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."

Comments

Themis and Mutable Realms

[Bruha]

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).

Re:Releasing code?

[Minwee]

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.

"Ultra"-MMORPG

[LakeSolon]

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.

Already has one in progress..

[Svartalf]

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.