Is Warhammer Online in Danger of Shutting Down?

It’s no secret for some time now. EA is letting go 1500 employees, 80 of those are rumored to be, as confirmed by somewhat attached sources (like this one) , 40% off Mythic’s current staff. Even stranger rumors seem to suggest that the layoffs included creative staff, as in staff responsible for creating new content (as confirmed by several artist portfolios claiming work on Mythic cropping up here and there). This might mean a deadly blow to the already slightly limping WHO by cutting off the flow of new content.

The good news (for WHO fans at least) is that MMOs ran like that do bounce off. The bad news is, “high profile” MMOs usually don’t. And EAs past experiences with the MMO market do not seem to suggest that the company is understanding of the games problems, nor that they will actually provide resources needed to re-spark the game. Considering that they have another potential cash-cow in the form of The Old Republic coming along on the grapevine, the situation seems even more grim.

Anybody who was playing Tabula Rasa or any other of the canceled MMOs of late knows the symptoms. A degrading flow of new players, the endless discussions of what can be done to make the game better with little or no actual feedback of the people in charge, finally the diminishing count of servers and various server mergers. WHO is struck even more by this, as the games end-game balance highly depends on a relatively equal number of Order and Destruction players. In a game like this, server mergers break much more then “inside morale” – the movement of players can make more servers to be imbalanced, requiring further tweaking or frustration, which in turn equals in canceled subscriptions. There are more reasons of the players leaving within the game itself, but the product itself does seem to have a loyal fan-base to build on. For now at least.

Similarly as the mentioned TR, the games staff seems to have, at least for the time being, no idea where to take their game next. Sure, they are fixing bugs, but there seems to be no real direction for the games future. If the rumors of “Maintenance mode”, which technically equals no more “new” work being done on the game, are true, then the population might just end up shrinking even more. And as I previously mentioned, with TOR coming EA might not be inclined to keep a “underdog” like WHO flowing while they can concentrate their assets on another, potentially way more successful MMO. Its Star Wars after all and after the amazing breakdown of the Star Wars Galaxies community with the games “NGE” patches, Biowares execution of an MMO might steal numbers farther, causing the death of both WHO and SWG.

The weirdly phrased and “I’m a PR message” themed reassurance posted by the powers at be in Mythic do not help. Again, as a player of TR which followed pretty much the path WHO did, only more rapid (and TR had a much smaller player-base to start with) this is pretty much the standard way to go. If things follow suit, after a few more months of lingering the sad news will be passed on and by the half of 2010 WHO will possibly be just a memory.

Unless, the opposite scenario happens, which in case of MMOs is cutting down the staff pretty drastically (which seems to have already happened) , focusing on actually listening to the die-hard audience of the game and settling for a niche. In time, this could grow to something else, which would in effect allow Mythic to develop a “low budget” MMO model, like City of Heroes/Villains. The problem with WHO is, game play wise it does not have much variety to offer, its open PvP setting seems dwarfed by Age of Conan and the final “great war” model seems to be still bugged and very sensitive to overpopulation on one side.

So, what is needed is a real plan how to proceed forward. Personally, I doubt that Mythic actually has the resources to do that anymore. I might be wrong. However, if I had to guess, I’d give WHO about the time it takes to finish The Old Republic. Then, chances are that as I mentioned, TOR will kill two other MMOs. I won’t miss SWG (and well, there is a dedicated fan base working on an emulator), but WHO seemed to have a good idea. And a very nice setting. Similar to Tabula Rasa (for me at least). Hope that’s where the similarities will end.