Obsidian no longer on Armored Warfare, My.com now in charge amidst controversy




In a brief post dating of February 11, Obsidian Entertainment has revealed that the studio won't be working anymore on Armored Warfare, the free-to-play shooter published by My.com. The Obsidian CEO and My.com's Publishing Director praise each other's work, and further developments of the game will be taken by My.com in Russia.

This could be the end of this news, however there's a lot more behind it, and it's not pretty. Speaking on Reddit, Gatortribe, “a design consultant for Obsidian Entertainment/My.com since the beginning of Early Access”, spoke in detail about “who was to blame for the game dying”. In short, MailRU (owners of My.com), are the ones who take the blame:




“Ah, here it is. The big one. How did I not see this coming, I played ArcheAge– I knew what they were capable of, and Obey reminded me numerous times of it. The rest of this post will be about how they ran this game into the ground because they simply lack the vision to see past the Russian market. They thrive on incomplete features and shitty knock off mechanics.”

It all began when MailRU asked multiple companies to see who would develop a tank game for them, but it seems they just wanted a World of Tanks clone:




“[Obsidian] developed this magnificent plan for Armored Warfare– what could have been is not at all what we have today. In fact, I'm not even sure if you would have been able to call it a World of Tanks competitor as the games only had tanks in common. […] MailRU said they wanted none of that, and they tasked Obsidian with making a “World of Tanks clone.” Yes, it was supposed to be as close to World of Tanks as they could get with modern tanks and without getting their asses sued off by Wargaming.”

Having Russia as the example for the game (“The Russians loved it”) and not caring about the North American market (and European), not taking the time to have polished, well thought out features, was also a big problem:

“MailRU chose Russia as the only market they cared about, to no ones surprise. This meant that instead of taking the time to have polished, well thought out features we got rushed, half baked features. Why? The Russians loved it. The terrible, terrible base system that was envisioned to be so much more was because MailRU was fine with the preview version that was introduced in Early Access, and decided it would be the final version.”

There's a lot more to read on Reddit, including that “MailRU canceled Obsidian's contract, Obsidian didn't quit. They wanted to continue developing the game as far as I can tell.” and the revelation that My.com is already working on Xbox One and PlayStation 4 versions of Armored Warfare.

Definitely not great news for the future of the game, so let's see how Armored Warfare improves – or not – during 2017.




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