Mythic "committed" despite layoffs

By Oli Welsh Published 12 November, 2009

Ultima, DAOC and WAR are safe, it says.

Mythic executive producer Jeff Hickman has moved to reassure players of the three MMOs that it operates - Warhammer Online, Ultima Online and Dark Age of Camelot - that it will continue to support them with customer service and new content.

His open letter follows news of 1500 job cuts at owner EA this week. Mythic is said to be one of the harder-hit studios, with Gamasutra saying that 80 people, about 40 per cent of its work force, had been let go.

"With all that is going on within Mythic Entertainment and EA, I would like to take a moment to reinforce the studio's dedication to both our games and our players," Hickman said.

"At Mythic, we remain committed to our games and the passionate people who play them - we're going to continue to deliver the content and service that keeps you playing. We want to assure our community that we will maintain the same high level of customer support you've come to expect and continue to improve our games with an exciting schedule of patches, live events and new content."

Meanwhile, Warhammer Online producer Jeff Skalski gave an interview to Massively in which he didn't discuss the layoffs, but gave a broad indication of Mythic's current plans for the game. It seems that tweaking and polishing will take precedence over new content.

"Right now, our focus is on improving the RvR campaign, career balance, and game performance," he said. "These are critical to our long term success. We also continue to fix bugs and work on overall game polish. These are the things we sit down and discuss every patch planning meeting we have."

Asked for more specific details, Skalski said, "Well, with [patch] 1.3.3 we're going to be introducing the underdog system to the RvR campaign. This will act as a handicap system for the Realm that is losing the war and give them a chance to fight back.

"We are also preparing for WAR's launch in Korea and there will be many enhancements/adjustments from to that version that will be big wins for all our entire global player base. For example, the upcoming visual enhancements we're doing in 1.3.3, including Bloom/HDR lighting and new weapon trails, come from the work we've been doing on WAR for Korea.

"Beyond that we'll continue to take a strategic approach to tweaking the careers, and you can expect continual improvements to the RvR Campaign to make our endgame even more exciting."

Mythic recently made Warhammer Online's early levels permanently free to play. For more on the current state of the game, read our most recent re-review.

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About Oli Welsh

Oli is Eurogamer's acting deputy editor and reviews editor and likes to take things one word at a time. He is among the best dressed people in South London.

Read more articles from Oli by visiting the Oli Welsh archive page.

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Comments (6) Latest comment 2 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • HermitArcader #1 2 years ago

    Post deleted at 09:17:39 22-12-2011

  • Orange #2 2 years ago

    Not a surprise considering how low sub numbers are.

  • butler` #3 2 years ago

    I HOPE YOU'RE PROUD OF YOURSELF BLIZZARD!1

  • Rubarack #4 2 years ago

    After losing the staff needed to make new content I can't imagine WAR can keep going much longer.

  • sneetch #5 2 years ago

    @Rubarack
    After losing the staff needed to make new content I can't imagine WAR can keep going much longer.

    Yeah, new content was already on the back burner while they concentrated on the bug fixing and class mangling, err, I mean balancing. Those are hugely important but cannot be the sole focus in an MMO, people need something new to keep drawing them back.

  • Kremlik Verified Co-Founder, Crash To Desktop #6 2 years ago

    With the advent of T1 being free and with ToR being EA's new 'mmo for moneyz' it's likly more now that Mythic and EA may be looking down the duel sub/f2p route Turbine has with DDO,.

    it's worked wonders for the game and the way Turbine has modeled the f2p side with 'you can totally play for free but if you don't want to grind for the unlocks you can pay for this' bit.

    I'm totally sure if Mythic keep the open world RVR free and lock off the cities and pve instances to 'pay to unlock/subcribe', it'll make WAR's population explode