Warhammer Online shutting down in December
It feels rare for MMORPGs to shut down nowadays, not without trying free-to-play first anyway, but Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is for the chop. This December, after five-and-a-bit years online, the MMORPG based upon Games Workshop's tabletop wargame will shut down.
It feels rarer for MMORPGs to shut down nowadays, not without trying free-to-play first at least, but Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is for the chop. This December, after five-and-a-bit years online, the MMORPG based upon Games Workshop's tabletop wargame will shut down.
"Unfortunately, as with all licensing deals they do eventually come to end and on December 18th, 2013 we will no longer be operating Warhammer Online," Mythic said in the announcement.
"... Warhammer despite its flaws was a valiant effort into the MMO space", producer Carrie Gouskos reflected . "I don't think any of its critics would ever call it boring. It struck out boldly, and some of the game's novel features are now considered industry standard for MMOs."
Though it had a PvE side, Warhammer Online focused heavily on PvP, with rampant warfare between three factions. Players needed to team up to secure war resources, control zones, take cities and, ultimately, raid and pillage the enemies' capital cities.
EA tried to launch a free-to-play PvP arena battle spin-off named Wrath of Heroes, but cancelled it this year before even leaving open beta testing.
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replyAlice O'Connor posted a new article, Warhammer Online shutting down in December.
It feels rare for MMORPGs to shut down nowadays, not without trying free-to-play first anyway, but Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is for the chop. This December, after five-and-a-bit years online, the MMORPG based upon Games Workshop's tabletop wargame will shut down.-
Indeed a waste. It was such potential when it came out, and they squandered it.
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It is amazing it took this long.
It is also amazing they never gave F2P conversion a shot... with how the areas are broken up, it seems like it'd be ideal for the LotRO method of buying zones. It even had that journal thing they could've granted points for unlocking things, much like LotRO does.
The horrific launch killed it, but after some patches I think it became a pretty good game... but at that point it was too late to revive it from the (deserved) word of mouth beating it took.
Seems crazy to me that they just let it sit in that Tier 1 Unlimited Trial Hell for years and years and never tried to make something more out of it.
Oh well. Maybe someone else will get the license... we're doing pretty good on 40k stuff, so I wouldn't mind seeing more WHF vidya games. :P-
I'd be willing to bet that Games Workshop vetoed any move to F2P. They have very particular stance on the perceived value of their IP.
Years ago I worked in a hobby store that sold a lot of 40K minis. A new line of Imperial Guard minis were about to be released, so the older ones had pretty much stopped moving. We decided to put the old stuff on a clearance sale to (hopefully) get it to move and free up shelf space for the new stuff in a few weeks.
By coincidence, the very next day our GW rep stopped in. The moment he saw the sale display he bought all of it with the company credit card. It turns out that GW corporate absolutely hates seeing their products on sale or clearance. Apparently the suits at the England HQ think that if a customer sees the products selling at discount, they'll interpret it to mean that the products are bad and not worth paying for. I imagine the idea of a Warhammer branded MMO becoming free to play would give them similar apprehension.-
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It's an old article so I don't know if it applies anymore but several years back they instituted a policy wherein any store that sells 40k miniatures is not allowed to sell them over the Internet, and GW would stop giving stock to retailers that do.
http://games.slashdot.org/story/03/04/16/1520219/games-workshop-tries-to-crack-down-on-internet-sales
The reason was probably due to channel conflict - the official term for the practice of using the value add of one channel and then actually patronizing the price of a different channel. Basically: trying out the product at Best Buy and then buying it from Amazon (used to be "going home to buy it from Amazon" but nowadays you can just do it on your phone in the store).
Since GW runs a large number of stores, the guess is that they got tired of getting undersold by the billion or so retailers online trying to sell for cheaper.
But like I said, this article is a decade old so who knows if they still do that.-
The tabletop gaming store around the corner from my home sells plenty of GW stuff online as well as in-store, so I don't think that policy is still in effect. At least not globally.
I don't think they get their product directly from GW, though.
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I still wish their bestiary stuff would show up in like...every other MMO.
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Yeah, I really want just a giant index of lore, monster models with full listings of abilities, stats, damage, etc, maps of areas, maybe a "quests completed" thing showing all the text from past quests.
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I hate Games Workshop in sympathy with any remaining players. F' them up their stupid asses.
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