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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.