Ten Ton Hammer - Taking MMO Gamers to the Next Level!

It started out as an innocent conversation around the Ten Ton Hammer water cooler. Managing Editor Cody "Micajah" Bye and I were discussing upcoming releases--which ones excited us, which ones we thought were not getting enough press, and so on. One upcoming release that is certainly on every gamer's radar is Warhammer Online (WAR). This little project from EA Mythic based on the collectible tabletop game scores of people are fanatical about looks to be the next "big" thing. But a game isn't destined for greatness just because it's generating a ton of buzz.

That's how the argument started.

Cody is sure WAR will be a huge success. I see potential for failure. Hear our arguments and decide for yourself.

WAR will be huge if it offers something different--or the basic features in a very polished form.

Electronic Arts Doesn't Care about Warhammer People
When EA acquired Mythic Entertainment in June 2006, you can bet it wasn't to someday make a game that send Warhammer players into joyous paroxysms. EA did it to increase its portfolio. It was just a smart investment. Some EA exec with a nicer suit than I have ever worn said, "It looks like this massively-multiplayer game thing might just take off one day." Blizzard found a way to print its own money with World of Warcraft (WoW), and EA wanted to cash in on that same market.

When EA went shopping, Mythic was a great buy. As owners of the Dark Age of Camelot intellectual property (IP), Mythic was a proven entity. EA figured it could throw some money at Mythic and have the team eventually create some new game that would make the company piles of cash.

The potential downside to the EA involvement with WAR is that I can see a scenario in which the software giant gets too greedy. Surely a hardcore contingent of Warhammer players would gladly buy a product that faithfully replicated the tabletop experience. But will EA be happy with just the Warhammer fans? That's not the business model that made the Blizzard money-printing game. Instead, EA is going to want to rope in all sorts of gamers, which will mean making the game appeal as broadly as possible.

To understand why a very specific IP bent to appeal to a mass audience is scary, one need look no farther than Turbine's Dungeons & Dragons Online (DDO). With the D & D license, Turbine had a surefire winner--an easy basket, as it was. But rather than making the game just for D & D gamers, they tried to make it appeal to other gamers, too. They tried to reel in action gamers with a twitchy combat system. They tried to dial down the difficulty by creating Feats that just don't exist in D & D. A sorcerer starting with 24 hit point? That is a different game; it's not D & D.

In the end, DDO turned out to be a good product that appeals to some gamers, but I fully believe it would have been more successful if marketed only to D & D players. I fear the same thing could happen to WAR. The core game play could become diluted by attempts to make a mass market game. The end result would be a game that only captured part of the Warhammer player base and a few other gamers who decided the WAR brand of homogeny worked better than any of the many other similar games on the market.

Premium Content Manager Danny "Ralsu" Gourley thinks EA Mythic has little room for error in a competitive market.

Reinventing the Wheel?
More than any other time in gaming history, the market is glutted with MMOGs. Neither of my degrees is in economics, but I suspect I can safely make this analogy. If you open an amusement park right down the street from another amusement park, you need have better rides than the competition. Every amusement park has a roller coaster, so yours need to be taller and faster. Every amusement park has a concession stand. Yours has to sell better food.

The point is simple. WAR has to give gamers something the competition can't or the exact same things better.People are not going to be lining up for a chance to start over at level 1 just for pure masochism. If EA Mythic tries to pull in customers from the competition (see issue #1 for me), they'll be asking players to abandon the work they've invested in another title to start from zero. WAR can't simply put a different wrapper on the same content gamers have been playing for years. The consumers will need a great incentive to make the leap of faith to start a new game.

WoW is a Virtual Boomerang
World of Warcraft has long been so successful that it is en vogue to hate WoW and the players who love it. Despite the popularized WoW-bashing, it continues to dominate the MMOG market. And dominate by a wide margin. WoW is estimated to be eight- to tenfold stronger in subscriber base than its closest competitor. And even very successful MMOGs (according to sales and subscriptions) like Age of Conan and EverQuest II don't hold a candle to the market reach of WoW.

So, it is easy for me to predict that a few people will leave WoW to try WAR. You know, people who are looking for the next big thing?  But most of those same people will return to WoW because of the investment or friends left behind, or when some game play feature of WAR does not measure up to the WoW counterpart.

Of course, then one must look at the impending release of the latest WoW expansion, Wrath of the Lich King (WotLK). If WotLK releases before WAR (unlikely), many WoW players who would have tried WAR will stay "home" to play the new WoW content. If WotLK releases after WAR (likely), then the WoW players who were giving WAR a test spin will have more impetus than ever to return to Blizzard's game.

Parting Thoughts
I respect both EA and the Mythic team they absorbed, but I see several factors that could cause WAR to be a quick flash in the pan. I can easily see Mark Jacobs giving an interview in October about high box sales and a large player base and then the game cooling off dramatically by December. I Told You So.