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Mythica MMORPG Cancelled By Microsoft
Ivan writes "Microsoft announced that it has cancelled Mythica, its internally developed massively multiplayer PC RPG with a Nordic twist. The official website has the formal cancellation announcement, but additionally, 1UP spoke with MS reps who gave a few more details, noting 'the company had two MMORPG projects in development -- Mythica, and an as-yet-unannounced title. Rather than support the development and eventual maintenance of two MMORPGs in an already crowded and highly competitive market, Microsoft cancelled Mythica to make room for its other game.'"
...that was the source code that was released. Maybe they are going to rewrite it in XML?
I was really looking forward to this game. It looked like it had some real potential. If I am going to invest in a game where i pay fees to pay, I want it to be a stable company with some future.
If I point out that you are incorrect, making me a foe does not make you any more correct.
Microsoft is putting out yet another MMORPG in an already way too crowded marketplace? I understand the 13$ a month business model is good, but not spread as thin as it will be with all this competition.
I've never been a fan of MS games, but wouldn't it make more sense for them to focus attention on cross-platform games that they would be able to market both for PCs and for their XBox system? Perhaps the second MMORPG mentioned in the article meets this critereon while the cancelled game doesn't.
...Whether my Maker is prepared for the great ordeal of meeting me is another matter.
Churchill
Barbie breaks up with Ken
Another fine shining example for a society with a 50% divorce rate.
Should also make a great cultural addition to "The Apprentice" (keep your own job by abandoning your neighbor), "Survivor" (let's all get together and decide who to ostracize) and "American Idol" (let's make sport of human cruelty).
What a joyful day indeed.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
I hope this trend does not continue, although I'm sure they have their reasons for this. I play Asheron's Call which is produced by Microsoft, developed by Turbine and I'd hate to see it go down the toilet too. To be honest I think Microsoft should stop trying to spread its roots of evil and focus its development on their operating systems. I'm sure we can all agree on that.
I'm sure the lawsuit was a factor too. But, like you said, the market is going to get saturated quick. Not as much room for shitty games in a place where you have to pay per month. That means a game must not only be interesting enough to make a sale, but good enough to keep that intrest over a long period of time. More, people are only going to be willing to plunk down so much. 1-2 games is probably the max for most people.
I'm betting between the lawsuit and the promise of Sigil they figured this wasn't worth it and just stopped.
Brad McQuaid, John Smedley, and most of all Abashi/Absor never listened to the players. They had "The Vision(tm)" and all other views be damned.
EQ may be the leader at the moment, but World of Warcraft beta got almost as many signups as EQ has subscribers...
[So very sory for being in a vehement anti-MS mood, but step aside: I have some bitching to do.]
Microsoft has bought another MMORPG. Buy, buy, buy: that is all they are capable of.
Mod me down if you want, but what have they to do with the project except for the money they put in and the recognition (oh, and money) they'll get out? In my mind, it's Sigil Games Online's MMORPG, funded by Microsoft, who is using capital obtained by being a monopoly.
OK, I'm done. I'll go back to my corner of Slashdot now.
Wouldn't it be nice if all other game companies were as forthcoming with game dev info (hello 3DRealms)? As much as I dislike MS, It's nice to see a company just come out and say it. "This game is toast, just letting you know"
So did Shadowbane, and Horizons, and Asheron's Call 2, and Star Wars Galazies, and Neocron, and Anarchy Online, etc. etc.
There are two problems here. What online RPGers -say- they like and what they will play are two different things. Everyone claims to hate camping and level grinding, and yet...you build an online Skinner box and you'll get players camping ph4t l3wtz that they have a 10% chance of getting once a month.
Second, the ideal MMORPG is basically not possible with current technology. Developers aren't able to make a living, breathing world with millions of independent intelligent NPCs, a game world that adapts on the fly to player behavior, deformable terrain, meaningful political systems, and so on. In the real world, the best you can hope for is a sort of virtual Disneyworld, which is able to move thousands of players through scripted encounters and quests. The notion of a gameplay experience truly unique to any particular player is just not going to happen....yet.
Whatever Microsoft and Sigil games may offer, it's not going to change the world.
No. It demonstrates that the worldwide MMORPG is not saturated. For English speakers, though, there are plenty of MMORPGs available (I'll leave the question of whether they're good or not to others).
Unfortunately, the MMORPG market seems to be locked into a painful, stagnating track. Specifically, everyone sees the success of Everquest and wants to attract the people who like that game. Thus, every game seems to be emulating EQ with relatively minor tweaks (probably inspired by reading threads written by people who are angry about something in Everquest). The problem with being on this track is that people who didn't enjoy, or got tired of, Everquest see little reason to try the latest, greatest MMORPG given how much they all tend to resemble each other.
Me, I'm just going to bide my time until they get about two years into Star Wars Galaxies. With spaceships and the inevitable balancing/tweaking/content additions, I'm pretty sure I could enjoy it. :)
The beta is free. How many of those that signed up will be willing to pay a monthly fee?
Like all the Windows incarnations, Office, Internet Explorer and Xbox you mean? The market sure killed those off...
I hate a lot of their products and business strategies as much as the next geek but if you're going to attack them, at least use some semblence of a plausible argument.
The real sad thing about URU being killed off was that it offered a different style of gameplay: dice-less, rule-less rpg instead of yet another rehash of Dungeons & Dragons. No leveling, no so and so many points for killing this or that monster, no PKing, cooperation instead of competition. This might not attract the 14-year old brigands of other MMORPGs, but it was attracting a lot of people that only play cooperative, non-violent games. Instead of leeching off of the customer-base of already existing games it might have picked up hordes of people (grandmothers, for instance. Hi Granny!) that had never even touched an online game before or maybe not even touched that many offline games before. That is a very impressively large potential customerbase... But it is over, and it is pointless to discuss could-have-beens :(
The problem isn't the developers, the problem is the customers. You have two choices. You try to make a game you think would be fun and entertaining to play, and hope that lots of other people will too, or you can listen to all the crybabies screaming about nerfs and see-saw the game back and forth on a weekly basis.
Half the people that make MMORPGs such a pain are the ones who play 3 accounts 20 hours a day, exploit every bug, min-max every character, and then bitch like crazy when developers close loopholes and try to maintain some sense of fair play. The other half are the so-called 'casual gamers' that think they should be able to play 2 hours a week and enjoy the same level of success as the power-gamers. You can't satisfy these two extremes. Any systems the developers put in place to make it friendly to the casual gamers will be exploited to death and back by the power gamers. And if they put in insanely hard content for the power-gamers, the casual crowd won't play it, and won't buy the expansions for it.
I've picked up almost every MMORPG since UO on the day they came out, and played them for weeks or months until I got bored or my friends quit, and the situation has been the same on every one. Best piece of advice I can give anyone thinking of playing one of these games is to stay the hell away from the discussion boards. Play the game if you find it fun, quit if you don't. But don't listen (and don't contribute) to all the bitching and moaning from people who seem the think the developers should cater the game to them.
or you can listen to all the crybabies screaming about nerfs and see-saw the game back and forth on a weekly basis.
Which is what SOE has been doing with EQ for the past 2 years. End-result is that cry-babies just cry harder when they don't get their way, and the griefers run rampant because everything is open to re-negotiation. (It's now a lot like dealing with a bunch of spoiled 5-year olds who are accustomed to always getting their way.)
The other problem that the SOE developers have is when they do implement a fix for a balance issue, they attempt to solve the entire problem at once. Which means that they usually go too far in the other direction and either have to dial it back over the next 3 patches or else it's such a drastic change that it affects a multitude of other classes. A dev team with a bit of common sense would realize that maybe changes should be gradual. So if class A is over-powered, instead of radically nerfing the class in a single-change, it should be planned out to take up to 6 months to implement everything. Do one change, see how it affects balance, tweak it a bit, then implement the 2nd change.
Of course, that requires someone with a "Vision" to act as a gatekeeper and a moderator. Both to keep the players from demanding changes that would damage the game, and to keep developers from changing things just because they can be changed.
Casual gamers who only play a few hours per week want a stable game where their hard work into a class isn't suddenly made away with when their class gets re-balanced. People love to complain about their class strengths/weakenesses, but if they *really* didn't want to deal with those plus/minuses, they'd have re-rolled another class. Changing the game to satisfy a whiner just means that everyone else will start whining.
And if they put in insanely hard content for the power-gamers, the casual crowd won't play it, and won't buy the expansions for it.
Here's where the bean counters get involved. A player-oriented decision would be to make a high-level expansion, realize that you will only sell it to half the playerbase, and make it a no-holds-barred high-level expansion. Instead, they try to add low-level features to market to the LCD so that the majority of the playerbase will buy it. So design time gets taken away from satisfying the high-end players (the original goal), and you end up with a lackluster expansion. Or else they make changes seemingly willy-nilly that end up causing huge balance issues that take months to work out.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
> Here's where the bean counters get involved. A player-oriented decision would be to make a high-level expansion, realize that you will only sell it to half the playerbase, and make it a no-holds-barred high-level expansion. Instead, they try to add low-level features to market to the LCD so that the majority of the playerbase will buy it.
The problem is that, in the market that these games live in, the bean counters must be involved. SOE cannot afford to issue a major expansion that only caters to (and will only be purchased by) a fraction of their player base. While this makes it rather difficult to issue a proper expansion, it's economically required by the business model. Saying they should just pick a segment and cater to that segment would be suicidal.
That said, they have tried to release expansions targetted to certain segments, with stuff put in for the rest. Planes of Power was virtually all for high end characters, with one VERY important and game-changing low-end addition (the Plane of Knowledge, which virtually eliminated the market for porters and made spell acquisition much simpler). I take that as an example of a well done expansion, that targetted one group but didn't leave everyone else out in the cold, and people who were not of a sufficient level to enter the experience areas still went out and bought it for access to the PoK. Then came the Legacy of Ykesha, which was also meant to be a high end expansion with some low end content and benefits. I take this as an example of a badly done expansion, because the "try to please" reach was much broader in LoY than it was in PoP. Since the high end content wasn't high enough to draw people out of the Planes of Power zones, the low end zones were still too high for the weekend gamers, and extra bank space wasn't sufficient to drive people to buy it if they didn't also want the zone content, not many felt the need to buy it.
So, in short, I don't think that trying to please a broad segment of the gamer base is a bad idea, and in fact it's necessary to the survival of the game. When it's done well, it really works, and I disagree that it can only be done well by focusing on small portions of the player base.
Virg