Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to mourn the passing of Warhammer: Age of Reckoning. So it goes.
Some might say a funeral for WAR is a bit premature, after all the game still has enough subscribers that you could lose the populations of most MMOs in there, and though it is seeing a reduction in servers there are still some that are actually busy. But I'm going to call this one now. There is more to life in an MMO than simple server status and population, there’s hope, there’s a sense that great things are yet to come. Warhammer does not have these. It has a shrinking population biding their time until something better comes along and forums littered not with just posts about individuals leaving, but of guilds and alliances closing their doors. WAR is a terminal coma patient waiting for the switch to be thrown. It could rattle on for years, but it's no more alive than a steak dinner.
If anything the problems with Warhammer Age of Reckoning are more severe than those that blighted the equally ill-fated Conan MMO. Conan was so relentlessly bad once you got past the first few levels and into the PvP that it pretty much bled out its initial population in a couple of months and could rebuild from scratch, maybe save itself. For all that was wrong with Conan, and it was a lot, there was nothing wrong with it that couldn’t be put right without sweeping changes to class balance and the addition of extra content to the parts of the game that had been bare. Conan’s problem was that it was, at launch, crap, with very little balance between classes and whole swathes of the game unfinished. Sure it looked good, and the content was very heavily front-weighted, so that it reviewed well (even I gave it a favourable review, a harsh lesson in just how long you need to play an MMO to get to the problems), but as an MMO, as a game you’re supposed to want to spend most of your waking life playing, it was a poor.
Warhammer on the other hand was, and is, significantly better. This might lead folks to wonder just why exactly Warhammer is going down precisely the same toilet as Conan, albeit, like an outraged pet alligator, with a little more resistance.
The chief reason that Warhammer is tanking is that it was sold as a PvP and RvR game. For the uninitiated that means a game based around fighting other players from the opposing realm. In this case Order Versus Chaos. This really didn’t work very well though and the first mistake that really set the tone for the fail to come is that there are only two factions. This is a proper schoolboy error. Two faction RvR is basically like have a seesaw, lots of fun if both sides are weighted equally and the balance is changing constantly, but of course though in MMOs this almost never happens. One faction starts out bigger and that defines the pattern for the entire in game war until you have an exodus of players, and you will have an exodus of players from that situation sooner or later. People will not pay to play an MMO that consists of getting mobbed constantly, and on the flip side they will not pay to play an MMO where they have to clamber over half a dozen friendly characters just to get a shoe in on a dying enemy. Three factions or more, suddenly you’ve got the elements for the players to balance themselves, the big realm has to fight all comers and balance is maintained.
The second omission was that duelling was not implemented, so you couldn’t just have a one on one fight unless you arranged one. One on one fights are really the kind of fighting where reputations are earned, where class balance is tested in the field and where you can enjoy a different kind of fight to the hectic stabathons of group combat. In a PvP focussed game you need to cater to all kinds of PvP, especially duels against allies when, as is the case in WAR, you will often find yourself with nothing to do waiting for a timer on a zone or attack to run out. If the enemy attacks a fort they get an hour to capture it, and it doesn't take more than ten minutes or so to overrun the non-player defenders, so unless you want the enemy in your capital city you'd best defend the forts, but if the enemy doesn't show all you get for your trouble is bored to death. Duelling could have alleviated this time spent with nothing to do, could have given players something to think of besides, "What the hell am I wasting my life standing on this parapet for?" and ultimately could have stopped players leaving.
Thirdly despite the promise that fighting monsters, the PvE side to the game, would never be necessary to enjoy the PvP side of it, this is simply untrue. This is because the RvR side to the game involves lots of PvE in and of itself. You don’t capture a zone or a castle or even a city by killing players, you take this objectives by killing bosses inside them and it all goes a lot smoother if nobody shows up to impede you at all. This is something that really only becomes apparent when you have reached maximum level, whereupon you are trying to gain renown points rather than experience, and where player kills are worth only a tiny fraction of what you get for locking an empty zone or capturing an undefended keep. What Warhammer managed to do so well was creating one of the first MMOs since Planetside where you could level your character up completely just from killing other players in RvR combat, but it dropped the ball in the endgame by not providing sufficient rewards. This problem was compounded by the need to acquire better armour and weapons, which often had to be done through repetitions of instances such as Sigmar’s Crypt and The Lost Vale. For players itching just to tear other players to bits these humdrum mob-slapping jaunts were torturous, for players who like PvE, well Warcraft always did it better.
The 1.3 patch brought with it new content to the game, but this content came in the form of a huge, predominantly PvE based area. Another step away from the games supposed PvP-centred philosophy. With the player base wondering just what WAR was trying to be the appearance of one more tepid dungeon to farm was not especially welcome.
Fourthly the RvR campaign of Warhammer is staggeringly badly structured and buggy. You capture zones, you push to the forts, you capture two of the three forts and you unlock the city, you then fight through the city and kill the kind. That was the plan. The reality is that the first stage of the city siege is the only one that is fought against the opposing players, and this is not decided by the level forty characters at all, the lions share of the points needed to win the first stage are instead taken in instanced fights called scenarios fought between lower level characters. Players now have to swap to their back up characters to win the first stage, then if they do and they push on they have to swap back to their main character and carry on the battle, a situation that couldn’t actually be sillier if it was conducted to the Benny Hill theme tune. Coupled to that the fact that for months there was a bug in how the points to capture a zone were calculated, and that inevitably the faction with the most players is basically going to steamroll everything, you’ve got a recipe for a pretty crappy campaign.
Lastly and anybody who has played a good amount of Warhammer will see this one coming, there is the issue of lag. That a game in this day and age can demand a subscription and lag as much as Warhammer is frankly staggering. Usually the lag occurs only at the big set piece battles, the fort attacks, keep sieges and city defences, you know, those big set piece battles that the game is supposed to be all about. Suddenly you’re bogged down with ten seconds to wait before spells fire off wondering why you’re even bothering. Any notion of skill or teamwork is lost and when the lag subsides, if it ever does, generally the side with the most people has won. You reach a point where one realm attacks with huge numbers and you can’t face them with similar numbers, presuming you’ve got them, because the server will break and of course why would you want to when the rewards for just taking zones unopposed are so much better than those for actually fighting? Other games have done large scale combat before, or at least had the common sense not to even try to do it if their servers couldn’t handle it. Warhammer’s great failing in this regard is having fundamental parts of the campaign doomed to be laggy as hell, and believing these battles to be a selling point.
So there it is, where Warhammer went wrong. Ironically from level one to level thirty nine it’s actually one of the best MMOs I’ve ever played, the journey from zero to hero is littered with great player versus player fighting, some fantastic public quests, really well defined classes and a plenty of places to go and interesting people to kill. It’s almost a shame that this part of the game is over so fast and all that remains is a misbegotten mess of compromises served up at a play by email pace.
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