Don’t equate low budget film with low quality crew. There were some pretty talented people working on that crew that had been involved in much more expensive high profile projects. The crew were largely hired professionals, with years of experience in the industry. The camera work was solid, the sets were well designed etc. Compared to what a top billed actor gets paid, a seasoned cameraman, art director, grip, etc. are not that expensive. It wasn’t the talent of the technical crew that made that film a stinker.

Low budget does not equal half-assed. It simply means it is low budget, and you won’t have Michael Bay explosions. You can still get a very polished product with the right management of your resources and setting realistic goals for those resources.

The one is almost by definition supposed to be half assed, the other is supposed to be a polished product.

I had the honor of working next to some fair talent on a low budget film right after I finished college. The writers, director, and producer were not all that good, but they had managed to pull in some pretty strong technical guys. Their main characters were mostly played by bad actors, but some of the smaller roles were performed by some really talented folks. It was pretty fascinating, and very frustrating to watch this talent get wasted on a bad movie. I suppose that is why I am easier on Mythic than some, because I have worked on one real stinker in my time, and know just what truly bad vision can produce.

You’re right, Mythic isn’t alone in releasing unfinished and unpolished games, but they do have a pretty poor track record.

DAoC was a solid hit for its day. But they lost focus and forgot what they were about and tried to become more like EQ in some of their expansions, most notably ToA.

Imperator never saw the light of day. People can say all they want that “it was a good call not to launch it”, but that only glosses over the fact Mythic wasted so much time and money on a failed project that in the end it probably forced their hand when it came to selling themselves to EA.

WAR was a great dissapointment by anyone’s measuring stick.

If you look at their track record it’s not surprising that MJ was fired and that Mythic was placed under Bioware’s watchful eye.

The only shocking thing is that more heads didn’t roll at the top of Mythic.

The really sad part is the story of the CSR guy and his friends. People like them always end up paying for the mistakes long before the bosses that made them do.

I would guess that you are correct Jeff, that project management is a key here. Mythic obviously has some pretty talented people working there. The look, sound, and many concepts for Warhammer are pretty darn solid. That is what keeps me playing. However, there is no doubt that the final product was not finished enough for many players, and I certainly don’t blame them for wanting a complete and polished product. That is reasonable, and should be anticipated by any game company that wishes to maintain a large portion of their initial subscribers.

Obviously, for whatever reasons, this is easier said than done, since Mythic is certainly not the only company to have done this, nor are they the worst. It may be that excellent project management is harder to come by than excellent programmers, artists, and developers.

I think too many developers try to do to much. Keep it small enough that you can polish what you have. If that means 4 classes instead of 8 or 8 instead of 16 then so be it. I don’t think it takes a wow budget to polish a game, an EA budget should have been fine.

I’ll wager you this, Star Wars TOR will be far more polished than it’s fellow EA sibling. A lot of that has to do more with project management as much or more than any wow sized budget.

World of Warcraft taught one lesson. Polish your damn game.

The problem starts when polishing your damn game to meet the Warcraft-set expectations requires a Warcraft budget and, for that, a Warcraft-sized prospective player base — the lowest common denominator. No thanks.

Yeah, by all means polish it, iron out the bugs, get rid of the game crashes (which were my main reason for leaving WAR, by the way) and definitely finish your game by release, but don’t go for those graphical excesses (Conan was a prime example).

I realize good/bad is all relative to each person, but speaking as someone who worked for a few years in the gaming press Warhammer was a bad game.

PvE was too bland, and what unique features they did have were beaten to death with overuse. No real dungeons, at least not what I would call a dungeon, for low to mid level players.

PvP was grossly imbalanced class wise. Poorly conceived abilites like AoE knock back spamming added to this. The end game was broken, and for a highly touted “pvp” game the best pvp gear came from pve dungeons.

Poor decisions piled on top of poor decisions with crappy execution of poor decisions piled on top. On top of that even basic features like linking items in chat, among other things, took months to patch in the game.

World of Warcraft taught one lesson. Polish your damn game. There are people out there looking for an alternative, but Warcraft has set certain expectations of minimum features and polish. Fail to learn that and you have Warhammer. A game hyped by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

The same goes for companies which want to throw money away, it’s their money. I think people tried to be productive with Mythic since at least 2003, pointing out the issues DAoC had, from what I know Warhammer’s beta testers have complained about most of the critical issues the game had in the beta, the game has been released anyway. I didn’t have a chance to test the game even though I applied for a beta and the European open beta test was a closed one. So effectively I threw money away too, on an unfinished game, which was maybe fun for the first 10-20 levels while still having many techincal issues.