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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
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...
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.
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...
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.
We decided that we would focus our efforts on getting our characters up to level 60 in WoW
so context is dead.
I have freaks! I did something right...
...you can't cancel a wish!
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.
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
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.
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
And I thought they were cancelling Tcl/Tk. *whew*
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.