How Not To Make An MMOG

garylian writes "Some of the folks here might remember a Massive game called 'Mourning' that went into development and never really went anywhere. Apparently, it went Gold, but it wasn't even close to complete. Some former fans have a riviting Q/A with one of the former programmers. Highlights from the article include the fact that one of the game backers was a internet porn-lord!" From the article:"The game was going nowhere, no one really believed in its success. We all knew it was going to fail, but we were kind of reluctant in admiting it. Those who realized this and had better opportunities, left. Those who were blinded by different reasons or had no other choices, remained till the end (or maybe had different reasons.) It's not that we didn't try to change this direction the game was heading to... We did, but no one was listening to us. " The interview is well conducted, but you should obviously take this with a grain of salt.

Comments

Re:Hmm

[nacturation]

I got the same impression. Also, consider this question:

Q: OK, well let's talk about the man behind the money. Who is David Jasinski and what was his role in the development of RoT?

You'll notice this is the first mention of the names David or Jasinski in the entire interview. Either it's an extremely well-prepared interviewer, a case of two former employees interviewing each other, or one former employee interviewing himself. After this, the interviewer starts calling him "Dave" which indicates a level of familiarity.

I looked for a bit of background and it's in plain sight on the homepage:

Friday, December 9th, 2005: Spoonbender recieved an email from one of the former developers of Mourning a few months ago asking what had happened to the game. At that point the game had been taken offline and the forums were down. Spoon sent off an email detailing his experience with the developers and with the game itself, and the former developer replied with a few stories of his own. Spoon forwarded the email to Shintuk, Shintuk to Jdodger, and JD showed it to me. JD then conducted an interview with the former developer. His insights and personal stories about the behind-the-scenes events during his time working on the project constitute the best and most accurate picture we have of who was to blame for the mismanagement that Mourning suffers from. He will talk at length about Ado's 'unconventional' game designing style, Ego's tragic inability to grasp the true problems until it was too late, and even individual incidents with the development team that illustrate both the potential Mourning had and how that potential was, with almost criminal negligence, squandered.

I feel that it is nessecary that those that followed Mourning and devoted time and money to its success see where their time and money went. In short, they should know the truth.

You can read the interview and draw your own conclusions.

So that provides some background. Rebuttal from "Adonys" can be found here.

The whole things reminds me of Battlecruiser.

No need for grain of salt, he's right

[Ka D'Argo]

Go read some of the stuff on mmorpg.com (mainly the forums). There was like a hundred page thread where players who had been with the game since beta, explained some of the stuff this game went through...

From never recieving pre ordered copies of the game, to the game shipping on just run of the mill blank cd-r's, the game was plaqued with horrendus management.

Go try to read the official Mourning forums. Notice how they only go back to a certain date? They've deleted their forum database more than once. Not just a typical pruning but completely cleaned it cause so many of the fans, players, and even development team staff & moderators spoke out aganist it.

Imagine if one day a huge portion of say, SOE's player base (for any game, just as an example) spoke out aganist a huge list of problems, failures and broken promises. In this huge group of people is several key people in your production team, a good portion of your long time forum and community moderators, and even some of your own sponsors. Now imagine SOE just basically giving all those people a big middle finger, deleting the forums, and then rule over the "new" forums with an iron nazi fist (quite literally, meaning NO negative opinions). If you can piture all that, that is exactly what it was like for the Mourning players.

Link for ya

[Ka D'Argo]

Found it

http://www.mmorpg.com/discussion.cfm/load/forums/l oadforum/51/loadthread/37720/setstart/1/loadclass/ 35

love the screen shot of the official GOLD game just being spindles after spindles of cd-rw's (note they DID ship just run of the mill burnt cd rw's in a small box with no artwork, as the official game....)

Re:Summary of Interview

[kamapuaa]

I heard of it, because Something awful posted a short paragraphstating that it sounded really generic, and Mourning responded with legal threats. Pretty cool! I wonder if Slashdot will get a C&D in the mail?