11.13.08

[Kevin]

We'll see how things pan out with Warhammer Online, but my guess is that WoW won't lose a significant number of subscribers until Diablo 3 or another Blizzard MMO comes out. I haven't heard of anything on the horizon other than Warhammer that is supposed to pose a significant threat to WoW. Age of Conan was supposed to, and look how that turned out.

The "problem" is that you have millions of MMO players who have gotten used to the WoW way of doing things. For anything to come out and win over that crowd, it's going to have to basically copy & paste the WoW formula with fancier graphics. At which point a two things will probably happen:

1. It will be written off as a WoW clone (for good or bad)
2. Blizzard will upgrade the graphics engine of WoW

Even the successor to WoW will have this problem unless they do something completely different. World of Starcraft, maybe?

There is a 3rd problem.

WoW has so many players because someone with a 3 year old comp (Athlon 64 3200, 6600GT video, 2 GB of ram) can play WoW just fine (which makes sense since WoW is a 4 year old game now). But that improved graphics engine that Warhammer has does not perform well at all on that system. And actually I'm not sure that processor is actually 3 years old and the video might not be either, though they are getting close enough.

If you don't have an 8800 + and something a few notches above that processor you won't really enjoy the Warhammer experience. And there are some features of it that I'm waiting to see how Blizzard steals because they are good.

It would have had a good chance of pulling me if it didn't perform as poorly as it does and most of of the graphics are wasted since I have to turn them off anyway. And WoW actually does a better job with keeping things feeling better as you turn off options. When you turn off options in Warhammer you'll see toons do animations that no longer make any sense because of the other effects you turned off and it actually caused some issues with play for me because I couldn't figure out what was going on.

But game play had some advantages over WoW. Though I have no clue about end game. Early PvP was more fun, even though it still had some issues that I would have liked to have seen addressed and some of the early PvE stuff was quite interesting. Public Quests were pretty fun. And it was obvious that Warhammer came out about 3/4 baked. They rushed it out, it needs around 6 - 12 months in my not so expert opinion but I can see how they couldn't afford that, and it plays at least as well as WoW did on launch. At least it didn't seem to have the database issues that WoW was plagued with.

If WoW launched today with the issues it had on initial launch it would have died. I wouldn't put up with the way it performed then. But it was the first MMO that I did anything other than beta test on too.