Warhammer Online Interview Reveals Big Changes

[GameBanshee News]

MMORPG.com has published a two-part interview (here and here) with Warhammer Online's Mark Jacobs, in which the general manager surprisingly reveals that four of the game's six capital cities as well as four of the original twenty-four careers have been "shelved." Not only that, but they're changing their name again - from EA Mythic back to Mythic Entertainment. The craziness:

“We are going back to Mythic Entertainment,” said Mark Jacobs, the VP and General Manager of EA Mythic. “I’ve always been a believer of separate branding,” he continued, going on to cite a number of successful companies like Disney and GE that operate subsidiary companies under separate and distinct brands.

“I think that this is a wonderful example of how things at EA are changing,” he continued, “both John (Riccitiello, CEO of EA) and Frank (Gibeau, EA) have spoken multiple times about city states, more freedom, that sort of thing and I think this is an obvious example.”

...

“A number of months ago,” Jacobs began, “we sat down and looked at where we were with our Capital Cities and we looked at what we were doing with Altdorf and Inevitable, we looked at the Greenskin home, the Dwarf home and we went ‘there’s an awful lot to do here and there are some issues‘.”

There was something missing. It wasn’t enough fun, it wasn’t interesting enough, it wasn’t “alive” enough. From there, the team was faced with a choice. They could either keep going down that path, working on all six cities and trying to get them finished before launch or make the hard decision to shelve four of the cities until post-launch and make sure that Altdorf and Inevitable were as full and rich as their design had intended. Mythic chose the latter.

“we decided to focus our energies on two capital cities; one for Order and one for Destruction, and make them fabulous, said Jacobs. “Not good, not great, but fabulous.”

...

The four careers that are going may surprise players (and even includes one of Marks personal favorites). The list is as follows:

Choppa (Greenskin)
Hammerer (Dwarf)
Blackguard (Dark Elf)
Knight of the Blazing Sun (Empire)

This means the removal of two tanks and two melee DPS classes.

“I wish we didn’t have to do it,” Mark said, “I really do. Unlike the capital cities [which provided a silver lining in the end], I can honestly say that I really wish we didn’t have to cut them out, but it’s better for them to be cut out than to have classes that aren’t great and that we would spend more time trying to make them great post-launch than we should have to.”

[Xandax]

I'm a bit on the fence here, after having followed the game on n' off for a number of years.

Cutting the number of cities, I think was a decent decision. What we saw in WoW was that it was difficult to get all cities "balanced" (if we can talk about balance with cities) and because the cities in WAR is meant to be fought over.
Who would travel to defend Darnassus in WoW compared to Ironforge for example, if playing alliance?
Plus - it is relative easier to put in cities if needs be compared to a lot of other content.

As for the classes, then we'll have to remember there are still what ... 20 classes in the game, and this being primarily a 2 way conflict (Order vs. Destruction) I do not think it overall would matter much if certain races does not have a heavy tank for example.
Plus classes are hard to balance - Mythic knows this from their years with DAoC and have often stated that WAR will not be balanced for 1vs1 combat. So I also doubt they'll balance for race vs. race combat - what counts in Realm vs Realm.

But it is a "blow" because the game have been delayed so much that many people anticipating it feels betrayed and feels like they've waited for naught.

My prime concern is RvR balance though - and if cutting 4 classes helps this - then I'm more then fine with 20.

Plus we've seen the flack other MMOs get for releasing bugged or unbalanced or unfinished content - Age of Conan and Tabula Rasa springs to mind - so I'd personally rather have polished and balanced content then "much more" content. RvR can capture players for a long time if done correct as we saw in DAoC which was seriously imbalanced between the realms and even have swung like a pendulum between ranged and tank balance.

I'm not terrible worried and still look forward to playing this game.

My main issue with this however is that the announcement seems like inexperienced developers, like they couldn't handle what they "promised" etc - broken promises, bad press, bad rep etc can hurt them very much. But overall - I do still think it is better they catch this flack now then release a buggy/imbalanced/unfinished product.
But now - I'm sure people will be even more aware of this fact - and hold Mythic to higher standards then usually come release.
They've just made their margin of error a lot less - they can't afford to mess up release now.