Everyone knows that Warhammer Online is not going to beat World of Warcraft. WoW's unassailability is now axiomatic and all that is left is the fighting over the carrion scraps for second place. But in trying to carve a viable niche for itself, Mythic has failed to understand the psychology of an MMORPG.
They have looked at WoW and concluded that it does PvE very well and PvP very badly and in this they are right. They have also concluded that they should therefore attack WoW's weak spot and concentrate on PvP and in this they are wrong.
WoW does have rubbish PvP. I mean really rubbish. There is such an enormous power imbalance between level 1 and level 70 players that battlegrounds have to be divided into brackets 10 levels wide but even then a ten level difference is essentially insurmountable so when you ding from 39 to 40 and find yourself in the next bracket up, you can more or less forget PvP until you hit at least level 48.
Gear dependent
And even if you and your opponent are both the same level, WoW is a hopelessly gear-dependent game. That's actually the whole point of the game – killing stuff to collect new gear to make you better at killing stuff. If the other guy has better gear than you then you start at a huge disadvantage and balancing PvP for this is virtually impossible.
But this is an intrinsic problem with any game where your character's power is not solely dependent on your own skill as a player. The most ridiculous extreme of this can be seen on the role-playing servers where some lunatics engage in a sort of combat called power emoting.
This is where they just stand there and use the chat interface to say things like "I summon elf energies from the nether darkness to blast you", countered with "Ah but I am a 3,000-year-old immortal elf and your spell bounces harmlessly off me." Fun PvP works because your avatar is simply an extension of your own ability.
Your fireball doesn't hit harder because you say so or because you spent three days killing locusts in a cornfield until one of them dropped the ultra-rare Trinket of Awesome Fireballs, it hits harder because you aimed accurately and scored a head-shot. Planetside did this pretty well and I played it with a suicidal fervour for about six months.
Kinda boring
But in the end, pure PvP always gets boring. Ironically, the unpredictability of a human opponent gets averaged out into just another kind of predictability in the massively-multiplayer context. And you never actually achieve anything because captured flags just get uncaptured again and you can't ever gain any cool kit or powers because it would unbalance the game.
With a PvE game, you can allow players to steadily get more powerful because you give them bigger monsters to fight. Sure, like one of those weird rising scales you never actually reach the top, but that doesn't really matter because you still have the sense of constant progression and when you stand in the lowbie zones and watch the baddies die just from the light of your glowing sword, you feel like a true hero.
Progression in PvP is more like building sandcastles on the beach. However impressive your fortification is today, it will all be washed away by the tide and tomorrow you start again with exactly the same blank canvas.
I am quite sure that the realm-wide PvP in Warhammer will be great fun – for a while. I even think it will be better than Planetside. But you're not going to play it for three years. That kind of commitment comes only from the PvE game and in that regard, Warhammer doesn't have anything that WoW hasn't had for ages.
Or won't add with the next expansion. When World of Warcraft is eventually toppled from its throne, it will be because someone finds a way to make killing locusts in a field feel even more epic than WoW does. I'm thinking zapping space locusts in an asteroid field, maybe.