WAR Feature Cuts

I wanted to give myself a day to think about what the feature cuts meant before writing about them.  For anyone who somehow managed to miss this news, WAR is cutting 4 of its 6 capitols and 4 of its 24 classes to make their planned fall release.

Reactions to this around the web have been pretty mixed; Snafzg of The Greenskin is pretty devastated, understandably as his site, which focuses on the Greenskins, just lost one of their classes and their capitol; Syp from Waaagh seems mixed, mostly upset with how the news was delivered; and Keen from Keen and Graev feels the game should have just been delayed again.

At first I was a little unsure how to react to this, but having a day to think about it, I feel the announcements mean mostly good things for WAR.

Capitol Cities Cut

First, having 4 of the 6 capitol cities sounds pretty devastating, but in reality it should have a pretty minor affect on the game, and be more positive than negative at launch.  WoW launched with 6 capitols, but 4 of them were incomplete and might as well have not been there.  Everyone just used Ogrimmar and Ironforge.  WAR will have just 2 cities, but they will hopefully be spectacular and full of things to do.  While leveling, you will share your one capitol with other factions, which should make it easier to meet up and find groups; and when the first few people get to 40, it will be easier to have a single target to focus on, rather than 3, since there will be fewer people available for attacking and defending.  Releasing the other cities at a later time seems to make more sense in this capacity, and releasing each as a finished city would be excellent.  These cuts seem to show Mythic is caring about Quality over Quantity, which is a much better position for long-term success.

Careers Cut

The career cuts hurt much more, because they have the potential to affect the balance of the game; each class should have a counter, and having Empire missing a tank with only 3 classes fighting Chaos which has the full 4 seems to raise quite a few issues (same issue exists but reversed with High Elves vs Dark Elves).  This game of course is not race vs race but faction vs faction, so it is not purely Chaos vs Empire, but Chaos, Greenskins and Dark Elves vs Empire, High Elves and Dwarfs.  This means it should be less of an issue, however, many may wish to follow their own races storyline, so the scenarios and battlefields available while leveling may well have some balance issues.

Silver Lining

Despite the balance issues for careers, I see a silver lining I haven’t seen mentioned on the other sites so far, and that is in the patches post release.  Looking at any other MMORPG, once the game is released, usually the patches post release are fairly underwhelming: mostly bugfixes and balancing with some occassional new content.  WAR however has a great opportunity here to keep patches post release interesting for a good while.  Having the game released and being able to look forward to a patch containing 2 new capitols, or 2 new careers is pretty exciting.  Providing they aim to keep a balance and offer them in bunches, there is still 4 patches there that would be very exciting post release.  Having those drop every 2 months would keep the releases interesting for 8 months, which should be just about when some major expansion news would begin showing up, stirring more interest.

Having the ability to release exciting patches for nearly a year post release may prove to be a bigger benefit to WAR than many anticipate; and hey, WoW released their game with no pve-endgame and no pvp, I am quite certain I will survive in WAR for a few months with 2 capitols, 3 fronts and 20 careers to explore.