Warhammer Online Undergoes Major Cuts

Mythic's upcoming MMOG Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is facing some serious cuts as release deadline pressure begins to mount.

In an interview with MMORPG.com, Mythic Vice President and General Manager Mark Jacobs revealed the game would be undergoing serious changes as a result of "issues" with the current state of the game and the looming launch schedule. The planned six capital cities in the game, one for each race, has been cut to two, while four of the game's character classes have also been removed.

"A number of months ago we sat down and looked at where we were with our Capital Cities and we looked at what we were doing with (Imperial capital) Altdorf and (Chaos capital) Inevitable City, we looked at the Greenskin home, the Dwarf home and we went, 'There's an awful lot to do here and there are some issues,'" Jacobs said. "We decided to focus our energies on two capital cities; one for Order and one for Destruction, and make them fabulous. Not good, not great, but fabulous."

As a result, each city will now be polished as much as possible, and Jacobs said that players won't be "distracted or divided" by the cities, instead focusing their collective efforts on a single position. "By only starting with two, we can really focus the community, focus the player base, focus the guilds, the teams, that are all working to sack the city," he said.

While Jacobs attempted to spin the city changes as a positive, he was forced to admit the missing classes are a greater loss, saying, "This isn't something that I can say that it is really a good thing for the player." The four classes being cut are the Greenskin Choppa, the Dwarf Hammerer, the Dark Elf Blackguard and the Empire's Knight of the Blazing Sun.

"I wish we didn't have to do it," Jacobs said. "I really do. Unlike the capital cities, I can honestly say that I really wish we didn't have to cut them out, but it's better for them to be cut out than to have classes that aren't great and that we would spend more time trying to make them great post-launch than we should have to."

Jacobs claimed that Mythic Entertainment owner Electronic Arts had "nothing to do" with the decision, but also revealed the studio had changed its name from EA Mythic back to its original moniker of Mythic Entertainment.

Based on the Games Workshop Warhammer fantasy setting, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning is currently targeted for release in fall 2008. MMORPG.com's complete interview with Mark Jacobs is available here.

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Very, very dissapointing to hear. A game I was very excited to see, just dropped considerably in my interest queue now. Hey Mythic, if you plan on cutting out so much, does this mean your gonna cut the price too, or are we gonna pay full price for 1/2 the original game.

Sounds like SOE to me....promising the world and delivering a small suburb instead.

Well, maybe they'll be able to work on that cut content after the game has been released. After all, it's almost become common practise to ship the game, then release all the cut content afterwards as a download.

j-e-f-f-e-r-s:
Well, maybe they'll be able to work on that cut content after the game has been released. After all, it's almost become common practise to ship the game, then release all the cut content afterwards as a download.

Which is exactly why I refuse to play a bunch of these new MMOs. These developers think they can release a shell of a game that is fun for like 2 weeks and then expect us to stay around paying monthly subscriptions while they get around to making the game like it should be. Screw that I say. I refused to play games like Pirates of the Burning Sea because I dont have the money to pay for a game that hasnt been made yet.

Disappointing, but it's still the only MMO I'm looking forward to. The concept appeals to me the most and Mythic has proven they can deliver on that concept with DAoC.

That said, with all the delays so far, this isn't particularly surprising. It was pretty obvious they overstepped their ability, I just hope this doesn't snowball into a classic disastrous MMO release.

I've just had a quick look at the Warhammer site and there's still quite a bit of variety. It doesn't sound good on top of all the delays, but I suppose what they don't want is the situation in DaoC where some classes were fairly redundant. I'm keeping my eye on it, but I think they would have been better off keeping the hype relatively quiet until they had a better handle on what they were going to do.

The classes being cut is really disappointing, but the Capital cities I can understand. Having only two will focus the battles a lot more, and make player-to-player interaction inevitable.

While it must be dissapointing to players, I have to admire the balls in this move. Shipping a game that was overbloated due to fear of player disspointment would have been the coward's way out.