An Era Ends

Posted by Gary N. Mengle on

I opted to wait an extra day to let the news settle, but it’s finally been announced: Warhammer Online is shutting down in December. This is not a surprise, and was writ large on the wall when EA pulled six month subscriptions from the online store.

I’ve directed a lot of snark at WAR over the years, but I never actually hated the game, only its loudest and most verminous fans, who felt that the only way to prop up their hollow, teetering Jesus Game was to tear down stuff that other people liked. That’s something I won’t miss. Warhammer Online itself… well, I will miss the good times I did have in it for a short while, and I’ll feel bad for those people that really loved it and stuck with it. Ultimately it promised too much, delivered too little, and failed to understand or implement its studio’s past success.

What we might also miss is the end of the era in which MMORPG bloggers seemed to have a real footprint. This may not have been caused by WAR and wasn’t ended by its dramatic collapse, but it was concurrent with its rise and fall. It was… interesting for a while. There are plenty of us left, of course, and some will never go away, but now there are too many other avenues for the kind of news, commentary and speculation that we were once collectively the biggest source of.

4 responses to “An Era Ends”

  1. Pingback: Warhammer Online to Shut Down in December | The Ancient Gaming Noob

  2. I really did like those public quests in WAR. I know it wasn’t the focus of the game, hence, no one did them after the first couple of weeks. But to me it was such a joy to simply be running along and find multi-player content that I didn’t need to plan for in advance, schedule a dungeon run for, spam zone chat to get a suitable group for, etc.

  3. It was a jumbled mess of brilliance and stupidity. It probably won’t be missed, but the impact of its parts will forever be felt.

    Now please someone get me an exact copy of WAR’s Engineer class!

  4. Can’t say I played WAR much, but I did give it a couple of months of love some years ago, and actually quite enjoyed it. The only thing it really lacked for me was the interest of people around me, so that I mostly ended up playing it on my own and eventually WoW of course pulled me back into its bosom.

    There were many things in WAR I thought worked really well, from skill resources to the public quests, so I am sad to see it go.