Warhammer Online: Wrath of Heroes

» see heroes.warhammeronline.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

This is not the Warhammer Online people mean when they say Warhammer Online. That was Age of Reckoning, the 2008 subscription MMO that was supposed to take on World of Warcraft and did not. Wrath of Heroes was the second thing Mythic built out of the same assets three years later, and it is a different game with a different death.

EA announced it at Gamescom on 16 August 2011. The idea was to cut everything expensive out of an MMO and keep the fighting: pick a hero off a roster, drop into a map with six players on your side and two rival teams of six on theirs, capture points, respawn, repeat. No character to build, no world to travel through, no monthly fee. Three-way combat was the differentiator, and it worked better than it had any right to, because a two-team fight has one obvious enemy and a three-team fight has a decision in it.

Open beta opened to everyone on 10 April 2012 under EA's Play4Free label, alongside Battlefield Heroes and Need for Speed World. Heroes got added over the following year. Reviews were mostly positive and mostly quiet, which for a free-to-play title is the same as a bad review, because the model only works at volume.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

The MOBA market it walked into had already been decided. League of Legends was three years old and enormous, Dota 2 was in its own beta and about to be free forever, and Blizzard was circling. Wrath of Heroes was a competent third-tier entry in a genre where third tier means nobody is there. I was twenty-eight in 2012, out of university and working, and had stopped installing free-to-play launchers years earlier, so this one ran its whole life without ever reaching me.

It also carried a problem the marketing could not fix. The people who loved Warhammer wanted the Warhammer world, the crafting and the realm war and the long campaign. This gave them a lobby and a scoreboard. The people who wanted a lobby and a scoreboard were already somewhere else and did not care about the setting.

~ the day it died ~

Mythic announced the shutdown on 28 February 2013 and gave the game one month. The studio's own language was that it was undergoing a shift toward mobile and had to reallocate resources, which is the standard phrasing for a team being pointed at something else by the parent company. Mythic itself lasted about another year before EA closed it.

The result is a game that was in beta for its entire life and shut down while still officially unfinished. There was no launch, no version 1.0, no release date to put on the headstone. Eleven months of open testing, then nothing, and no offline mode or private server was ever left behind for the people who had been playing every night.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »