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Wish Cancelled
Shockeye writes "According to Mutable Realms' website, the Wish project has been cancelled after 'careful consideration of all the facts and analyzing all the data which we have gathered from the Wish Beta 2.0 test.' The beta test for the Wish project will close at 6pm EST. According to the message it also seems Mutable Realms will be closing as well. You can view the short message here, and over at f13.net we are discussing the latest casualty to the MMOG scene."
and just see which fills up first.
That's all I have to say about it.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Maybe they should open source it since they are just going to scrap it anyways??
This may be a blessing in disguise for productivity in the world. World of Warcraft has destroyed me, missed deadlines, angry phonecalls from editors etc. I ended up emailing the .exe to a friend, gave the CDs to another and begged them both not to give them back for at least a fortnight. Then wasted 2 hrs trying to crack her gmail password.
:).
The lack of another MMORPG out there may just mean I get this book out on time
paul reinheimer
What is the exact reason for cancellation? Is it financial or what? Does it make sense to continue this project under e.g. the GPL model?
It's a waste to let all the hard work just be for nothing.
see a Text Widget
Judging from this screenshot, I think I can see why. Sure, graphics ain't everything... but competing with WoW and EverCrack2 (to a lesser level) isn't easy... I hope they had a GREAT gameplay to compensate for such... graphics.
From their FAQ : "No decisions have yet been made on the specific pricing, but you should not expect Wish to be on the cheap side. We want to compete..."
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
Well, then, you shouldn't come to a computer game site like Slashdot.
Once again it seems that Themis http://www.themis-group.com is involved with a failing or failed business.
Some of their happy partners include.
Anarchy Online
Jumpgate
Wish
Saga of Ryzom
And several niche MMO's that have vanished over the years. And lets not forget their heavy influence at Turbine Entertainment and that peice of crap they call Asheron's Call 2 that refuses to die. (Note they were not involved in AC2 being crappy but one can wonder why it has not been axed yet).
As an independent games developer, this strikes me the same way as a bakery tossing away perfectly good bread one one side of town while someone's hungry on the other side. Remember when Crack-Dot-Com went out of business and released its content to the public?
There's a special place in Indie Valhalla for the Jonathan Clark and those like him. Why don't we see more of this?
________________________________
Inago Rage - Create and fight in first-person arenas of your own design.
We're indie. We're working on our 14th game.
It looks to me, from the remnants of the website, that the developers wanted the game to be fairly immersive and involve a fair bit of actual role playing , as opposed to modified hack-n-slash with a quest system bolted on. Did anyone here play in beta? What were the compelling features? What went wrong?
Why should he/she shut the fuck up? Although the original message was not in great depth, I believe your's could have addressed the issue to a greater degree.
Remeber, Blender wasn't open source until NaN went bankrupt, and "sold" it to the blender foundation. Perhaps Wish's developers could bring in some cash, and interested volunteers could make something out of wish, selling server time to players.
I have freaks! I did something right...
Another fantasy online RPG cancelled. Was anyone surprised?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
When I was hooked on Everquest, I couldn't be stopped. Thank Joe that I developed an immunity to it...
I was, briefly, a Wish beta tester. Everything about the game was highly derivative; there were no compelling features to be seen. It was Progress Quest with a GUI.
The reason you don't see companies going along with reasoning like yours is because in the IP business code is like buildings and machinery.
If you had a manufacturing business and closed your doors today you probably wouldn't give everything away the very next day (especially if the cost of storing was as minimal as code is). You'd hang onto or try to find a buyer to re-coop some of your costs (developing code costs money too).
Maybe after a long time you'd be willing to give it away, but you probably put a lot of your own money into this stuff and you'd like to get something back out of it.
Quack, quack.
They aren't called "Mutable Realms" for nothing...
you had me at #!
An open source MMORPG would be a very worthwhile project, however the cost of bandwidth would have to be dealt with. I wonder if it is possible that the "world" database could be stored in distributed fashion, like a freenet node, eliminating the need for a central server.
My rights don't need management.
Looks like we've got the first candidate for 2005's Vaporware Games Awards...!
In a rash of magnanimity, I'll also spare you all the possible "wish" puns...
How can you cancel my wish list !!
Companies and owners sometimes do the same, they hire you, you work a lot, and then they decide that they'll end the proyect.
It's hard if you see it from the worker/programmer perspective.
I was working for my company for over one year in a really interesting proyect, suddenly the owner of the company woke up one day and said that the proyect was end. Why? if the proyect is great and is working perfectly in the company? I don't know What I know is that still today, we are using what we'd developed in the company, we didn't sell it doh.
ajf
Not at all.
After the success of everquest a large number of mmos were announced. Most of them were not going to be able to succed. This is why:
1. MMOs take much more time to develop than any other game. You have to create a world thats large enough to keep players playing for at least several months while you are creating new content to keep players playing. Most other games are linear or have limited paths a player can take.
2. Time commitment to one game makes player reluctant to dedicate time to other mmo games. Though that doesnt stop some players, just most.
3. The MMO audience is smaller than the general gamer audience. Not everyone wants to or can subscribe to a game.
4. To break even on operating costs, you need a certain number of players to keep the game running. This number is ussually in the thousands, but it depends ont he game.
So, we have a limited audience, gamers who can generally dedicate themselves to just one game, and you need a chunk of that audience to keep running. How many games can the MMO audience sustain? Not many.
World of Warcraft and Everquest 2 will the big players. They also need at least 100,000 players to stay profitiable. Other games can survive if they plan and develop for smaller audiences. Aiming for a large audence without being able to compete with the big players is just a recipie for disaster.
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
There are dozens of MMORPG titles being developed right now, but hardly any players to play them. With the recent releases of World of Warcraft and Everquest II the market has become even more competative. I am betting this will be the year we will see a massive cancelation in MMORPG development. Wish going down not even 10 days into the new year is a bad omen for developers.
me neither, i thought that they were talking about this wish
/* No Comment */
We decided that we would focus our efforts on getting our characters up to level 60 in WoW
This is a very funny little program. Its like a spoof of computer role playing games really. It's _fully_ automated! LOL. So much for the drudgery of hack n slash.
so context is dead.
I have freaks! I did something right...
Next time put some thought in your posts.
Something seems wrong here... Me and a friend both have rss feeds that are way ahead of the posted content. Comment numbers of way off too. Anyone else ?
Like the other guy said; maybe you as well should shut the fuck up?
...you can't cancel a wish!
At first I thought this was about Make A Wish and they cancled some sick cancer kid's wish. That would have been wicked. A game seems less than news.
It's so nice to see low-uid slashdotters keeping the bar raised high, pointing out the obvious! Now THAT'S insightful!
WISH made some noises about being the first "ultra" massively multiplayer online game, where "ultra massive" was defined as "over 10,000 players online at once in a single game world".
EVE: Online (a space based mmorpg) did this back in April of '04.
It's not impossible, but it is difficult. I guess they weren't up to it.
~Lake
P.S. Aside from just the user record, EVE is a pretty cool game and worth checking out. Very different than other MMORPGs out there. Kind've a modern mmorpg of Elite or Escape Velocity.
Still, you've got to appreciate a game where you can play as a Demicanadian Voodoo Princess.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
If I told my sister of this, she'd probably laugh or rejoice. The game seriously sucked, though I could be a little harsh, as I don't tend to like RPGs. Still, the ONE enemy she was supposed to fight (the Mord after meeting the man we came to refer to as "Losey McWhat's-his-face") never showed up, except for once when she was in the middle of talking to Losey McWhat's-his-face. Upon killing it, she was disappointed to find that all he effectively did was go "Okie dokie!" and that was the end of it. She was stuck in the introductory stages! Not to mention the character creation, controls, and graphics were all a bit lacking. I understand it was a beta test and all, but it would need to get ALOT better to have ever survived. For crying out loud, how important were the different types of trees?! My sister would have appreciated being able to find the Mord more than knowing that "the tree over there is oak!" Enough of my rant...
I suppose this is really only funny to me, since my sister and I were making jokes left and right about the game. "Spirit of Subtlety?! More like the Spirit of Letting-it-all-hang-out!" Then there were the characters she made...one mildly serious character to start with, then one she made to demonstrate the strange character creation (the name of that one came to be "ClayAiken"). Then a third she made as tall as possible because she was getting screenshots of the Spirit of Subtlety's nipples (long story short, friends were saying it was just shadowing and she wanted to prove them wrong). The name of that cyclops came to be "Pierre." Anyhow.
Not really a big loss all together, so far as I'm concerned. But that could just be me and my lack of experience in accepting the flaws in a beta test.
I think this was precisely the problem. They most likely had a very small turnout for the people that signed up.
I signed up and was accepted for the beta but I was too busy playing World of Warcraft to even install Wish (which I did download the whole thing, 1.2G).
This seems to be mostly the result of "the worst timing possible" mixed with "those graphics are soooo last year". >.>
..could this get modded insightful while someone "blaspheming" World of Warcraft gets modded a troll.
I hope all these types of games close down! Kids need to go outside and do some physical activities. I believe these types of games skew reality for a lot of people. I am already interviewing college grads, who are great coders, who can't relate to people. However, when I ask them their handle on World of Warcraft, they go on telling me all about it - and the excitement in their eyes scares the hell out of me. I then ask them, what do you do outside this game - and I get a blank stare.
I agree. Bet they had a small turnout and lack of people playing. I just uninstalled it. Guild Wars generates enthusiasm in me, couldn't muster any for Wish.
The 2nd beta didn't seem much different from the 1st. For some odd reason they had poor default choices in their options menu. Also it started up at a low resolution. So right from the start it gave you a bad impression. Then not having WSAD keys for movement!
Skills improved by using that skill. Lots of repetition. Combat wasn't anything special either.
Level 43 shaman reporting for duty!
I didn't go to the extreme's you did, I just smacked myself around a bit and decided I need to start working. I'd probably be level 60 by now if I hadn't done that. I hope to get an hour or two in tonight but I probably shouldn't because I'll be up until 11am if I do.
Thousands of sources converge to say: "Hey guys, the players are pissed. Is there any chance that we can rip out the mouse based movement system and go back to WASD?"
Programmers: "We quit."
And with that, the age of MMORPGs which try to host more than about 3,000 players per world comes to a close... at least for a decade or two.
I seem to recall that Wish was first announced back in the age when the Everquest clones were really starting to manifest. Anarchy Online was released (trainwreck that was) and Horizons and Wish were announced more or less at the same time. I called them both vaporware, perhaps grieving over Ultima Origin's recent cancelation, or perhaps rightfully concerned over the glut in the industry.
I remember when I was really enthusiastic about WISH, back when MahrinSkel used to be working on it and was telling us about all these spot on game design observations. I thought to myself, "Woah, if this guy knows this much about what makes the other MMORPGs suck, Wish should kick some serious ass!"
A few months afterwards (Summer of 2003), MahrinSkel's no longer on the team and I get my first taste of Wish Beta. I was mortified about the lack of interactivity to the gameplay, where previously I was given reason to believe that Wish was going to actually emphasize interactivity. The engine was interesting, but very kludgy - I chalk it up to forgivable given that it's an early beta.
I stop playing Wish Beta, and for awhile beta is over while the team retools everything. I applaud the year delay of the release, thanking perhaps Wish could provide an interesting 3D Ultima Online alternative with a little work. (Although SWG had that niche covered fairly well already.) Beta 2 rolls around, I got an invite, but there's too much on my plate with World of Warcraft and school.
And now it's come to this.
I don't know, sometimes it seems a real shame when those that cried "Vaporware" a half decade ago, myself among them, were right..
1) Your analysis is based on bad assumptions so your result is way off. 2) You're a sick bastard for fucking a horse.
Assume for a small moment that you're in the shoes of one of the 3D modelers for this hypothetical company that decided to release all the assets for relicensing or for free.
Yes, it sucks that they might be giving it all away.
Did they pay you for your efforts?
Yes?
Then all of those assets are a work for hire and you don't own them and shouldn't be bitching about them giving them away. Can't be pissed about it, you traded the work for money and it's theirs now no matter how you slice it and it's theirs to do with as you please. But by all means do what you say you'd do- you'll find that you'll never work in any segment of the Game Dev industry and possibly the movies and TV as you'll come across as a sore loser. (Nobody wants to hire someone that whines about what someone does with a given asset after the owner paid for it from someone else..).
Me, I'd be tickled pink that my name was out and about and I might even find work after the implosion because of the stuff being available for all to see and use.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Planeshift's the very thing we're talking about here. As for the world database, it'd take a little more than that- you need something along the lines of the database AND shared notifications of everything that each user was doing along with authentication of some sort to verify that all clients were telling the truth about what they're doing, etc.
:-)
Simply put, it's a rough thing to accomplish so nobody's attempted it- YET.
Me, I've got my plate full trying to push two startups to major success AND trying to help LGP get several games out the door, so I doubt it'll be me (though I've an idea or two on how to go about it all...). But it's definitely not an unsurmountable problem and a P2P MMOG might not be a bad idea as it'd distribute the server horsepower over all the peers and the bandwidth as well. Just going to have to come up with framework, and that's the rough part more than anything else.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Freenet's the wrong thing to use as a base for the thing. Differing goals for P2P modalities. Anonymous operation's most definitely NOT something you want for this. However, I believe the parent poster was using it as an example more because it's the only definitive thing that most people know about, This fact is actually amazing, considering that there's a MUCH better solution, that's mature, runs under Java , Ruby, Perl, Python, and C/C++ right at the moment- better yet, it's under a decent enough Open Source license that wouldn't prohibit anyone from using it. Why people don't use it? Because most people associate it with Java and Java only because of who gave it to all of us...
Ah well, I'll leave it as an exercise for those who're serious about starting on solving that problem as I've got to work on using it for my own projects. Once I'm totally done (should be in another 6-12 months...) if nobody's done it or done something better, maybe I'll work on it. Pretty sure it'd rock as it bridges firewalls, etc.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Unless there's a clause in their agreement/contract for the ownership of the assets they worked on in the event of closing shop, then they've got no room to complain- period, end of story. Doesn't matter if it's a modeler, musician, level designer, or code developer. I have to deal with that all the time and there's nothing I can do about it. If it's a problem, I suggest a different line of work or get so good that you're not selling but leasing it out to the studios (There ARE people in that position, you know...).
ALWAYS be certain of the terms of your work. If you don't like them, don't do the work. If you can't afford to not work, do the work, but understand that you don't own it, can't own it, and have absolutely NO say in what is done with it once handed over to your employer.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
And these are character graphics. Chances are they were generated from a set of various choices... so perhaps those particular characters just look cruddy because the eyes/hair or something similar look bad together?
This one isn't too bad, except for the hands:
Super!
I finally get accepted into a beta and it closes!
There are far too many MMORPGs these days because every small startup game company and their publishers and investors were rushing to jump on the bandwagon. The trouble with these types of games is that they put such demands upon a player's time that he or she rarely has time for more than one MMORPG addiction. That combined with the fact that MMORPGs are not yet and probably never will be (due to the aforementioned time constraints) part of the mainstream. The end result of all of this is too many MMORPGs chasing too few players and therefore too few dollars. What do investors do when a company is hemorrhaging money like an arterial bleeder? They pull the plug and it appears that that is exactly what happened here.
There's quite a few multiplayer games in the works, and this one is just a statistic now. On a fluke I did a yahoo search for a star trek mmorpg. Looks like one is in the works, but the release date is sometime in 2007. It will become a statistic also, and will fall under the "too sucky too late" category. Star Wars Galaxies barely scraped by that category although it's just kinda sucky.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
It's been said.
...when you offer to take it off their hands, many people that sit on the BOD of the company in question start saying "Someone's interested in buying it, surely there's someone else out there that'll pay more for it...". They're tasked with trying to maximize profits and minimize losses as much as is possible. So when they're closing doors, the minimize losses part kicks in with a vengeance and more often than not, they just simply will not achieve a compromise on the price in question and the code drops off the face of the Earth, never to be seen again.
Blender's a notable exception, as is Crack Dot Com's release and Digital Tome's. But they're the exceptions, NOT the norm by any stretch of the imagination- and I don't see that changing any time soon unless there's a change in business philosophy or laws are passed requiring release under some Open Source terms or to the Public Domain.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I just noticed that I live 3 miles from one of their main offices. Never would have guessed a game development company would be here. It must've been going pretty bad if they would cancel it this abruptly.
When you buy a comic book you're legally allowed to do anything you want with it. But if you walk into a comic book shop and buy that limited edition copy of superman #1 and say to the clerk "no need for a bag, I'll eat it here" you can be sure that within a week every comic book shop will have your picture on the front door and "banned for life" written under it.
How we know is more important than what we know.
part of the reason why this company didn't make any money to cover their costs, was because they gave the product away for free.
I beg your pardon? The reason they didn't make any money to cover their costs was that they hadn't finished and released the game! They didn't give anything away for free - they conducted several limited (both in number of participants, and in duration) beta tests of the unfinished game, but they in no way provided the means for people to sit on their asses enjoying the game for no cost.
Hey, ProgressQuest HAS a GUI. It's not command line... And 3D mode! Get the limited edition platinum CD for that! It's the shading on the bars, makes 'em look a bit 3D. PQ is fun. When you get sick of playing something else, open up your PQ window and laugh.
Not a sentence!
Good. Lord. In. Heaven... You need to try to draw attention to this and do it in as many forums as is possible. I was under the understanding that Planeshift was working as an Open Source MMOG, It's readily apparent if the veracity of your claims on that link can be confirmed that they're claiming one thing and doing something completely different and as such that would be a BAD THING.
Seems to me, it's time to reveal them for who they really are and salvage anything that we can from their project (It IS GPLed, a fork of anything that is so licensed is quite in order at this point...).
I was considering coming up with a networking layer to do P2P if someone beat me to it, but not now. I don't even think I really want to play the game at this point- I don't like being lied to and the games your link describes is pure lying to the rest of the community.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
You miss what I'm on about. There will always be more people wanting to get in on the modeling, etc. and saying that a company's going to be ostracised is only fooling yourself.
Why do I say this?
Well, EA's still quite in business isn't it?
The RIAA labels are still going quite strong in spite of all the crap they pull on the artists.
Ditto the MPAA studios.
The reality is you're a sharecropper unless you go up quite a ways on the food chain- no matter what industry you work in. They're just not going to give the words of some alienated modeler a second thought in the industry unless they're a big name. And while there's going to be people willing to take a stand on principals, there's unfortunately tons of people who don't give a rat's about them or aren't in a position to care about principals.
Pissing off the community that they depend on to make the content? They (The Corporations...) do that every day and don't have any more pain than if they don't- so that will NEVER enter into their equations of what they do/don't do. It just won't until we all group together (And that means all the artisans and engineers that comprise the Game Dev and Media Industries...) and get their attention with a clue-by-four. That's the reality here. I agree with your sentiments for the large part, so don't get me wrong here, but the reality is far removed from what you, I, or the modelers and other artists care about.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Wish was intended to support 10,000 simultaneous players per world. That sort of bandwidth is not cheap.
How many simultaneous readers does Slashdot have?
"Wish is the first Ultra Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (UMMORPG(TM)). "Ultra" means that Wish supports more than 10,000 simultaneous players in a single, seamless world, without any zones or "shards".
"
cough www.eve-online.com
"29.11.2004
12K Barrier Broken
Sunday, November 28th at 20:40:00, EVE Online broke the 12,000 simultaneous user barrier when 12.258 players were on at the same time. This record comes at the heels of EVE's latest expansion - EXODUS.
"
214357 is a low UID?
*elevator music plays*
When you Wish upon a Star....
Oh, never mind...
I can't believe I just typed that Subject.
Please don't start a language flamewar. It's just a joke, and a bad one at that.
Sounds like you need a hug! *HUG*
I was in the beta and played it for a couple of hours on the first night.
The first thing I encountered, as I got into my starting harbour town, was that everyone in the town had contracted some disease and started dying. You couldnt buy stuff from merchants because they were all dead. At first I thought this was just some intro quest, but when I talked to some of the players they said it had just happened the night before. I initially thought 'woah!'. The dynamic nature of it made the world feel much more alive. It was a group quest that had to be worked on by everyone, and effected everyone. I was really impressed.
That is until I spent about an hour trying to figure out what to do. It seems that the only way to complete the quest was to collect x number of healing roots and bring it back to town. yay! This is exactly what I hate about mmorpgs. I spent the next hour trying to figure if there was anything else worth while to do. In short, the only other things to do were kill monsters and pick berries. Im sorry, thats not for me.
But I have to admit, for a brief period of time the flavor of the quest really blew me away. The world felt so much more alive, just through a little bit of text and setting. These quests were to be the hook of the game. The only problem was that these quests probably took up too much of the developers time, and they had no time to spend on the core gameplay. Now if something WOW could take this idea and run with it, it could totally revolutionize the mmorpg scene.
It had to be some kind of internal problem in the company not relating directly to Wish. If there was a problem with either the gameplay, server code or something of that nature, they would have at least made an effort to improve it. They wouldn't have just cut off the servers with no warning. Maybe funds were pulled and they were no longer able to keep the servers up and the game in development.
Anyway, I really hope they give us something more of an answer in the coming days.
And I thought they were cancelling Tcl/Tk. *whew*
It's kinda weird having a game cancelled while you're beta testing it. Fortunately the game didn't have much potential as a retail game, so there's no loss. It was trying to follow in UO's footsteps and go with a skill based system but they forgot UO's worked because you just needed a tool to attempt doing something of a different skill. Wish made you have to apprentice to earn certain skills (for example, you couldn't carpent unless you were apprenticed under an NPC as a carpenter). Also, the battle in Wish isn't automated whatsoever. To attack you have to click one of your attack skills and then click another while that first one coolsdown, then click another because the first isn't quite cooled down yet, then click the first again, etc. If you don't click, then you don't attack. Not very fun imo. UO also only had three stats where Wish has 7 or 8 (I can't remember offhand). Also, the creatures outside of towns in UO were bunnies and rats, all very easily killable. Outside of the town I started in in Wish the creatures had grouping tendencies and were occasionally aggressive. There's a lot more bad things Wish did, but I'm not going to bother talking about them: the game's dead and what I've said's enough to show why.
I have friends that got just as addicted to PQ as to EQ.
Play Command HQ online
The videogame business has always been based on the fact that 90% of all games released fails. Why would MMO's be any different?
The ______ Agenda
The beta kicked ass. True multi-head support, fantastic forests, beautiful grass, awesome models. The screenshots don't do it justice.
The game itself was compelling, fun, slick, and something very nice.
Half of the people who saw it didn't even give it a chance. You won't find anyone who showed up to beta test panning it. Many people were expecting a finished product. Many people were immediately turned off by the point and click interface and left bitching. Many people got a bug up their ass about the UI and instead of suggesting improvements (It was a fantastic UI with few irritating quirks), bitched endlessly, stated how disappointed they were in the game at every opportunity and then left.
I think most people think that 'beta test' means 'show up and test the product TO SEE IF YOU LIKE IT'. Which is moronic. (Granted, the whole concept of beta tests as unpaid labor is a little evil, but that's how the system works, and some people actually show up to help!)
The game was not finished. There were two phases of beta to go. I was having more fun in that beta than I've had in any other MMORPG.
It was quality.
In this day and age, quality always loses.
-Kysh
--=:: Wings and tail and snout and scales of blackest night
It's a shame that it is being more increasingly difficult to commerically develop software. I would like to offer my condolences to the families of these software developers. I pray you can find employment in this post dotcom crashed environment where outsourcing to third world countries has become commonplace.
The open source vultures will now come out of the shadows and demand the source code for Wish. Haven't they done enough yet? I just want to make a living and put a little money in a savings account for my 2 months year old son so he can go to college.
the game's graphics were so crappy by today's standards that it couldnt compete on the market no matter how many players their server could hold!
But have you checked out the 3D mode in Progress Quest?
http://www.progressquest.com/faq.php
is this not what happened with blender?
Gekido's Lair
of the world is going to.
Sometime in the not-so-distant future a very large portion of the population will be spending much of their lives in virtual simulations, and we're not talking World of Warcraft here either, think of almost Matrix-esque experiences.
Society is changing, and it really isn't your perogative to lay judgement onto those who wish to spend their time differently than you do or believe it should be spent.
Besides, this isn't the only outlet for this type of behavior.
All your base are belong to Google.
I tried it for a few days, and when it came to crafting it was quite ok. However, combat wasn't much to write home about. The graphics? I'd say it is better than WoW, although I've barely tried WoW. It kinda had a 3DMark03 Nature look to it if you didn't have to turn all of the goodies off to make it work with some ancient card. People have been bitching about the PnC quite a bit in the beta forums, but in their defence, they had the best pathfinding I've yet seen in a mmorpg. Kinda turned me off WoW when some monster I tried to take out with a ranged weapon just "jumped" over some unwalkable terrain. I do kinda like the world having an impact on how comabt works, if not I can just go back and play my old MUD. I suspect problems with the servers are one of the main reason for canceling the project. They usually crashed after 3-4h at the most, although this seemed to improve towards the end. But whenever they went down it took them 45 minutes to get it up again. Probably figured it'd take to long to make it into a stable 50k player thing they wanted it to be. Now I got to look for something else I guess. WoW with their regional servers won't do it for me as I want to play with friends I got on various continents. Its a bitch when people can't stick to one continent as they used to, eh? I mean, what stupid føkk made the internet borderless in the first place!? Guild Wars? Darkfall?
You're not going to get performance out of freenet.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
Read http://eve-online.com/ properly and you will see it's actually broken through 12k users: "Sunday, November 28th at 20:40:00, EVE Online broke the 12,000 simultaneous user barrier when 12.258 players were on at the same time. This record comes at the heels of EVE's latest expansion - EXODUS."
I think the real reason why MMORPGs are starting to fail is only partly because of the points you make. True, the market is limited, but only because the games are. MMORPGs right now take a crack addict like addiction in order to play. They all reward people for spending hundreds of hours on these games per month. There is a fanatical core that will happily pay such games. There is a much larger core of gamers (like myself) that have a pile of money from work to throw around but not that amount of time. I would love to get my fantasy kicks in a massive multiplayer world, but I sure as shit am not going to spend a few hundred hours doing it. Only unemployed, people in school, single people, and soon to be single people have that kind of time to throw around. I don't have a problem shelling out $25 a month for a game I enjoy as that is pocket change, but I do have a problem throwing away hundreds of hours.
MMORPGs simply have failed miserably to be accessible to gamers with jobs and wives. Massive multiplayer worlds and gamers on a limited time budget are not mutually exclusive, but you wouldn't know that from the MMORPGs out there. Until MMORPGs get their shit together and open up to a larger audience they are going to continue to have many miserable failure simply do the small audience which they can appeal to. When I can fire up UT2004 or CS: Source and be death incarnate few hours, why in the hell would I fire up an MMORPG where the best I can do is whack rats for hours on end?
Sure, I might suffer at the hands of some punk who spends every waking moment playing Counter Strike on occasion, but the fact that I AM a gamer means that I generally suffer very little, very rarely, and no matter how good he is I can always get lucky and pop a bullet between his eyes. In an MMORPG, because I don't throw my entire life away in the game I will never ever be able to compete. A level 1 character will never ever beat a level 50 character, even if that level 50 character walks away from the computer for an hour to have dinner. If you think that type of game play is even a little bit appealing to someone with a limited time budget - well, don't be surprised when more redundant time sink MMORPGs get canned due to a lack of an audience. Lots of people want to be apart of a vibrant massive multiplayer world. The problem is that most of those people also have lives that they need to take care as well.
This is really sad.. considering I had a great time in the Wish beta (although short), i was eagerly awaiting its launch AND i was ready to cancell EQ2 and WoW to play this game, because it was THAT MUCH better than them.
Here are some images from a great encounter, with 500+ enemies being killed...
http://ecstatica.mine.nu/3pics/wish/Threnallis/
Shortshort story related to pictures: enemy had taken over a friendly city, a brave party of 15 adventurers decide to help out.. but first we have to cross enemy territory,.. only 4 of us get there in the end.. we meet up with others and finally win the day...
// instant - "I for one welcome our new Decaff Coffee-Flavoured-Coffee Overlords"
I thought it was Tcl/TK graphical shell: wish. Now that would be a shame, not some stupid useless game...
I don't feel like it...
How many fantasy games do we need anyway? Why are they all middle earth knockoffs? City of Heroes success is is weighted on the fact that it's not swords and sorcery. Tons of people tried Anarchy Online because of the cool cyberpunk world. Perhaps if Wish had tried something besides being Everquest Junior they could have done something?
This was not a game as much as a tech demo. And the technology wasn't that compelling to begin with. There is no outcry against the "shard/server" system in MMO's. There are no throngs of people pleading for a point and click movement interface.
Yes, there are many popular games running on this site.
To begin with, there's the "First Post" game. Wait for new stories, and try to get a first post. Especially ACs like to play this game.
Next, there's the Karma Whoring game. Try to get cheap Karma through postings which almost predictably get modded up without taking too much effort from your side (a good way is using Google to find some relevant link, and post that).
And of course, there is the "Obligatory" game: Find some way to integrate a standard phrase (like "In Soviet Russia, Slashdot plays YOU.") into the discussion as seamless as possible.
A variation which works only on polls is the "Missing Option" game: Can you find any option "missing" from a poll? Of course there are various levels: Adding a missing option to "Favourite drink" is easy. Adding a missing option to a yes-no question is harder, especially if it shall be a funny one.
Any game I forgot?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
Another article that fails to spend six words to explain what Wish actually is. Way to go, editors^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hclickmonkeys.
I got accepted into the beta on Wednesday, downloaded the files and found the login server down... with no notes on the forums with updated status. Every time I did succeed in getting logged to the tutorial server, I was quickly dropped with an error that indicated that the server was no longer responding. Finally, on Friday night I succeeded in getting two hours of gameplay.
/con a mob. If I [examined] one, there was no indication of its hostility... which I found out was not an indication of [indifference] when a horde of scorpions attacked me.
I considered the gameplay to be frustrating;
[1] To me it appeared that they inverted mouse button functionality. Right clicking was used for movement and for the pull down menu on mobs. Unfortunately, everytime I tried to right click on a mob, it moved and I ended up clicking on the ground and moving to that location. I simply had a problem breaking my habits on mouse utilization.
Note: I've played other point-and-click movement games, such as Neverwinter Nights, without that problem.
[2] Quests were typical, but frustrating. Most of the ones I took started with harvesting minerals. Only, everthing had a "white" label, which I found, by asking in game, meant resource exhausted. I simply could not find any resources in the newbie area that were not completely exhausted.
[3] Combat was simple, but I never did figure how to
All in all, after about two hours of game play, I was still trying to learn how to play. That is too long for a normal person and unacceptable for someone who has played multiple online games and participated in multiple betas. . .
For every problem there is a solution that is simple, obvious and wrong.
1.7 - How secure is Wish's funding? Will it definitely release? The Wish project is heavily funded by a private investor group, which allows the product to be complete before launching. We will not rush out an incomplete title.
Is it possible that this "Private Investor Group" killed it's funding causing it to go under? It was looking good for the ten minutes of time I got to test it.
Empathetic-- 94% You tend to walk in someone else's shoes a hundred miles before pointing a finger.
I'm not saying to release it right away. There might be a change of mind, a new investor or partners, etc. Eventually when it's just rusting but not yet lost and buried. I worked a project for a prototype hot 68000 arcade system in 1984. I'd hoped that we would do some networked FPS (first person sword&spell) games with it. The coin-op market slumped then, and the project was abandoned with just the single prototype, and all the bits gradually faded away. I might have the bits of code and editors somewhere, my notes, and maybe some of the sample dungeon grpahics, but it's all dark history now and who cares?
At least two of our games (for crummy hardware, not the prototype) still exist on MAME because one of the team later released copies of the roms. (I know it was you Bruno!) If nothing else, release old dead code for a place in history and old fart bragging rights. :)
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.