by Julie Whitefeather

What happens when the media hype of a game developer meets the cold hard reality of the game’s release? Sometimes people get hammered.

Read on…

New Attitude: Julie gets hammered

by Julie Whitefeather

This last weekend I was lucky enough to be able to take part in the “preview weekend” for Warhammer Online.  This is simply because I managed to get hold of a collector’s edition (the last one on the shelf at the local Best Buy in fact). Normally I don’t buy collector’s editions. Normally I just wait for the standard edition to hit the shelves.  But somewhere inside me my “inner child” always wanted one of these delightful toys.  Much to my delight Mother Superior was as excited about the game as I am.

Love or hate Warhammer Online, there is one thing that cannot be denied – Mythic Entertainment knows how to sell a game. The game is set to go live on September 17 of this year and it has already “gone gold” as they say (ready for the actual disks that go with the game to be printed). I don’t think so much attention has been paid to an event since the advent of the Second Coming, as grandmother used to say.

As a result of Mythic “selling the game” long before it hits the shelves and is ready to be sold, is that it has generated a lot of what is know as “fanboy-ism”.  Now I may have been a fan of Warhammer since long before anyone even thought to put “Online” after the word “Warhammer”  but I am far from being a “fangirl” of Warhammer. Yes, in the mmo communities across the internet there will always be vehement defenders of any given game. This time, however, things seem to be a bit different.

What do I mean by that?

Simply this – this time the vehement defenders have gone to extraordinary lengths.  If you say ANYTHING that is even the slightest bit detrimental to the game the defenders of Warhammer will act as if you asked if you could not only shoot their dog, but cook it up in a stew afterwards. When Richard Bartle made the statement in an interview “I have played Warhammer Online – it’s called World of Warcraft” it engendered an immediate internet frenzy.  On a side note, after playing Warhammer Online for awhile I found myself considering the statement and saying “I think Richard Bartle needs to play WoW a bit more if he thinks the two are alike.”

Consider what happened when Brent, host of Virgin Worlds, wrote a recent article for his website entitled “Warhammer Online: the mmo that jumps the shark” – it generated instant mayhem; and not just on his web site either. Reactions to the article swept across the internet.  Many of his detractors never got past the italicized sentence “It isn’t fun” about half way through the article and immediately started to hammer on Brent over his reaction to Warhammer. Some people didn’t even bother to read the article.  Me, I found the article quite interesting, especially the following excerpt:

“Realm vs Realm PvP combat. If you’ve killed enough rats today, you can participate in an exciting PvP game that I like to call “Chase the guy with the red name”. It doesn’t matter what the objectives are, or who that guy is. If he has a red name, chase him down and hit him in the back until he drops dead. And don’t worry, there are no consequence to these battles - you’ll spawn right back in. It’s part of the game!” – Brent, from Virgin Worlds

As much as I am a big fan of PvP I couldn’t agree with him more – but that is a story for a different article.  However, while I haven’t been hammered over  Warhammer yet, I have received the occasional rap on the knuckles for a few adverse comments about the game.

For the most part I love the game so far, even though I do have a few reservations about it. But all is not coming up roses in Mythic land. In recent articles at massively.com and shack news, it was announced that the good folks at Mythic do not intend to credit all the people who worked on the game. There are various excuses for this including things like “it encourages people to stay on until the game is finished.”  (On another side note, the very nature of an MMO is that it is never truly “finished” as is a console game).  Some people may hear this and say “so what” but some people are not the people who put in countless hours bringing a table top game to virtual realty.  And no matter what you may think about the way the game plays, Mythic entertainment has given Games Workshop’s Warhammer a virtual life in a spectacular way.

Not crediting the people who put in so many hours trying to make the game match the media hype is not just wrong; it is seriously, heinously, disgustingly, DEAD wrong. But that too is a subject for another article – my next article. I will be waiting to see if I get hammered. In the meantime…

See you online,

Julie Whitefeather