By Danny "Ralsu"
Gourley, Premium Content Manager



I recently href="http://forums.tentonhammer.com/showpost.php?p=288200&postcount=11">told
some Ten Ton Hammer readers about my first Told You So blog
where I jokingly bragged that I was right about something in style="font-style: italic;"
href="http://vanguard.tentonhammer.com/">Vanguard: Saga of
Heroes that no one was arguing against. Player-vs-player
(PvP) combat in style="font-style: italic;">Warhammer Online
(WAR),
my topic today, is much more hotly contested. Specifically, many gamers
are upset that EA Mythic had to pare down the factions to a simple
choice between Order and Destruction. My task today is to explain why
the controversial design decision will only help the game at launch.

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This is
only fun if it isn't broken.

Location,
Location, Location and Launch, Launch, Launch

A popular expression in real estate says that the location of a
property means everything. A $160,000 home in my neighborhood is only
$90,000 where I grew up in Tennessee. The same house would fetch
$500,000 or more in California.

If I were to try to identify the most crucial aspect of a
massively-multiplayer online game (MMOG) in a single word, I would say
"launch." Gamers are long past the days of the late 1990s when MMOGs
were still new and people caught onto them through word of mouth.
Today's gamer is very savvy about the market, researches games before
they release, and has a resume of past MMOG experiences against which
any new game will be compared.

Because gamers are so much smarter and more experienced--and
because developers have saturated the market--publishers have to get
the launch of a new MMOG right or the battle to overcome the poor
launch is
enormous. The best example of the struggle to overcome a poor launch is
style="font-style: italic;">EverQuest 2
(EQ2). Sony Online Entertainment launched EQ2 two weeks before Blizzard
Entertainment released World
of Warcraft (WoW) in 2004. Four years later, WoW is up to
double-digit millions of subscribers while EQ2 doesn't crack one
million. EQ2 launched with heavy system requirements and "on rails"
game play that either excluded players or soured their taste for the
game. By contrast, WoW launched with moderate (for the time) system
requirements and game play that was friendly to casual gamers. The rest
is history. While EQ2 spent a couple of years changing the game into
what I think is an awesome game today, WoW was busy tapping into an
audience that previously had not been reached.

Today the market WoW reached is no longer there. MMOGs are
common knowledge, and people have a ton of choices. New games can only
hope to pull members from other games and end up with enough
to make
the game profitable to maintain. Of course, an intellectual
property (IP) with a strong fan base that does not already play MMOGs
might capture those fans. Such a subscriber base could sustain a game
even if
the number of subscriptions will never be the equal of WoW's. Sadly, href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/40916">most
developers don't build games with a popular IP faithfully.

To finally connect this line of thought to WAR, it is
absolutely critical that WAR be as solid and as polished as possible at
launch. EA Mythic saw that it was not going to be polished with more
than two
factions, so they decided to launch the game with just two in order to
release a good product. I respect the straightforward way the
developers told the fans. With WoW's newest expansion on the way, EA
Mythic wanted to get out a good game soon, and it wasn't going to
happen with more than two factions.

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This
character had to be balanced against all of his counterparts.

Balancing Act

How to properly balance a game for PvP has long been the bane of
developers. Monsters are usually designed with massive amounts of armor
and life because multiple players pick on them at once. This makes
skills overpowered in PvP. Ultimately, games with PvP as a diversion
are riddled with errors in design that either ruin a class for
player-vs-environment (PvE) conflict or make a class vastly overpowered
for PvP.

Balancing for PvP sounds simple in whiny forum posts, but it's
actually quite difficult. Even if they only focus on PvP, developers
have to ensure that each faction's archetypes stack up fairly with
their counterparts from each other faction. In other words, developers
must be certain that the ranged damage-per-second (DPS) fighters from
Faction A are comparable to those in Faction B. The Red Archer must do
similar DPS but in a different way than the Blue Wizard.

Adding extra factions to the mix doesn't just add one
balancing
task per archetype for the new faction. Adding
a Green Gunner that stands between the Red and Blue from my example
above adds not one, but two balancing tasks: Red Archer with Green
Gunner AND Blue Wizard with Green Gunner. Add a Yellow Necromancer and
it
gets even more convoluted.

My point about balancing as simple: it's no small task for any
game, but it's doubly important for a PvP-centric game like WAR. If WAR
were to launch with poorly balanced or incomplete PvP, the whole game
would
be set back in ways it might never recover from.

Ralsu has more to say. href="http://www.tentonhammer.com/node/41268">Move on to
page two.