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Soon-to-be laid off EA Employee: Why Warhammer Failed (and why Old Republic will)

markatisu said:
I hear this alot and call bs, the Clone Wars was universally hated if you look at online complaints but yet is CN's highest rated series and will go at least another 2 years (if not longer)

The movies continue to sell again, and again, and again upon home video release

The games like Force Unleashed get universally panned but still sell, not to mention the ridiculous sale of the Lego SW games

The license has plenty of power, whether its "good" or not is irrelevant
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Clone Wars season 1 sucked, season 2 and on have been good.

The difference between SWTOR and other SW games is that TOR is subscription based. If X Star Wars game sucked but had good front-loaded sales, it doesn't hurt the company. If tons of people buy TOR and only play for the free first month and quit afterward, that's very very bad for the company.

Also :lol at all the theorizing on how long it will take EA to pay off the $300 million budget. You are completely ignoring the fact that the game takes money to run through server maintenance, post-release content development, and expansions, of which WoW will be releasing their 3rd in December shortly after the game's 6th anniversary.

Other than that, I don't see good things in the future for TOR at all. The extensive voice acting and heavy, serious storyline with "choices" are not things that the MMO community have been clamoring for. This in addition to Bioware's inability to even remotely balance classes in their games gives me low confidence in the product. If LucasArts, EA, and Bioware/Mythic are betting the farm on this project, I fear for all of them.
 
evangd007 said:
Also :lol at all the theorizing on how long it will take EA to pay off the $300 million budget. You are completely ignoring the fact that the game takes money to run through server maintenance, post-release content development, and expansions, of which WoW will be releasing their 3rd in December shortly after the game's 6th anniversary.
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And MMO's are long term investments, only time will tell. Lot of unknowns right now, but the money invested is for a long term project, they can't expect to make money out the game and any idiot would know this with the amount of money they are supposedly tossing at development.

The games future is suspect as with any MMO, but it's not going to likely be a huge flop and shut down, so many "failures" like Warhammer are even still going 2 years later and that even has an upcoming paid expansion just announced. TOR has a benefit of alot more hype, franchise, and likely push than many of other games on the market, so even if it doesn't do huge numbers, it should be around for a while.
 
WAR had such potential. A fucked up launch with a clearly rushed product and WOTLK launching just a few weeks later meant "end of story" before it ever really started. If it had been delayed 6 months with a more polished launch in the Spring 2009 and with the missing content (slayer/choppa) included it would have had a much better retention rate. It is actually a pretty damn good game today for those looking for a PvP fix, but the population is so low everywhere except for 1 server. If it went F2P it actually might even be more successful than Turbine has been with LOTRO.

Dark Age of Camelot is still my favorite MMO of all time. I hold out hope that one day we'll see a proper DAoC sequel, but it will never happen. Mythic is dead.

On the subject of SWTOR, I can definitely see it selling 2-3 million copies in the 1st month putting it close to WoW's numbers in the North American/Europe regions. WAR and Age of Conan each did 1 million their 1st months, shouldn't be hard with Bioware's prestige + Star Wars license + an expanded MMO market from when SWG came about. They won't touch WoW's worldwide numbers for obvious reasons though. Nothing ever will. :lol
 
HK-47 said:
Why are you just pointing out people defending it then?
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Because defending a game solely on developer's promises is pretty silly? Most of the critiques are just opinions on how the game looks, not exactly something that need to get worked up about.
 
Incompetent or nonexistent management? Brad McQuaid is that you?

Warhammer Online failed for many reasons, they may have been a direct cause of bad management but not all.

Warhammer Online failed because:
awful graphics engine, one of the biggest problems with MMOs(EQ2, Vanguard, AoC, FF14 and more also failed in this aspect)
focused on instanced PvP when the players wanted open PvP(other Mythic tell-alls said that open PvP was added as an after thought)
didnt listen to beta testers, Mythic pushed the game through despite beta testers warnings(FF14 anyone?)
horrible servers, laggy and unable to handle large scale PvP
terrible PvE, only notable aspect was the flawed Public Quest system
buggy, imbalanced and unfinished
the strict 2 faction system snowball effect, when 1 faction became more populace than the other they would steamroll in PvP which would lead people to quit or reroll on another server which would lead to major imbalance which would lead to the death of a server
released waaaaaaaay too early

If TOR is at least average in every aspect then it will be a HUGE success. All Bioware has to do to get 1 million subscribers is be feature complete and not suck.
The Star Wars name will get people in the door, that is certain. The Star Wars name worked as well as it could for SWG but they were quickly driven away by how bad the game was.

The full voice for TOR will be a major bullet point for TOR. Why? Because in a sea of "same old same old" anything new and semi interesting will be a major draw. People skip over quests in current MMOs because there is nothing interesting in them. Yes, I could read why some farmer wants me to kill 10 womp rats but why? But a fully voiced cinematic explanation of why I should kill 10 womp rats will be a new experience. Yeah, it'll get old after the first couple months but thats months of subscription fees.

Other things:
The WoW subscriber graph that shows the dip isnt even close to the truth. The website said it was just a guess. The truth is no one knows and a good portion of Chinese players moved to the Taiwan servers when WotLK launched there and the rest moved to them when WoW was closed down. Why do you think that WoW has only gained 400,000 subscribers since it came back online in China?

LotRO was able to double revenues by going free to play but we dont know what the revenues were originally. Turbine had to do something about LotRO because the lifetime subscription was the biggest mistake they ever made.
 
The dancing comment really was retarded though, save that shit for a cirque du soleil game, or maybe a specific class or some shit, it's never made sense why you'd have all these big burly warriors with axes and shit on their backs dancing around like they're in a Footloose MMO.
 
Throwing that kind of money at a studio like BioWare, who has a sort of proven limited skill-set, to develop a game in a genre they have no experience with... well, I thought it was stupid to begin with. But that figure, if true, only serves to further that impression.

MMOs are built on the design/gameplay. There has to be a steady stream of psychological triggers that tell you you're having "fun", provided by the gameplay. It's a science, honestly, and I know BioWare doesn't have the understanding their player-base to design something like that. The Old Republic will be a success, if only because it really can be nothing less than that at this point - but it won't be the start of a new era of MMO.

That whole mess at Mythic sounds awful, by the way. But I wonder how much of it can really be blamed on EA's management, and not the personalities at Mythic.
 
300 million to release

lets say 1 million in box sales first month (reasonable number)

49.99 box price = 50 million

the rest is...how many of said million Stay around...

say 33% stay (BAD Mmo - not god awful bad just Bad)

330 thousand x15 =4.95 million revenue 2nd month - excluding box sales

say -since "bad" game you stabilize after 4 months at 150k subscribers (people joining and leaving are "equal"

would take ABOUT 5 years to break even- in revenue not including expenses like servers and CS and employees working on the game.

retention at 50% ("good" mmo)= 500k 7.5 million second month

settles in at say 300k subcribers = 4.5 million a month

take About 3.5 to 4 years to break even-

retention at 66%- "Great" MMo

break even would be at about 2.5 to 3 years- again except for expenses

it all depends on that First Month and word of mouth.

the first month is THE defining moment for the game anything pre release is hype, it is when the mmo is out with the public to spend their money on is where the mmo will be made or busted.

every mmo that has released post wow hasn't been "good enough" to pull most people who tried the new MMO away from WoW permanently.

WoW permantently pulled people from everquest, from daoc, from everquest2 from ultima online, from FFXI, Lineage, Lineage 2, etc


you need an MMO - AT RELEASE- that is finished/Polished/Solid enough Throughout the game from "level 1 to max level- ESPECIALLY AT THE END GAME-to keep the players from going Back to their previous game.
 
mAcOdIn said:
The dancing comment really was retarded though, save that shit for a cirque du soleil game, or maybe a specific class or some shit, it's never made sense why you'd have all these big burly warriors with axes and shit on their backs dancing around like they're in a Footloose MMO.
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I remember when the game was coming out and they were like "there will be no dancing", I was like "fuck yea".
 
Nirolak said:
They've already spent all the money.

It can only get less bad for them once launch happens.
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Not if you've got your fingerprints on any of it. Game bombs. Stockholders look around and wonder WTF just happened. Heads roll.
 
Xiaoki said:
Warhammer Online failed because:
focused on instanced PvP when the players wanted open PvP(other Mythic tell-alls said that open PvP was added as an after thought)
didnt listen to beta testers, Mythic pushed the game through despite beta testers warnings(FF14 anyone?)
the strict 2 faction system snowball effect, when 1 faction became more populace than the other they would steamroll in PvP which would lead people to quit or reroll on another server which would lead to major imbalance which would lead to the death of a server
released waaaaaaaay too early
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Pretty much the big ones for me, yeah.

The full voice for TOR will be a major bullet point for TOR. Why? Because in a sea of "same old same old" anything new and semi interesting will be a major draw. People skip over quests in current MMOs because there is nothing interesting in them. Yes, I could read why some farmer wants me to kill 10 womp rats but why? But a fully voiced cinematic explanation of why I should kill 10 womp rats will be a new experience. Yeah, it'll get old after the first couple months but thats months of subscription fees.
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I think it will be mostly a meaningless bullet point compared to the whole 'Star Wars MMO by a well-respected developer thing,' but yes, I imagine it will get old fast and likely become an annoyance.
 
Warhammer was also kind of doomed being a PVP focused MMO. I mean it was always going to be relegated to a niche market since it basically was so casual unfriendly. They slapped on PVE which if anything just diluted the player base with folks doing stupid quests for meaningless rewards instead of joining in on the PVP.
 
Obviously I know a fair bit about the underworkings of things.

I really wanted to enjoy Warhammer and initially I did despite it's low level of polish and failure to deliver on large scale RvR. What got me to cancel my sub was a lack of players (too many servers) which was somewhat of a design call that Jacobs was very vocal about on the non-official forums. It may have been that it was a technical issue and the excuse was a design excuse; if that's the case then I'm wrong for pinning it on Jacbos although his flame wars on the forums couldn't have helped matters.

Had they instituted cross-realm scenarios and not nerf'd RP on my Zealot I would have kept playing past month two. I, of course, sent my feedback to the folks who run the games label when I cancelled my sub.

The customer these days will not accept a less than polished experience unless it is doing something extremely amazing. Cost-cutting measures and outsourcing really hurt this as one of the first victims of the cuts is local/internal QA. Lack of good QA and time pressure make for buggy messed-up releases and day one patches. There is a correct and proper balance of time pressure vs. quality, you need to have both, and one way to help things along is to spend a boat load on QA. Publishers (not just EA) seem more reluctant to do that these days; just look at the large number of day one patches for console titles.

Back in the day, you had to press a new version to issue a patch. There were no patches. The games had to work out of the box. This is the quality level that a console programmer should be striving for.

I still remember a friend at Midway giving me a copy of Wipeout for the N64. I fired it up and it crashed after 45 minutes. I was so shocked by this I ripped it out of the console and threw it at the wall. Now this kind of crap is common.
 
blizzardjesus said:
LEGO SW is pretty awesome. It sold well since it was good.(though the batman and indy ones were kinda weak)
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As an owner of 3 versions of Lego Star Wars I whole-heartedly agree (though I paid about $50 for the 3 new). It does what it needs to reach its obviously large audience quite well.

As for the MMO, it's the only MMO I have an interest in at all. Admittedly that is more due the tOR half than the SW one.
 
BattleMonkey said:
I remember when the game was coming out and they were like "there will be no dancing", I was like "fuck yea".
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I don't even remember if it had dancing, got it added later or not but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have helped the game at all.

But it's all in the past now.

The only MMO I've liked since DAoC was Eve and that's just too unforgiving for someone like myself who keeps such odd hours and will primarily play solo. Although we did play a lot of Asheron's Call before DAoC, that was pretty brutal on that open server, I'd probably rate that game as terrible by today's standards and the sequel was shitty but back then, our expectations we're just lower I guess.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

But I agree with people saying that these days you have to have it right at launch, it seemed back then the market was just ever expanding and you could throw anything at the wall and it'd stick long enough for you to get enough people stuck there but it's not like that now. You've got to have it pretty wrapped up right from the start.

Voice work however, I don't think will make a lick of a difference, after the first quest or two you're going to be in a hurry for the next, and the next and the next and actually listening will take way too long. I'm not saying it'll be a minus, so long as it can be skipped, but I could see it becoming a big problem down the line with patch sizes, unless future content isn't going to have voice work.

I honestly don't know if a good Star Wars MMO can be made, I think it'll be the same thing with the last Star Wars game where everyone's going to be a fucking Jedi, that's what most are going to want, I wonder how long they'll fight them and if they last as long as Sony did before caving.

Having not played or seen anything from the KOTOR MMO I won't comment on it specifically but if it's doing things other MMOs don't I think that can only be a positive, they need to find their niche not be a clone of WoW.
 
BattleMonkey said:
Warhammer was also kind of doomed being a PVP focused MMO. I mean it was always going to be relegated to a niche market since it basically was so casual unfriendly. They slapped on PVE which if anything just diluted the player base with folks doing stupid quests for meaningless rewards instead of joining in on the PVP.
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Really, if they had built the damn thing to handle sustained large-scale open world RvR and really nailed the components of it... I think it would have done really well. Not WoW, obviously, but at the time it would have been offering something distinct from WoW that might have been appealing for many people. Given ORvR worked, they could've gotten rid of the scenarios and got people into the world for a damn change. This probably would have helped with the PQs and a variety of other things.

But ORvR was piss-poorly handled and here we are. I mean, it had many failings, but that was really the distinctive feature that could have earned it some interest.
 
nicjac said:
I think Jaffe was spot on with his comment: http://criminalcrackdown.blogspot.com/2010/10/my-response-to-ea-louse.html
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I never thought I'd say this but Jaffe has hit the nail on the head. I mean yes we don't know if this guy is a spaz and a bullshitter, or has revealed just the tip of the iceberg on a shitfest. But either way judging from the far outside it just seems like he's being a little bitch. Really the only thing he listed that seems truly odd is the producer moving up from customer service and even then that depends (what if the guy was friends with the higherups at EA and proved to them his potential?). $300 million is VERY steep but...welcome to 2010. Wasteful and lenient spending in big production games isn't uncommon, infact it's that norm.
 
crimsonheadGCN said:
If that $300 million figure is correct then Bioware will most likely not exist if Old Republic bombs.
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i guess thats why TOR needs 1 millions subs just to break even. EA is counting on at least 2 million though.
 
Flying_Phoenix said:
I never thought I'd say this but Jaffe has hit the nail on the head. I mean yes we don't know if this guy is a spaz and a bullshitter, or has revealed just the tip of the iceberg on a shitfest. But either way judging from the far outside it just seems like he's being a little bitch. Really the only thing he listed that seems truly odd is the producer moving up from customer service and even then that depends (what if the guy was friends with the higherups at EA and proved to them his potential?). $300 million is VERY steep but...welcome to 2010. Wasteful and lenient spending in big production games isn't uncommon, infact it's that norm.
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The main thing that pisses people off is that the management move on to bigger and better things even after presiding over a massive failure. They get paid majorly to shoulder some major responsibility and then when things go to shit they blame all the guys under them and walk away. The guy does sound whiney but he is also about to get shit canned because a project cratered that he had no direct control over and the guys responsible for it cratering were apparently rewarded.
 
George Costanza says:
October 13, 2010 at 3:29 pm

Everytime I see a clip of SWTOR, I wonder why people are so excited. It looks like a game that cam out in 2004, the character models are generic and goofy looking. The combat looks stale.
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:lol :lol Costanza you have to get into everything don't you... Grade A trolling.
 
Ho-leee SHIT. Now THATS a post. Finally, an insider who gives names, and the real behind the scenes truth behind bad decisions. I had suspected some of this, but nowhere near all of it. Someone hire this man because he cares enough to expose this just to try and stop it even though he knows he won't be a part of the team anymore.
 
Two of the reasons Warhammer failed was because of the imbalanced population and the Instanced PVP. If you did ORVR most of the time you were either getting zerged or in the zerg yourself and people got tired of it FAST. And really, there was no insentive to do ORVR anyway. You could get way more Renown in PVP and the worst that could happen is that you get camped for a few min. At least there could be no zergs there.

They now have a good system up where you can get a lot more Renown if you are the underdog but it was too little too late. The upcoming ORVR pack might be the last hurrah.
 
The Old Republic will probably fail, but that's not news to anyone. Bioware is not on the same level as Blizzard, and the Star Wars IP doesn't sell games like it used too. Cataclysm looks amazing and will probably bring back a ton of former WoW subs (not this one, but a bunch of my friends have already reupped for 4.01). It all hinges on the end game really. There is a ton of stuff to do in WoW at max level, and if there isn't in The Old Republic, it will absolutely fail.
 
Whoa that's an interesting rant.

Anyways I've had no hope for Old Republic. Can't even come close to competing with WOW really and also Bioware's shit these days. Floppabomba within 6 months.
 
Orin GA said:
They now have a good system up where you can get a lot more Renown if you are the underdog but it was too little too late. The upcoming ORVR pack might be the last hurrah.
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Jesus, they just NOW got that in? Beta testers, including myself, were telling them to do that from the fucking beginning. Hell, I wrote a blog post about it... back when I had an actual blog.
 
Vinci said:
Really, if they had built the damn thing to handle sustained large-scale open world RvR and really nailed the components of it... I think it would have done really well. Not WoW, obviously, but at the time it would have been offering something distinct from WoW that might have been appealing for many people. Given ORvR worked, they could've gotten rid of the scenarios and got people into the world for a damn change. This probably would have helped with the PQs and a variety of other things.

But ORvR was piss-poorly handled and here we are. I mean, it had many failings, but that was really the distinctive feature that could have earned it some interest.
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I really want this from a MMO, but no one tries it because it's too hard :(. If EVE online was more accessible/less of a playable spreadsheet, or someone made a game like planetside I'd be all over that shit.
Unfortunately TOR and GW2 look heavily instanced, I'm more likely to return to WoW than try either of these.
 
If that number is really even remotely true I don't see how they make that money back quickly. The big Star Wars money in content and merchandise related directly to the films (new and old). SWG had that obvious connection but Old Republic does not. You won't see the game flying off the shelves. A combination of WoW's latest expansion keeping people busy and the wait and see approach is going to keep that number down I think for a few weeks. Then there is the simple issue of retention. Some will like what is offered and others won't. Doesn't matter if it's a good game or not. It won't click with everyone and that's working with the ideal that it's a good and solid game. Unless they sell several million boxes very quickly it's going to be a while before they make that kind of money back. Even when we run numbers that doesn't factor in how much is still going to be being spent to maintain the game and the people working on it so that's still money going out from EA. I doubt that figure (if true) will even include any marketing they might be going to do.

I don't see a problem with starting small and making a very solid product and just expanding it months at a time. As long as the additions aren't paid expansions but content updates like how Star Trek Online is doing or the book updates LOTRO had/has, or the monthly update the Asheron's Call has/had I don't think people will complain. Just as long as they are timely and people know when to expect them and know this is what your monthly fee is going toward. However the box content has to have enough content to justify the price or perhaps lower the price so it better reflects the content in the box.

Now the big issue is this. If they don't make their investment back quickly and start pulling in profit/revenue what will EA do? EA has no problem pulling the plug on MMOs either in development or ones that are fully launched. The only reason why UO and DAoC haven't been killed off I think is because there most likely is no significant cost to keep them going. Skeleton crews are most likely maintaining them and it has to be all profit coming in. If Old Republic ends up bleeding them money (what's going out is more then what is coming in for some reason) or simply with no timely turn around what then? Do they dare kill it or sell it?
 
Eve online is great in that it doesn't compromise itself in what it is but that same virtue does turn away many.

Planetside, that was fucking awesome, man someone needs to release something similar.
 
Router said:
I love a good rant. I wont be shocked if most of that is true.
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I'm sure it's slightly embellished with some half-truths and heavy bias sprinkled here and there, but I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't mostly true. I'm sure many others would feel the same way.
 
nicjac said:
I think Jaffe was spot on with his comment: http://criminalcrackdown.blogspot.com/2010/10/my-response-to-ea-louse.html
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lol, fucking jaffe. dude needs to write a book. i agree on both points, but as others have said point #2 could be invalidated in the case of say too human or DNF or any project where the creative talking-heads just refuse to deviate from their obviously failing plan.

also, WAR failed because:
-game was mediocre
-launch sucked
-shit wasn't WoW

can't speak for TOR since i haven't played it, but it looks like some of the worst parts from SWG and mass effect combined. just make another goddamn jedi knight game already.
 
And this is why to this day the God of War series is mired in clunky, poorly automated combat (dodge on the right analog stick lol) and anyone with a clue considers Bayonetta, Devil May Cry, or Ninja Gaiden to have far superior controls and combat mechanics.
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mjemirzian, you are my hero.
 
Wow. Just wow.

That is pretty damning stuff if true and his predictions are accurate. EA is not in a good position for another bomb considering NBA Elite got pulled from the market and MoH seems to be getting 'meh' reviews.
 
DennisK4 said:
Stupid publishers/devs chasing that WoW money.

I never wanted this stupid MMO anyway, I wanted KOTOR 3!

*pouts*
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Hey I wanted KotOR II and ended up with 2/3 of a game!
 
I'm not going to believe this yet - a disgruntled employee bashing his (soon to be) former employer isn't exactly new. That and the fact that he mentioned George Lucas. George Lucas. The same guy who made Jar Jar Binks. I don't really think he has any direct involvement in the game itself (I do know that BioWare has shown him the game before as I'm sure most things Star Wars are shown to him for "approval").

From everything I have seen from the game, the least you could say, given the videos and whatnot, is that it's WoW with story. I don't think that will fail right off even if that is true, and WoW was also missing the story component for me to really get involved with it anyway.

With that said, I hope TOR is much more but I can't really say until I see more and get the chance to play it for myself. I am not going to believe this EA employee though because I think he's probably just disgruntled and wants to hurt his former boss.
 
Shrinnan said:
That and the fact that he mentioned George Lucas. George Lucas. The same guy who made Jar Jar Binks.
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If this guy is correct when he says George Lucas hates TOR, thats the best endorsement for the game that i can think of.
 
Proven said:
Response from Sanya over the comment about her: http://eatingbees.brokentoys.org/2010/10/13/yes-i-saw-the-louse-blog/
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Sanya implied that things went so sour that she had to lawyer up, and she suggested the EA Louse do the same. It's clearly not all sunshine and lollipops at Bioware Mythic.

nicjac said:
I think Jaffe was spot on with his comment: http://criminalcrackdown.blogspot.com/2010/10/my-response-to-ea-louse.html
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I don't blame his team members for complaining about the combat in GoW. I thought it was awful. But the spectacle, cinematic atmosphere and high production values helped make up for it, I guess. Without that you just end up with, well, Dante's Inferno.
 
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