The recent announcement of the Warhammer Online delay until fall might be sad news for my buddy over at Keen and Graev (and his expected disappointment in this post) - but the delay is welcome sign for me for our highly anticipated future MMOG.

I have three reasons for this, and they are:

1. It will give more to time to play Age of Conan and give it a real, fighting chance.
2. The game will be more stable and polished on release.
3. Not rushing the release is a good step away from the corporate mentality of meeting deadlines, no matter the cost, and watching your project fail. Example: Vanguard, Saga of Heroes.

I know the waiting game sucks, but a Warhammer Spring 2008 release was muddling everything up for those that wanted to try both Age of Conan and WAR out and see which is better.

This also means more features and things added for Warhammer plus a true focus on the PVP content of the game:

Mark Jacobs: In terms of RvR, the game’s motto has always been “war is everywhere,” so this game has always been focused on that aspect of gaming. One of the things that we found during beta was that certain aspects of our RvR system weren’t everything that we wanted them to be. So we added open-field RvR. We’ve been looking at certain rulesets for different RvR servers. And that takes time.

The other thing is, and it really encompasses the entire game’s development, is what the team’s been doing–and doing a tremendous job with, by the way–is meeting all their milestones in terms of the amount of material to add to the game, whether it’s content, quests, or systems. What they didn’t meet in the milestones was the date. So, they’d get everything in, but it took a little longer, and as it took a little longer, we were faced with two obvious choices: we cut some polish, or we cut some features. And we made the decision, backed by EA, to make sure that all that polish is in there, and all those features are in there. And that’s it.

Sounds good to me. Glad to see their adopting a Blizzard-style quality model in releasing their products. As much as some of us might hate the Blizzard monster nowadays, they’ve at least set the bar on stability and testing of their games.

Technorati Tags: AoC, WAR