Mark Jacobs, VP of Mythic Entertainment (formely EA Mythic) dropped couple of bombshells in his interview at mmorpg.com. First he announced that Mythic had teamed up with PunkBuster to get some anti-hacking code to protect Warhammer Online. Usually MMOs keep hack prevention code in-house, but PunkBuster has a pretty good track record for providing software that can snoop out the aimbots and wallhacks, so why not an MMO?
But that wasn't the bombshell. What suprised everyone was the announcement that Mythic was cutting a lot of content from Warhammer Online.
Jacobs: “We decided to focus our energies on two capital cities; one for Order and one for Destruction, and make them fabulous. Not good, not great, but fabulous.” (source)
Originally Warhammer Online was designed with six fully-fledged capital cities - one for each race of the game. Now only two of them - Altdorf (Empire) and Inevitable City (Chaos) will make the launch. Considering that the capital cities were supposed to be the main goal of the massive RvR gameplay, this is a pretty big change. Instead of three cities for both sides, they are left with a single city each at launch.
And that's not all. Mythic is also cutting four careers - classes of Warhammer Online - before launch.
Jacobs: “Four of the classes that we’ve been working on, we just couldn’t get great. We looked at them and we said these careers are just not great… and we tried, and they weren’t coming out well.”
The classes that get the pre-launch axe are
Choppa (Greenskin)Hammerer (Dwarf)Blackguard (Dark Elf)Knight of the Blazing Sun (Empire)What's interesting is that all four are melee classes, and two of them were supposed to be "main tank" classes. Read on for our take...
Warhammer in Trouble?Mark Jacobs obviously explains it all away with the desire to provide a polished, high quality game while sticking to the November 2008 launch date. EA supposedly had no input to these decisions - and hey, it may be true. On the other hand, EA may be pushing hard for Warhammer Online to make that November 2008 launch (even if Jacobs denies that), and Jacobs is a veteran - he knows that emulating Age of Conan at launch is the path to a disaster. The only remaining option is to cut back on content and spend what little time you have to polish what's left.
Now we don't have all the details to truly analyze how such a massive cut will affect the game, but based on the noises I've heard from the closed beta (nope, I'm not in it - wish I were), all is not well. Based on third hand information, there are some fairly good ideas and concepts, but on a fundamental level, Warhammer Online tries to step to the territory of World of Warcraft, and in that comparison, it loses in many areas. Sure, Warhammer Online is not yet finished, but if they truly stick to the November release date, and go head to head with the likely launch window of Wrath of the Lich King... let's just say that the last game who tried to launch head to head with World of Warcraft was Everquest 2, and that didn't work out too well for SOE.
On related news, the Guild Beta of Warhammer Online has started - yet another sign that the launch is closing in. I remember when my old Dark Age of Camelot guild applied to that beta years ago... I guess I have to dig up some old email addresses and ask if we got in.
Oh and yes, EA Mythic has changed their name back to Mythic Entertainment. I wonder what the behind-the-scenes reasons for that decision are.
