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

Perhapps a good thing

[PktLoss]

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 :).

Re:Perhapps a good thing

[bob65]

Um - if this is really true, then I think you have much bigger problems than World of Warcraft. There are lots of other things you can get addicted to in this world - you can't avoid all of them forever. Sooner or later, the same situation will occur again, but maybe with a different subject other than a MMORPG. Personally I'd go see a psychiatrist or something.

Re:Perhapps a good thing

[Boronx]

Huh, my four year old son has learned the alphabet (except c and v and other unused chracters) from playing nethack, as well as the vi movement keys because he plays on a laptop.

It's interesting that he can get four or five levels into the game with out even knowing that there's any combat going on.

Well

[FiReaNGeL]

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..."

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

"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 by offering the most immersive online experience possible, not by being the cheapest. Furthermore, to support our "Live Story Content", we have to support a full-time staff of Game Masters, whose singular purpose is to entertain the players."

I'm sorry but anybody that takes that attitude is just sending their company down the tubes. To compete with WoW and Evercrack 2 you need to be at least on par with their fees and ideally less. It's going to be hard since they can both afford to operate at a loss for a short period of time.

Re:Well

[MiceHead]

...to compete with WoW and Evercrack 2 you need to be at least on par with their fees and ideally less.

Underpricing is more important for commodities and less so for something like an MMORPG. I don't think that (say) a game with a monthly fee of $5 less than WoW's would entice anyone to switch to them. There's also the matter of perception-of-quality -- I would guess that most people, upon seeing a $4.95/mo MMORPG would turn their noses up at it.

Conversely, if there are gameplay elements that make the game worth $14.95, consumers would probably be willing to pay a few dollars more.

There are, of course, limits to this. If you're going to charge $50/mo for a subscription, you'd better either a) provide something pretty amazing, or b) disassociate the subscription fee from actual money. (Ever been to Dave and Buster's? When you walk in, you buy credits, then use arbitrary numbers of credits to play games. They disassociate the cost of playing a game from actual money. So, while you're probably paying $2.50 for a game, it doesn't feel that way.)

As a corrolary to this, in the early '90s, I used to work for a company that charged $6.95 an hour to play its online game, (with a $3/hr connection surcharge). This was pretty standard. We had a few flatrate customers who paid a whopping $1,000/month for unlimited access. Yeeaaaugh!

As a result $14.95 never seemed so bad to me.
__________________________________________
Inago Rage - Our first-person shooter

Re:Well

[Cecil]

Uh, hate to break it to you, but those trees are much better than anything you'll see in World of Warcraft. In fact, most of the graphics in World of Warcraft wouldn't be any good at all if they hadn't slapped a slick-looking specular highlight shader onto most of the textures. That's basically the only difference graphically between WoW and Wish, and it's why Wish graphics look so flat in comparison.

WoW is blowing away everything else because the gameplay kicks fucking ass, not because of its graphics.

Re:Well

[Miriwen]

As a member of one of the betas (though, I will give it that it was a moderately early beta), I can say that there really wasn't much in the game at all. The skill system worked as WoW's, with skills going up as you used them, but it worked differently in that you had to constantly use the skills or they'd start going down. Character movement was all point-and-click using pathing to determine how to get where you were going. Bad pathing too, as it would get stuck constantly if there was anything to get stuck on (again, this *was* an early beta). The graphics were alright if you zoomed in really close, but usually you were looking at the world from far out, with everything looking very small and bland. Worse, the camera was difficult to manipulate, and near-impossible when inside buildings. Character design was lackluster, and classes fairly nonexistant. Really, absolutely nothing in the game was very good. Personally, I'm surprised they didn't cancel it long ago.

Why do the assets always go to waste?

[MiceHead]

I'd like to see more instances where the teams of cancelled projects either release their assets into the public domain or license them via a system like Turbosquid. This may not be appropriate for all projects -- for example, in many instances, there is no single owner of all of a game's IP -- but I've seen too many cases where gorgeous art assets, (take a look at Wish's, for example) go essentially wasted.

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?

Around July, Crack first missed payroll. August came and we moved out of the office. September offered no new news, so we decided to call it quits. Rather than letting all that hard work sit around and rot, we released it to the public domain.

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.

Perhaps you should elaborate.

[jpardey]

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.

Re:Themis and Mutable Realms

[Bruha]

Of the clients that I know themis to be involved with currently only one is succeeding and questionably so. The facts are that Themis is a advisor to some of these garage mmo's and in 2 years time one has shut down and 2 have gone belly up either in development or shortly after launch. This is not bashing this is facts.

If mutable realms was a public company they would be in trouble for all the glowing announcements since the new year with "#1 download on FilePlanet", "68,000 Registered beta testers", and various other statements that considering what just happened is probably all a lie. The year 2000 is over and I bet whatever poor bastard dumped their money into that game is regretting it today.

Themis too. They just saw another revenue stream go up in smoke.

Re:Was anyone involved in the beta? Excited about

[laiquendi]

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.

Nucleus of a good idea

[earthforce_1]

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.

2005 Vaporware Awards

[rasty]

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...

Re:Their called assets...

[Jeremi]

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.

That's a fair point. If people really want to see the code open-sourced, why not have everyone contribute to a pool of cash and offer to buy the code from them? If their "orphaned" code is really so difficult to to re-sell, they might be willing to part with it for relatively little money.

wish

[Flunitrazepam]

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..

Re:Already has one in progress..

[QuantumG]

Planeshift wont be doing that. They don't even permit players to share the artwork with each other let alone writing a distributed peer-to-peer network into their client. This was one of the many ideas I had for Planeshift which was shot down when I suggested I was interested in working on it. Unlike other open source projects Planeshift demands that their contributors only work on the things that the Planeshift team finds relevant to their specific vision. If you want to contribute something which they're not interested in they won't accept it, even if it could be useful to someone else who is thinking of using their engine. This, and them now demanding copyright assignment from all contributors, code and art, is the reason I'm no longer contributing to Planeshift.

For people who want to make these kinds of additions to Planeshift I'd suggest moving to a distributed form of revision control. I'd like to recommend GNU Arch but it's still not up for the task. This kind of control over developers is exactly the reason why the Linux developers don't use CVS. Those who control the centralized server, control the project. Linux developers now use bitkeeper, and I'm not aware of any other revision control system that is up for the task. Hopefully GNU arch will improve or some other open source revision control system will actually start letting people know they are available.

Re:Releasing code?

[Midnight Warrior]

If the vendor had planned it, from the outset, to be able to live past their ability or desire to support the product, then perhaps the world could live on. Per my Virtual World Bylaws page, this is one of the primary rules which must be followed if an author's dream world is to be realized. I don't propose a solution, only that without solving this fundamental, doom is certain. The additional point above is well made by mentioning that the graphics engine is a big deal.

1. The world must be able to exist when the vendor loses interest and shuts down the hardware.

Peer-to-peer networking is an excellent example of letting a good thing keep running even when somebody wants it to come down. The same resiliency should be applied to virtual worlds. Distribute the servers that manage the virtual areas or worlds and localized hardware problems only mean a degredation in service.

Likewise, folks who are open with their underlying engine will find their technology replicated so that the world continues without them. Find a balance with openness and intellectual property or risk having your worlds be meaningless six months after creation. Note the difference between a graphics engine and an object interaction/scene description engine.

Vendors around the world will testify that customer service is the hardest part of MMOGs. No vendor wants to keep a customer support team paid and trained for 300 total players. If the technology is open, then those 300 players can play when they want and they will be expert enough to keep it running.

But what about artwork and the licensing that goes with it? Yes, that is a troubling sticky point. So what I recommend is that at the moment the vendor decides it's time to abandon, they exercise a clause they signed with all the graphic artists that says all royalty payments stop when the support section for that world closes. The artwork should then be released under something like the Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/). This ties the company's profit line to the royalty distribution, if one exists at all, and as long as the venture is profitable to someone, the artists involved should be compensated.

Re:Themis and Mutable Realms

[Anonymous Coward]

Themis [..] is involved with a failing or failed business [..] Jumpgate

I don't know about the others, but Jumpgate - a four year old game - is still very much alive and you can play it right now if you want to. They still have a hardcore group of regular players - and the game is still actively maintained with occasional new content and bug fixes. This is not my definition of a failure.

The company isn't failing either - the creators of Jumpgate, NetDevil, are now working with NC Soft on Auto Assault, a MMO car combat game.

Re:Was anyone involved in the beta? Excited about

[sakshale]

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.

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 /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.

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. . .