In this modern day of MMO gaming we have a hard time saying goodbye to games that have been out for awhile. At the same time we question why we must say goodbye. A good instance of this is Warhammer Online. There is a lot we can talk about the subject, but we’ll try to summarize and make it as quick as possible.

When WAR launched it got a massive following. I believe over a million box copies sold. Then, at the 30 day subscription mark, no one ponied up the money to renew for a variety of reasons with blame to be spread everywhere. On the surface, the game was revolutionary. On the execution, it was not. This created a a problem.

After time, games that were failing went free-to-play. WAR held out as long as possible, skipping over the perfect window to do something about it, then launched a terrible F2P campaign. You could play for free up until the first battleground and couldn’t trade, meaning you would have terrible gear and people who paid a subscription would destroy you.

This meant that the game became nothing but the low level battlegrounds and it pitted twinks who loaded up on gear you could obtain by paying the subscription against non-twinks who would either fight other non-twinks or get farmed by people who twinked out. This gave EA-Mythic a wonderful idea - let’s just make a battleground game.

They did this. It was OK, it died off not that long ago. Now WAR is sunsetting, mostly because the reason to subscribe is gone. There is no reason to give EA-Mythic any money because you get nothing. It’s not that people don’t play the game or like the game, it’s that there is little to no reason to subscribe, meaning that there is no money to be made.

This is ultimately the issue with WAR. If it had gone full F2P and did a cash shop like DDO did, then it would have recovered. It was a great game, great concepts, but those concepts got thrown behind a pay wall and everyone hates pay walls. Plants vs. Zombies 2 recently took down their pay walls because no one could stand it.

It still sucks to see an MMO go though and it all makes us kind of scratch our heads how developers and producers could allow the things that would obviously send a game on a downward path happen. I don’t have those answers. However, I can say we’ll miss WAR and I’ll miss WAR and I hope the efforts of any legal attempt to emulate the game will go well.

Moving on - I have a kind of a WAR like question. WAR had some wonderfully awesome ideas. DAoC did to. However, what if instead of Camelot Unchained we got Warhammer Online Unchainted. Would that have been a better idea? Would voxel based Warhammer PvP been fun? Imagine if you could build up your own capital city only to have the enemy destroy it - food for thought there.

See ya guys on Monday!