Warhammer Online Capital Cuts

Posted by Stropp on July 15, 2008

The big announcement over the weekend (no, not the Flagship Studios announcement, the Warhammer one) was that Mythic Entertainment (also no longer EA Mythic) was making some changes to the amount of content that was going to be available at release. A bunch of classes were cut, and 4 of the 6 capital cities were also being cut.

The worst thing about the announcement was the cutting of four classes; The Choppa, The Hammerer, The Backguard, and The Knight of the Blazing Sun. There’d be a lot of fans out there who have been doing a lot of planning based around playing these classes.

As for cutting the capital cities. I think that this is probably a good thing for a few reasons.

1. Less cities means more socialization. One of the primary goals of a MMOG is to get players together. That’s a lot harder if they’re spread out over six cities, rather than two.
2. Players will pick the major centers that they want to be in and neglect the rest. While playing WoW I had several occasions to visit Darnassas, the Night Elf city. I don’t think I ever really encountered more than a handful of players there. Contrast that to Ironforge, or to a lesser extent Stormwind, which were hives of activity.
3. The devs, as stated, can put more effort into making the two capitals excellent locations. There’s only so much effort that can be put in, only so many man-hours available. That can be concentrated into putting more content into the two cities, rather than having six capitals with less content.
4. Time is running out. See point 3. Do we want six mediocre capitals with lots of broken parts, or two comprehensive and polished capitals?

None of this means that the cities that have been removed can’t be added back in later. It just allows the developers to apply as much polish to the game as possible before release.

The good thing is that we’re finding out about it now, rather than after the game has been released.

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