Mythic Entertainment rebuts Jeff Kaplan's WAR critiques

Well, personally, I think he should have just blew off Kaplan's comments. I can understand that Kaplan reaches a much broader audience, but Kaplan just looks desperate and petty to me.

WAR is the first game (that I can think of) that had Blizz come out and say disparaging comments at all. That says a LOT more to me, then petty, minor complaints.

But, I'd chalk one up to Kaplan, at getting Jacobs to bite.

S'ok though. Mythic as a whole is leaps & bounds above Blizz in the implementation & innovation dept in my book. So, I forgive him.


As an aside: Anyone find it funny how the gaming industry is SO political now. Reminds me of the music industy through the 90s.

As long as WAR keeps healthy server balances I could care less as a player if it is EVER as popular as WoW. I quit WoW because of knee jerk arena class changes. Lack of innovation, lack of content improvements and length of development time. The problem with Blizzard is they can't see over their noses anymore. Hating on a game 1 month old when 1 month into WoW it would take me over 1 hour JUST TO GET IN THE SERVER, let alone a BG. Eat his ass for lunch Mark!

The MMO industry as a whole is worse than two women fighting over a guy anymore. It's childish from players to devs. The thing that amazes me is how someone can bash a game for innovation when WAR is going to have released 2 classes in 3 months as WoW has taken 4 years to release a single new class. If Kaplan never talks to the media again it will be too soon. Blizzard would see it fit to keep a leash on this fool.

Industry isn't that political yet. The fact Kaplan admitted he played WAR gives points to Mythic. Doubt he'll admit he played AoC (god what potential that no-end-game title had).

Jacobs fails in his rebuttal tho (and I'm a WAR player not a WoW fanboi). He brought up 'WoW had 4 years and billions of dollars, bla bla bla'. Sure, it's unfair for a game to come out today and have to compete against 4 years of polish - but if you're not prepared to put out that quality of a game, save us time and money and make an SP game. WAR is not competing against WoW 1.0, it's up against WoW 3.0. The game has something for everyone (expect pvpers). WAR seems to have something for some pvpers.

Too bad there are only 2 factions... once end cities exchange hands a few times, I foresee a mass exodus of bored pvpers. Wonder where they will go, though.

All Jacobs had to do is ask how their latest patch is going.
LOL

For those that don't know, Blizzard has been rushing things, and the latest patch is making things unplayable, causing crashes, tons of bugs and problems. Bunch of friends who still play WoW are really pissed about how they just screwed up the game with the last patch.
Just peak into WoW's official forums for some amusement.

Then of course, he could've asked what Blizzards next new IP will be, because they already ripped off Games Workshops two main franchises.

Or could have asked how many more things from Warhammer Online Blizzard is feeling the need to rush and put into their game.

Seriously, Kaplan is an asshat.

No matter how much I like playing WoW (I'm going on 4 years), I can't help but feel like Kaplan is acting like a self-righteous jerk.

WoW didn't invent anything, it's been a compilation of elements from other games from the very first day. It's especially ironic to me that Kaplan tries to trash Mythic on things WoW doesn't do so well; server stability and PvP system, etc.

Blizzard is good at what it does, but let's give credit to where credit is due. It's not because you have 11 million players that your game in inherently better; quantity vs quality, and all that jazz.

Oh, and Kaplan, don't make a Gaute Goddager out of yourself and just shut the hell up next time.

While I find the entire dialog between these two people to be completely pointless, I'm going to point out one correction:

"World of Warcraft featured a number of lengthy queues just to get onto servers when the game first launched in 2004."

This is not a true statement. When I started playing WoW on Nov 23, 2004, there were no server queues. It wasn't until 2 months later, when the game grew in popularity faster then Blizzard expected, that the queues arrived.

3.0 killed my server, its been offline and unplayable for 2 days. i actually hope i get some time to play this weekend.

Why do i put up with this? because i actually want to play a mmo thats good. sure wow has had server problems since the beginning and ever patch after that, but its still better than the alternative.

WAR is just boring. I dont raid, i pvp in battlegrounds mostly and warcraft pvp is a lot better than WAR pvp as it is right now.

And those seige things they are talking about? well that was done a long long time ago. Look at Lineage the blood pledge. that came out around the same time Diablo was out, and that had castle seiges.

i love how mmo devs are always saying "we specifically swayed away from what wow is doing, were unique" instead of just taking the good things wow has brought and expanding on them, there is a reason that wow has 11million or whatever players. Another thing is the new wow patch deleted all my mounts and pets. however blizz fixed everything for me in no time and i was doing fine. when i was trying to get the war beta to download it was problem after problem, I am sticking with wow, not because of innovations but because of their commitment to customers.

This little spat is amusing, certainly. Both sides have their vested interests.

I think it's a bit telling that Jacobs, after saying a few weeks ago that he understood he had to compete against WoW 3.0 and not 1.0 and thus wasn't going to cry about it, sort of reneged on that. Nevertheless it's a somewhat valid point. WoW and several other games were plagued with far worse stability issues than Warhammer on launch.

Kaplan's comments do not necessarily speak to desperation but they are more specific than we've heard him or any Blizzard employee get in a long time apropos rival games. Blizzard has little reason to be 'desperate'- it'll take a cratering of the East Asian market plus a massive Western exodus in order to gut the game's subscribers. The former is even less likely than the latter.

But WoW's finally having to share the limelight with another game that doesn't suck. Despite the complaints of some, as these launches go Warhammer has largely lived up to its hype. Whether it can stand the test of time is another issue- but I think we're forgetting that Warhammer has the luxury to worry chiefly about expanding the game's content and balancing it.

Contrast that AoC and Vanguard who were outright missing vast swathes of leveling content- and in the case of AoC a conspicuously absent PvP system.

Lastly, every MMO is derivative. I love WoW and it'll always hold a special place in my heart- but to say that it's even a mostly original game beggars belief. The only way it was truly original was- admittedly not a small thing- its organisation and presentation of content in such a way as to be friendlier to a less hardcore set. Beyond that, however, the constituent bits themselves are just hand-me-downs from older titles.

*Every* MMO does this. Jacobs exaggerates a bit when he claims Warhammer is more innovative than WoW if only because he's not putting handles on that statement by providing context. More innovative than WoW was at its launch? More innovative than WoW today? Either thesis there would need several caveats at least.

But for WoW to claim strident originality is a bit silly. It owes a lot of EQ and Asheron's Call for sure- and every modern MMO owes a bit of something to UO.

It's only evolution, baby.

I really can't stand Blizzard's approach to its gaming base. The general philosophy is "keep them subscribing" through long winded grind rather than the WAR approach of just have fun (which is the mantra of all other online PC games or console games). I hope WAR succeeds just to give some competition in a stagnant MMO genre. No other PC game genre has so much money poured at every month.

And about the WoW patch - I queued for 1 hour to get on Thursday, then received world server down on two servers (game card is due to expire in November I might add). The pitch forks would come out if that was Conan or WAR. People just need to give other MMOs some patience and stop expecting version 3.0 games when they arrive. Take a look at Paladins in WoW right now, and the forever "class XXX is overpowered" problem the game has, it's not perfect it just has a very very strong game engine that is hard to beat.