Author: Jeff Morgan (Page 234 of 260)

Mythic did something at GDC this week that I honestly don’t expect from any developer: it acknowledged mistakes. Not just one mistake, either, but a slew of them that kept the Warhammer MMO from becoming the best new thing on the market. I appreciate the acknowledgment for a couple reasons. First, the game was a letdown, and a pretty big one at that. Second, the things the Mythic staff pointed out gives us a close look at how small changes can affect the scope of a game in a big way.

Here’s the bulk of Mythic’s comments from VG247:

There’s a big difference between easy play and ease of use. One of the lessons that we thought we learned from ourselves and other games, was that it’s important to have ease of use, and it’s also important to hit the right balance between easy gameplay, challenging gameplay, and too difficult. We thought we hit that, but Warhammer, in PVE, in the beginning, is too easy. It doesn’t make you thrilled to do it.

[As for] our economy… we just missed the mark. If you look at the reasoning behind the economy, you’ll see things like, ‘Hey, we’re not going to let gold farmers in our game.’ ‘We’re going to try to make sure we have controlled inflation.’ We had all the best reasons in our game, but what it caused us to do was build a game where economy is not important enough.

All I can say is, “yup.” Those are exactly the sorts of things that sound great in theory but in practice create an uninspiring world, one you’ll find hard to justify spending money to be a part of.