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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."
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).
I don't know the inside details, but they opened up their beta test to something like 10,000 people on January 1st while promising 58,000 more that they would get in as the week progressed.
Eight days later the project is cancelled.
Sounds like somebody got their first bandwidth bill.
In the gaming world today almost nobody actually owns the code they work with so pipe dreams like GPLing failed projects just won't happen. The $100,000 that you paid to license somebody else's middleware only give you the right to use it for a year, not to give away the source code for free. Ripping out all the proprietary, licensed bits means a lot of hard work for absolutely no return on the investment.
The people who pay for this kind of development really hate footing the bill for that kind of thing.
That has the added bonus of being able to be played over SSH from any Internet connection with Mindterm Java SSH client. Addiction galore, for the weak minded at least (I play it once every few days, but no more).
I was just going to post the same. There's more to a game than graphics, but decent graphics is pretty much a requirement today to attract the large masses of gamers, which is probably required to fund a MMORPG as well. With screenshots as abysmal as this , it being a beta is not really an excuse. These screenshots are for example from Guild Wars, which had a beta weekend event end today.
Come on, it's a game for 2005...
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
so context is dead.
I have freaks! I did something right...
Don't forget, it is also on PocketPC, so you can play it 24 hours a day, whereever you are.
And just down a potion of sleep if you get a bit tired.
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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.
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.
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
1.3 - What is the "Wish Engine"?
The Wish Engine is the software that powers the ultra-massive world of Wish. It is based on ZeroC's Ice technology. Mutable Realms licenses this engine to other online games. Sui Tang Online, developed by Shanghai Cartoon and Shanghai Animation Studio is the first title besides Wish that also uses the Wish Engine. See our press release for more details.
Income from licensing the engine would be a pretty good reason to not give it away, hmm?