I'm going to be posting a series of messages around the web regarding today's announcements but I'll say a few quick things here:
1) The addition of Punkbuster is both conditional and beneficial. If it works as well as we expect it to, it will be in at launch. If it doesn't, we'll remove it. As some of you have pointed it, I've said it will be just another weapon in our arsenal. Studios within EA have a lot of experience with PB and we did our research and work before we made this announcement. This will be a major plus for Mythic and the players or we will take it out, period.
2) The loss of the capital cities is a net gain for WAR. As I said in my interview, even if we had 3 more years to work on the game and could create 6 perfect cities, we were still very concerned about dilution/spread of the player base for RvR. This allows the players to focus on one major target and not three. And considering that no developer is perfect, having 6 imperfect cities at launch would have been a bad decision.* It's all about the quality and not the quantity as I've said again and again and again.
3) The loss of the classes is upsetting but the content is unchanged (other than the class specific stuff naturally). Every race still has its own lands, quests, starting areas, etc. It was a hard choice but one I'll make again in a heartbeat. Do we launch with classes that are not great and hope to make them great post-launch or do we take them out now and see what we can do with them? The history of MMOs is littered with developers who cared more about their vision and pure scope of the game than they cared about quality. There are other developers who did even more shady things in order to please/lie to the customer base and drive sales. We refused to do that. We could have waited till the last minute but we also refused to do that. We have spent a ton of time going through player feedback, checking our metrics and these classes were not coming out the way we hoped that they would. A short amount of extra time wouldn't have done the trick and I cam just imagine how much the community would have howled if we had said "We need to delay the game again for an indefinite amount of time until we can get 4 out of the 24 available classes in the game working well." Now, that would have been an epic community meltdown. And again, if we believed a little more time would have solved the problem, we would have taken the time but that wasn't the case unfortunately.
I do wish that the news about the classes was better but it is what it is and our goal, as always, is to make a great MMORPG. It was never about whether we had 24 classes or 20 classes, 2 cities or 6 cities, it was about making a great game. If I believed that some extra time would have allowed us to both get in the removed classes and the other cities, I would have made the call to delay the game and I believe EA would have supported it. However, neither I nor the team believed that some extra time would have changed the situation. It was with all this in mind that we made these decisions and as painful as they were, I'm glad we made them and once the surprise/shock wears off, I hope almost all of you will agree with me.
All in all I think the news (especially with Guild Beta starting) is overall good. Shocking maybe but if I were just a player, it would reaffirm my faith in a developer that cared enough about the quality of the game to make hard choices and be upfront with the community about it.
Do not create new topics here about these announcements as they will be locked. Also, please keep the drama down to a minimum as you are beta testers. Too much drama or the "I'm not going to play the game now" will be met with bannings. Remember, you are beta testers and these forums are not the place for such posts.
Mark
P.S. Remember to pat yourselves on the back a bit as well. It was thanks to your rigorous testing/feedback and our data that told us this was the right decision to make now.
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Folks,
Don't make me repeat myself again please. Some of these careers had issues that didn't appear solvable by adding some additional time, period. So saying things like "Why didn't we just take more time" is both pointless and inaccurate. If I had faith that a few extra months would have solved the problem, we would have delayed again but that wasn't the case. And I hope nobody is as foolish to say that we should have just delayed the game indefinitely till we got *those* specific classes in the game. This is how beta works and as I've said again and again, we're not afraid to take out what isn't working well in order to make a better game. We're making WAR not HammerWAR or ChoppaWar but WAR.
I'm truly sorry though if this decision causes some of you not to want to play in the beta, cancel your pre-order and not play the game but that's the whole point of beta. Test, improve and toss if necessary and that's what we did.
Mark