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Might & Magic Creator Joins Garriott At NCSoft
Thanks to Google News for its link to the press release announcing Jon Van Caneghem, founder of New World Computing, has been hired by MMO developer NCSoft to work as "executive producer... on a new, unannounced online game project." As the release notes, Van Canegham "created the Might and Magic and Heroes series and turned them into two of the industry's most successful titles, with more than 20 million units in combined sales", and following the dissolution of New World Computing due to owner 3DO's collapse, and the sale of the Might and Magic franchise to UbiSoft, he'll be "working with [Ultima creator, Tabula Rasa developer, and NCSoft Austin head] Richard Garriott and NCsoft's... designers to create the next generation of massively multiplayer online games."
NCSoft is acting as a publisher here. The only titles developed by NCSoft is Lineage and Lineage II. Of NCSoft's other titles,
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Guild Wars is being developed by ArenaNet , a group composed primarily of former Blizzard employees who worked on Diablo that left in the Vivendi Universal bankruptcy debacle over the possible sale of the games division (including Blizzard). They could have picked a name further from BattleNet, though.
Tabula Rasa is developed by Destination Games, the Austin, Texas group headed by Richard Gariott composed primarily of people that got fired from or left Origin after EA scrapped the Ultima Online 2 project. They were actually far into Tabula Rasa before being signed on with NCSoft.
City of Heroes is developed by Cryptic Studios based in San Jose, CA.
Finally, Auto Assault is developed by NetDevil
All of these developers are completely autonomous as far as design goes. NCSoft is only the publisher and the billing gateway. For the sake of the independent developers that just happened to have signed up with NCSoft, please don't confuse their works with that of other developers.
Grouping with a friend or two who aren't idiots make CoH a much better experience. It took me almost 40 hours to get a 14th level character - not knowing what I was doing or where I was going.
My second toon works with two others for maybe 90 minutes a night and hit 14 in 17 hours of play. Not only that, but that hour and a half a night has been REALLY enjoyable, hitting a lot more of the game's content and with a lot of talk about comics and other geeky pursuits along the way.
Anyway, reality is right where you left it. All you have to do is avert your gaze from the computer screen, and there it is.
-- I wanna decide who lives and who dies - Crow T. Robot, MST3K
I'd describe Heroes of Might and Magic II or III as tedious in places, but extremely fun. Hearing you call CoH pretty fun doesn't make it sound like a game I want to play. I've played Asheron's Call and Shadowbane and won't be playing any more of them until there's something to do besides level. Shadowbane was interesting with its wars and politics, but it was too buggy and I'm not interested in going back now that the player base has shrunk.
Bandwith alone will eat up your yearly salary in a month for most mmorpgs, and that doesn't cover energy bills, hardware cost for the server farm, technical support personnel, ingame support personell, etc.
Actually, the original Might and Magic games are RPGs, just like the old Ultima games were. Heroes took the game in a turn-based direction.
;)
To reward those that read the comments a bit later, I'll share some dark secrets from 3DO. Since 3DO's bankrupt, I doubt there will be any trouble caused by posting this.
It's a little-known fact that 3DO had plans to make a Might & Magic online RPG a very long time ago, before UO was even launched. 3DO bought Archetype Interactive, the company responsible for Meridian 59 (the game I currently own and operate). They also bought New World Computing (NWC) about the same time to get the valued Might and Magic franchise. They wanted to use the M59 technology (which was pretty cool back in '96) to take Might and Magic online.
Well, things didn't quite work out that way. 3DO was looking at the game as a game, not the service it really is. So, they neglected M59 in favor of working on their new project. In the end, M59 didn't do as well as it could have despite launching a full year before UO was launched. Meridian 59 got little internal support, no resources for expansion, and terrible marketing support, so it's little surprise that the game didn't do that well.
In addition, UO was widely panned by most critics when the game launched. The lag, the bugs, the design flaws, all these things helped the game win multiple "coaster of the year" type awards. The secret was that there were multiple thousands of Ultima fans that played the game despite the complaints the critics had. EA/Origin kept mum about their real subscription levels, and everyone assumed it was a collosal failure.
The "failure" of M59 and UO convinced the 3DO that online games were just not profitable. So, they scrapped the Might & Magic Online plans and laid off the whole team. Of course, many Meridian 59 developers left the company as well in sympathy for their friends that were just laid off, ensuring that 3DO would always be an "also ran" when it came to online games. This was about the time the dot-com bubble was heating up.
Interestingly enough, the concept that online games were a failure stuck with the 3DO management for a very long time. Trip repeatedly gave interviews saying that "the market isn't ready" for online games. Even after UO was proven to be a success and EQ entered the scene with a HUGE splash, 3DO still stuck to this story, even when I left the company in 2000. Denial is an ugly thing, really.
Personally, I'm not sure the cancellation was a bad thing. 3DO proved repeatedly they didn't know how to run an online game. I had to fight tooth and nail while working on Meridian 59 to get the resources necessary to fix and improve the game. Jumpgate, also published by 3DO, faded into a completely undeserved oblivion. (It's interesting to note that NetDevil, the studio making Auto Assault for NCSoft, was the developer for Jumpgate.) It might be better to have our memories of Might and Magic as they are, not tainted by another "failed" game.
On the other hand, it could have been different if 3DO had kept competent people. Meridian 59 is actually a really fun game with multiple innovative elements that have only just recently been copied by other games. If you like online games and want something a little different than the ordinary fare, I recommend Meridian 59. (The good news is that after we bought the game from 3DO, we were able to do a lot of the work that the game absolutely needed.) Those of you that remember Meridian 59 from before might want to check out the new rendering engine that we're working on. The game is getting a bit of a facelift from the old software renderer to a new hardware-accelerated renderer.
Some information for the curious out there.
Have fun,
Brian "Psychochild" Green
MMO developer's blog