And welcome to reality.

Mythic cut back on the release features for WAR today. Specifically they reduced the classes and capital cities.

The announcement and corresponding interviews were peppered with the usual cheery 'it's for quality' spin.

I'm not denouncing Mythic, while I don't think there was any bravery in the announcement, it was to be expected. It was either something like this, or a delay. At this point, with collector's editions pre-ordered, they cannot delay. EA would balk. They may even be contractually obligated to the retail chains for a Q4 release.

Mythic is trying to provide as much entertainment as they can within a sane timeframe and budget, two things which they've pushed pretty damn far.

It's too easy for fans to ask for something to be 'done when it's done'. The first time I heard that phrase it came from John Carmack, while leading a team of 8 talented developers at ID Software. It's a phrase for great games with limited scope. MMORPGs are on an entirely different scale of complexity, they can be great, but so much is involved in the process of getting them there. And it's far from an exact science yet.

Just a little while ago, MMORPG players were finally getting games that could be released without servers bouncing up and down for days, weeks and months. To ask for complete polish with full-and-lasting content on top of stability for launch-day, well we haven't seen it yet. It comes later, with patches.

I think we all have to swallow the pill sooner or later.

I hope to be proven wrong, eventually I will be, but not by the current crop of MMORPGs approaching release. There's an insane amount of pressure, the market has gone up and up and each game has investors that are hoping to catch onto that rocket and fly into the stratosphere.

When we do see it, I think it may be from a privately held company and not a big public corporation with shareholders to answer in quarterly reports and expectations of earnings on each dollar.