF3 for days. During the beta of BF3 I had to piss around for 15 minutes just to join a server with EA's bullshit web browser app. Why does EA have to turn everything it touches into shit?

On topic again. Apart from the launcher/account issues the game itself is fantastic. It suffered at launch which hurt it a lot, but I believe the free trial to rank 10 has helped draw in plenty more players (Wow did a similar thing afterwards but you have to buy the game as well as subscribe) If I didn't have to bitchslap the launcher just to login it would be a lot easier to enjoy. The main issues with the accounts that I have suffered seem to be related to the fact that the EA/Cryptic merger they went through last year pretty much decimated the European server population and so they merged them all. This ****ed everything for EU players.

In terms of MMOs, I still recommend this dog. Just don't try and resubscribe if you were a former player in europe... I'm very pleased with the recent resurge in players. Though a smaller playerbase than wow. The concentrated servers make the playing experience seem much more condensed and full of activity. There's only 6 races available but unlike wow, each race has completely different classes, this gives rise to 24 completely unique classes. Where a Tauren Shaman and a Troll Shaman in WoW have the same abilities but slight different racial boons, the Chaos Marauder and Empire Witch Hunter have different abilities and play styles despite both having a melee DPS archetype.

http://uk.pc.ign.com/articles/918/918335p2.html

 

[BabyHeadCrab]

Not gonna lie, I thought this went Free to Play years ago.

 

[NeptuneUK]

It was only released late 08.
But a good point. This game just missed all the headlines, with no good reason.

 

[Raziaar]

I have to argue with the launcher for 5 minutes about my login name and password just to log in.

NeptuneUK: "I'm not giving my name to a machine!"

 

[NeptuneUK]

You can't trust the system.
I threw it on the ground.

 

[bobtheskull]

Don't get me started on EA. I just upgraded my HD's and have been reinstalling my Steam games, including the games I ain't played in a while due to lack of space. Burnout Paradise is one, and after reinstalling yesterday, it took 15 minutes to get to the game! I couldn't attach to the EA account I created when i got the game and the support was worse than awful! It plays without the ability to play online and will still not acknowledge my account.
Also, i have a few other EA games that are attached to seperate accounts cos the damn setups wouldn't accept anything other than a new setup. You'd think that once you set up an account with a company, any future purchase could be registered with the same account/details.
I refuse to buy EA now unless its something I really don't want to miss.

 

[Bad^Hat]

I also played this at launch and, I'll be honest, the only thing that kept me playing for the month or two I stuck with it was having an awesome guild who moved over from WoW. It was a perfectly capable MMO with some nice gimmicks, some of which have since been adopted by other MMOs, but it was blaaaaaaaand. Combat felt lame and unresponsive, movement was weightless, characters were nearly impossible to tell apart from one another, and the art style was murky and completely unattractive. The one area the game shone, large scale pvp, ran like crap at launch and was a ghost town in pretty short order because they grossly overestimated the number of people who would be populating their vast, vast areas. Maybe some of these problems have been fixed, but I doubt they've managed to make it any more fun or interesting to play.

Not saying it's bad, it just suffers from the same problem that every other post-WoW fantasy MMO suffers from - it doesn't break far enough from the mold.

Also John Smedley called, he says "amateurs."

 

[BabyHeadCrab]

I'd even say the problem with every post-WoW mmo is that they don't even succeed in filling the mold. After all, WoW just builds on the empire Ultima and Everquest founded.