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 :).

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

[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.

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.

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.

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.