f13.net

http://www.mutablerealms.com/

Dear friends of Wish:

Unfortunately we have bad news.

After careful consideration of all the facts and analyzing all the data which we have gathered from the Wish Beta 2.0 test so far, we have decided to cancel the Wish project.

Our Beta test will end this evening at 6pm EST, and at this time our Beta forums will close as well.

We enjoyed working together with our fans very much, and we are very sorry about this development. We wish you the best of luck in the future, and hope that you continue to enjoy online gaming, even with Mutable Realms and Wish not being available anymore.

We also wish the best luck to our competitors, and hope that they will not suffer the same fate as us.

Best regards,
Your Mutable Realms Team

OMFG that's hilarious.

Yeah for April Fools!

Oh wait.. they're serious. It isn't April.

They wasted all this time and money to end it now?

I think the Beta 2.0 was to see what kind of interest there was in the game. Methinks that they looked at the timeline to "complete" the game and read some feedback from testers and decided it just wasn't feasible or worth it. After all, why release and then run a production house in the manner of Horizons. It's no fun to sit at bankruptcy's door all the time.

This is too funny, actually have a morbid curiousity to see the final beta of it now :)

If they had balls they'd release all the stuff they'd done open source. But they don't. Where's Dave Rickey when you have questions that need answers.

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..

He hasn't been with the project for almost a year, so it's doubtful he could answer much if he wanted to.

MMOs aren't easy things to bring to market. Considering that this announcement probably also means a good dozen or so people are now unemployed, you might want to temper the HAW HAW noises.

I'm not terribly surprised by this... I was a tester since very early in alpha.  Even at that time it seemed obvious to me that the game was little more than window dressing for middleware that they had hoped to sell to others developing mmogs (in fairness, I should two other people credit for this thought).  Wish was all about the technology of large population single server games.  I wonder if they had hoped that Wish could be used to demonstrate their technology and sell it as a platform to others in China and Korea.  

The problem: In the US, people appear to want multiple servers and instancing in their mmog. The market seems to be shifting toward small group and/or single player games enjoyed online with others.  The success of WoW and CoH may have shown this better than anyone.   Ok, the fact that the games are fun also helps.

On a side note, I had the most hope for this title when Dave Rickey was with the project.  When Dave left, so did those hopes.  I actually stopped active testing quite some time ago due to both the direction the game was taking and the rabidity of the blind tester base.  To their credit, MR was a pleasure to test for.  They were professional, responsive, and seemed interested in what testers had to say. I hope the best for all of those that were involved in with the Wish project... they all seemed like good folks from my testing perspective.

Dave left the first week of January 04.

I still remember precisely every single day and every single post on their forums till the first week of February. I remember Kagara, Xavori, Nebu, Hyrrix, Apathian and Dispressa who was supposed to lead the Team Katana after Lepidus got "hired". I still remember the devs flaming me.

*waves at Nebu*

It's funny. I don't like most MMOs, but I had fun playing Wish.

It'll be interesting to see what their reasoning was behind closing it all down.  Granted it was an incredibly unfinished state and a lot of things flat out sucked about it, but I'd buy and play Wish long before WoW, EQ2, or the current version of UO.

It seems to have gotten a pretty bad reputation around here, and I ended up defending it to most people I knew who tried out the beta.

Oh well. I guess I'll have to figure out exactly why after a while.

As for now, Lum's exactly right. The amount of background laughter I can hear over this is wholly inappropriate. Not only are people out of jobs, but something they put their life into for a very long time has unceremoniously been buried and never really saw the light of day. Not really something to laugh at.

Please expand upon this. I'm not entirely sure what made it fun vs. anything else ever on the market. Assuming you're talking about the new beta, I still don't understand. Wish was rather doomed from the start when they said every single person would be on one server. And then the goats came. Then they went away, and now the game is disappearing. I wish I knew what you saw in it (pun unintended).

Edit: To add - should they have had jobs in the first place? I'm not sure I get the pity at the end of your post. I'm not one to laugh and throw a party about people losing their jobs, but whether they worked hard or not is irrelevant. Their product had no market interest. It's surprising it made it this far.

Maybe my Wish shirt will be worth some thing on ebay in 10 years from now. Its not like I plan to ever wear it or anything.

Should have stuck with the goats.


(http://forums.f13.net/images/avatars/48153870241df10ade8ca2.gif)

Ummm. WTF is that???

I "wish" I could say this is a surprise. Probably for the best, all things considered.

Don't mean to be rude, but do I know you?

He's HRose.

When I played Wish last E3 it seemed nondescript.   You guys who were in the beta:  was there anything obviously wrong with it that suggested this cancellation?   Did it have anything especially interesting or fun?

In all honesty - it was a terrible game. There's no other way to slice it. While I'm tempted to feel sorry for the developers, I feel much sorrier for the investors who bankrolled a game with what seems like incomplete design docs and absolutely zero aim other than packing bodies into it like a theater with 40 screens.

I'm not going to comment on this much, I've been gone from there a year, and some friends of mine are now out of work.  But I wanted to let schild know that Wish had only one investor, as far as I know.  The goals and procedures for Wish were what he wanted them to be.

--Dave

Suggested alternate thread title:

"Oops, we really ARE vaporware!"

First of all, hello, registered to comment on this thread.
As I read, some of those commenting have tried wish in some stage of beta, but only one(?), correct me if i'm wrong, tried the 2.0, the one who was willing to pay for it.
Must say i'm with him, frustrated that now i must go and be part of the WoW (aka diablo2-in-warcraft-skin-made-to-mmo)
Wish was fun and their live content also was very pleasing, we had our little town of Windok, many times we defended it against raids from different mobs led by dev's, helped the fellow towns and kept looking for some big bad monster Utec.
Also had the willage work together for crafting machines for the town and such.. it was fun.

For those who decide over very early stage of beta or alpha, its just sad to read your so not adequate posts, when you are nowhere near to "mr. current news", you shouldnt make too big words and laugh about some old development stages.

some screenies off the last minutes of wish beta:
www.zone.ee/xmpics/wish

And yet we see games like Horizons, WWIIOL, Swedens national shame AKA Project Entropia, Asheron's Call 2 etc. comming out, hell even surviving for the most part.

Just as a little clarification, I believe several of the people who commented in this thread have played the beta 2.0, not just one person. Now, you must forgive us for having only had the opportunity to play for a week as the game was cancelled. Jackass.


On another note, the game looked decent and ran pretty well for me, but I found it to be rather bland. This may be because they were following the older MMOG paradigm of lengthy gameplay, which is fine but just is not for me. I didn't have the chance to catch any events during beta 2.0, but I wasn't on the game 24/7 either nor would I ever be so I'm wondering just how many events an average player would have had the opportunity to see, especially once the game was live. Live events are a great idea, but somehow end up not working. I know, Wish was aiming for everyone on one server and localized events to ensure that the events happened, but there was talk about having to do more servers should the population of one get near that 10k user mark. Anyhow, I suppose this is all neither here nor there. The game lacked something for me.

I played beta 2 and thought it was worse than beta 1. I'm not surprised at all. There was no game here. Far better off to terminate it now than to do a Horizons.

Numtini's right.  Cancelling Wish was the smart thing to do.  They might have limped along with a few thousand subscribers for a while, but it would never have made any money for the investor(s).  Better to kill it now and retain some integrity.

I hear MR has licensed the Wish engine to some company in China(?).  Perhaps that was the goal all along...

I tested early on and briefly tested beta 2.0, also.  I agree... somehow it got worse.  Back during my first stint, with the goats and berries, I thought it might be a decent game someday.  They certainly came up with some nice ideas for the game.  How odd that they suddenly shut the doors like this... though I seem to be the only one suprised.  

I don't know if these games being terminated is a good omen or a bad omen.  It's bad if they shut down because they are finding they can't complete with the biggies... that just means less choice for the punters.
It's good if they're stopping because they realise they're about to release a piece of shit.  I commend them if that's the case.

just to clarify what made the game so much fun, despite the obvious bugs and problems :

ever seen a MMORPG in which, because a player failed to deliever enough plants to a NPC, all other NPCs slowly began to get sick, upon which, a shady character (Vinnian) appears on the scene, and asks to be delivered money and a female NPC (called Monyka) from a rival Society in exchange for the cure to the plague. Enters Lady Monyka, walking toward her doom in Lokshire. Players, who have been searching far and lo through Ganedan escort her and her guard, but are ambushed by skeletons, upon which the guard sadly dies. At her arrival in Lokshire, where the exchange was to take place, a small army of players have gathered, and awaits the arrival on Vinnian, while discussing how to keep Monyka alive, get the cure and get rid of Vinnian at the same time .. all this being roleplayed. Sadly, Vinnian's messenger gets killed on the way by a player, so Monyka discloses the location of Vinnian's lair, and people rush there.

In the end we got the cure, but Monyka died under mysterious circumstances, as I found out the day after in the Newspaper.

I saw some of it myself, some I read in the newspaper.

Now tell me of a MMORPG in which something like this can be experienced on a regular basis?
Moments before Marc Laukien's post about Wish's demise appeared on the fourm, many players were already  deep into other Live Content threads, as it didn't need GM's to be present all the time.

(sorry if I cut short, but I just lost a lot of the post somehow and I'm writing this for the second time)

The death of Wish left me feeling empty. I browsed through the available MMORPGs yesterday, but none seemed to be able to stand up to the standard Wish set for me. Yes .. i'm spoiled. And from what I gathered on irc.sorcery.net (#wish), it's the case with many of the former Wish testers. Nothing out there is good enough to replace Wish, even in the beta state it was.

bbye,
Fuinelen

Well, so much for an honest to god system of rogue skills.  I've been dying to play a real thief (ie, no combat skills) for ages.  Looking at McFly's page again when the news about IPY went out just made things worse.

There is still a huge gap in the mmo market.  Some of us out here aren't going to whack-a-pig for a few hours a day to the tune of $15 a month.  

Now, $15 a month to pick the pockets of my fellow players followed up by an intense session of running like a girl before they can beat me to a pulp?  
That I would pay for.  

I just hope time and circumstances will align to bring a concept like Wish to market.  The subscribers are out here waiting.


PS, please don't bring up Shadowbane.  I swore that the third time I cancelled would be the last.

schild, I think you're being unfair. I didn't play it before 1.5 so I can't compare to anything prior to that. Now, 1.5 wasn't very impressive. What kept me in the game was the impression I got of the devs and the promise the game showed. It was like any other unfinished mmorpg - boring after you explore the basics.

Beta 2.0 was entirely different. It started out similar with more players, but then something happened. Live content. I spent as much time ingame as I could, so I caught the rumors fast and got to participate in many of the storyline skirmishes and follow the ongoing investigations. It was great. I've never done anything like it. In just a few days, I was addicted. If wish was released today, I would play it, despite of the unfinished state of the game and server. Why? It was fun! It was great, great fun. And I'm really sad it ended. You might call me naive, but I've grinded and quested and crafted and pvped in various other mmorpgs, and none of them provided the same excitement as wish did. We saved cities from attacking armies of monsters and assassinated evil warlords - now, this is nothing new in itself, but what's new is that nobody told us what to do, we had to investigate the rumors we heard and discuss possible solutions to the problems presented. And when a problem was solved, we knew there were concequences. We knew we were the ones who saved the day. We hoped to have our names in the newspaper for our heroic acts.

I'm still sad about this cancellation. It looked like the answer to my dreams - to all our dreams - but apparently it was too good to be true.

this was a GREAT game, AWESOME even, this spanked EQ2, L2 and all the those games right on the butt ! this was finally an MMORPG in 3d which you could finally do something more then just slaying some silly lookin monsters, it had a story... IT EVEN HAD THE PLAGUE ! damn this is a shame that its canceld.... i loved the game !
ah well too bad its canceld...

RIP Grumpy The Pony... =/

Well, it appears as though the fanbois have arrived. It may have seemed like the answer to all your dreams (I hope you have better dreams and higher aspirations than an MMOG though), but we'll never know.

As to Live Content: see AC1, AC2, Saga of Ryzom and to a mild extent Horizons. Eve also has a fair amount of "Live Content", but in-game it is mostly player driven while the developers run the news in-game and on the web site. But it is a PvP game, so player driven content is a given really.

Hey the fanbois at least registered here to defend it's honor. That's gotta count for something, right? RIGHT?

PS - I never played the game because...well because it wasn't even on my radar frankly.

I don't want your flames, I'm trying to provide insight.

I've tried eve, and no way is it anywhere near the same experience as wish was.

Haven't tried the other ones you speak of. Heard AC was good, haven't dared trying the others. I suspect word would have spread if they had the same focus on live content as wish had.

When the Wish development team decided, in between beta phases, to overhaul the entire game I knew it was over. Marc had stated on the beta boards that they were postponing the next beta phase because the game was "like a shuttle in pieces on the assembly floor" to which I replied "I'd hate to be an astronaut knowing it was a few months until launch." In fact, I even posted on the boards the message I expected from them soon, declaring the end of the Wish development process. Obviously, it wasn't well received by the rabid fanbois, but some of the people saw the glimmer of wisdom in my abrasive sarcasm. My first instinct was to see if the boards were up and dig my thread up for a "I told you so." :p

Wish was a few good ideas that were ruined by poor technical implementation and a staff that wore blinders to every criticism. They were over-confident, under-experienced, and unwilling to compromise on the details that could have saved them. I've had a baaad feeling about Mutable Realms for a while now.. I say it's about time.

And I don't want your "insight". I played the beta 2.0 phase as well and I did not get to experience the Live Content that you so readily boast of. Is it because I didn't play the game 24/7? Or is there another reason? Either way, it matters not now. I've beta tested over 32 online games since 1995 and I have played every MMOG I mentioned (as a matter of fact, I've played every MMOG released to date). When you have a greater knowledge base for comparison to draw upon, then perhaps you can give me some "insight", but until then, I've been there and done that, baby. I've seen beta tests where the Live Content was spectacular only to see it completely disappear in the release version of the game. Could Wish have kept it up? Who knows. AC1 did and they did a hell of a job of it. As a matter of fact, AC2 does a hell of a job of it, too, even though they have a very small playerbase. Wish did it in beta with a very small number of players. Could they have effectively done it with thousands of players? Doubt it. But again, we'll never know.

Having played Wish for some time, and watching it evolve. There were good things that it didn't do that it needed to. There were also good things that it did do that I'm not sure anyone else could.

They needed better help files for new players, it did get a little better w/ 2.0 but still was a learning for my friends. Contrary to popular belief they did not instantaneous travel, but they did need to make the stablemaster invulnerable.

It was faster and slower than other MMORPG's. This however was probably part of it's downfall because we, ignorant want it all *now*  americans, have to see this or that flying by. Flying by to tell us *Your Leveling*.

It needed alot of work, but unlike other beta's I was in, they did listen to viable ideas. I remember the E&B beta *shudder*. THe only people who would have been openly screwed when wish came out would have been the FFA PvP people, and they have SB already.

It's a pity it's gone. Most of my friends are, to say politely, very angry that it happened. Incidentally for the person who said smaller server and instance this and that. I've play EQ2, there is nothing more annoying that your friends being in queynos 7 and your in queynos 1. The thing that brought me to Wish, that was bringing our who guild of UO'ers and SWG'ers to Wish was the one world concept. Out of 55 people in our guild who got into the Wish Beta, only 5 utterly disliked it. 30 like it but the UI needed some reworking to be more "accessible" about 10-20 thought the chat  might need some work.  10-15 thought it was coming along perfectly other than the obvious boo-boos in the beta 2.

Out of 55 people in our guild, 3 liked EQ2, about 10 like SB, 1 likes COH, and 2 play WoW. The rest of us still play UO and / or SWG. Speaks volumes that only 5 would have stayed in SB vs playing Wish.

I'm the one that mentioned this above.

1. The EQ2 example is an implementation issue.  CoH does instances very well.  

2. A single server would be a daily battle for the overworked, understaffed CSR team.  Unless your company is willing to shell out the resources for sufficient CSR support, this is a logistics nightmare waiting to happen.  

3. People seem to want instancing.  Look at the subscription numbers for WoW, EQ2, CoH.  Also look at the latest expansion by Mythic.  Instancing seems to be the current business model.  If I were an investor, I'd consider the single server model to be a very risky move.

I played it, got bored, and moved on.  It didn't grip me like a good game should.

But apparently it gripped 5 people.  Maybe that's why they cancelled.

Now, can we please remove the HRose stink?

Look, if GM led custom events were the only major differentiaion between Wish and the host of other mmorpg's out there, if the live events were the only reason you considered thie title fun,  then it's better off to die early before they started charging people money.  There is no way they could have possible have enough live staff to keep even a modestly successful number of players entertained for any appreciable length of time.  For futher review go see EQ1's luxury server...

Why do you think dev's are trying so hard to come of with ways for players to be each others content, b/c you will never be able to generate enough new content to outpace even a small population's consumption of it.  AKA What works in a small closed beta doesn't always translate to mass numbers of people.  Scale matters.

Xilren

It looks like about half of them came here and registered accounts to talk about Wish...it is good to stay busy.

In all seriousness, having a project jerked out from underneath you has to suck. The upside is they now have the chance to hook up with something that  might hit the market someday.

No, it's not the customers that want this, it's the developers.  Being able to instance your world means that you have to build a LOT less content.  If you had one server instead of ten, you have to build 10x as much content in order to avoid congestion.  Know how most games have a central "open market" area, or "The Spawn Drop", etc?  They'd be choked full of people.

I'm a customer, I want it.  You are allowed to agree with people, Roac.  It's OK.

That's nice that you want it.  Individuals don't make the rule.  

For one thing, there are a lot of downsides to instancing and having multiple worlds; it makes it harder to play with your friends.  Instancing can make it easier to keep people who are not your friends out (which is often good), but it's not the only way and could be handled without that feature (though maybe not as easily).  

The other thing is that I don't think anyone really cares about instancing all that much.  I suspect based on the arguments for/against it that I've read, that people are championing/hating instancing based on the symptoms that it addresses, not because "WE HAVE INSTANCING!" is a marketing bullet that attracts people.

Yeah, my first post too.... So sue me :)

I'm neither going to applaud nor denigrate Wish here.

I just wanted to say that what I am still looking for in a game is one that can even begin to translate paper-and-pencil RPing into the online world. And in my style of RPing, it's not being an action game, nor a strategy game (at least primarily). It's being a part of an interactive and dynamic story, with a strong emphasis on "realistic" gameplay (well, in the sense that Sci-Fi and Fantasy can be "realistic").

Would Wish have filled that? Who knows? I was somewhat encouraged by the Live Content that I experienced.


The way it was cancelled just screams that someone pulled the funding plug. It's hard to see how it could have been directly related to things like PnC, or even Beta 2, given that it only had 10 days to run. About the only thing that made sense is that something trashed their business model, like their game engine being totally unable to scale past a few thousand. Given that there was already planned to be a beta 2.5 and 3, if not 4, seems to say that they had planned for a lot of further development, and had the funding in place for a few more months at least until this happened.

They crowed about the number of b2 applications, about 68k, so interest at this mid-beta phase seemed reasonable.

By the way, with respect to UMMOGs, Eve Online has had a max of 12k players online in a single universe, though it is statically zoned. They commonly run between 8-10k.

EDIT: I'll be nice.

Check out NWN and NWN persistent servers that some folks have set up. They're the closest to PnP RPGs thus far and they are online. No, they aren't massive, but you didn't list that as a qualifier.

Sage advice.



Is it possible to be a fanboi for a canceled game?


Again,
1. Work on Persistent Whack-a-Mole until the underlying technology is a commodity.
2. Once you have a well-understood client-server and virtual item management infrastructure, work on fun and exciting new social and economic systems.
3. Profit.

WoW, probably destined to be the flagship MMO, has a large development staff and a crapload of funding, and they can still barely get the item management code working.  How's a small development house going to outdo them on the low-level code and implement visionary economic and social systems in a reliable way?  People in this industry are still biting off way more than they can chew.

Don't worry, Fanbois!  You are not alone.  There is now a place for Wish refugees.  You can even help by contributing your hard earned money in the hopes that there will be enough to buy it and set it up for free!  Maybe it'll do as well as that other free game, Rubies of Eventide.  

Sign up today!! (http://s4.invisionfree.com/Wish_Refugees/)

Now that is the funniest/most pathetic thing I have read all day.

Jesus those people need a life. Like STAT.

Oh, sure... take my kind post to the sad, lonely, beta-less fanbois and use it to mock them.  You force me to join you because I am weak.

We have 16 new people on f13 today, alone.  I followed the link the last one to register provided in his profile and it took me  to a worrying place.  

http://www.goldshire.com/

We can sing along!

Styx quotes and now WoW Christmas carols.  

I can see that things are about to get ugly.

Now 17 new users just today.  Does this make anyone nervous?  Could they all be HRose?

Stop complaining. I'm mailing you a carton of cigarettes.

Meh, Haemish will probably eat at least five of them before dinner.

Could be SB infiltrating the board with 17 new handles.  

Think about it.  He could divert the focus of any given thread to himself without using the same name.  It's like referring to yourself in the third person, only the third person name is entirely different.  

I think we need a thread just for conspiracy theories.

No, we don't. This is getting ridiculous, haven't you all done anything interesting lately? Or is everyone waiting for RE4 tomorrow like I am? Suikoden IV comes out too. But it's ass.

Some of us new members are actually new members! While I admit I wound up on this page through a couple of link chains that started with WISH being cancelled, I did not even know what Wish was, much less care (other than in a business sense) that it was cancelled...caught the slash-dot (yes you've been slash-dotted, that's probably where all of the new members are coming from) link to here, and started reading.

Since there is some valid market feedback for MMOG's here, I decided to hang out and register, and see how the community works out.

Welcome :)

EDIT: I admit though, I have nothing more interesting to do atm, other than wait for Haemish to enter the thread. It's either that or work.

God have mercy with your soul ...

Heh...been around the block when it comes to jaded/aggro communities on the net, so not too much to worry about on that score...as long as there is at least some valid signal to all the noise, I'll probably hang tight!

I knew it was Shockeye's fault.  It just smacks of useless news.

you have at least one legitimate new registrant, someone who has played several MOGs and tends to say "meh" to them as a result.  i downloaded the Wish beta because someone sent me an email.  i played for ten minutes, mostly character creation, before finding that i was unable to gather wood for a floating female Silver Surfer.  about that time i realized that the Steam-like interface and ass-flavored graphics were going to cause premature baldness, so i removed it and apologized to my rig.

today i followed the /. link.

PS2 - Ghost Hunter
GC - Eternal Darkness
Xbox - Fatal Frame II: Director's Cut
PC: Riddick, Ut2k4, AvP2, Painkiller

For the half hour I managed to get into the beta this past week, it was wholly bland and uninteresting. Point and click movement just isn't fun, and probably should have been ripped out long ago. Combat was less interesting now than it was when I was first in alpha over a year ago. The interesting bit was that skill gain was use-based, and there were no classes. But the gameplay and world had devolved since I played the first alpha. I don't think I've ever seen a game so backwards in development.

The days of trying to squeeze a billion folks into the same server should be over. Throwing more people at rancid gameplay won't help it, it'll just make server achitecture more expensive.

EDIT: And to add more fuel to the fire, live content is hardly a selling point. No MMOG in history has ever provided enough live content to keep a player base happy. A small indy dev house from Alabama SURE isn't going to be able to do it. Live content in beta is easier to do than in the real thing. I imagine the investor saw all the server downages, as well as the amount of people it would take to pull live content off and shit a brick.

I do feel bad for the people who lost their jobs. I've been there and it sucks ass. But the game was not ready for prime time and showed no signs it would be in the future.

i agree and i don't know where this idea got started. does anyone ever interact with more than a handful of people at once?  i don't need thousands of other people surrounding me all at once, i need a fleshed-out game world and my crew.  i don't want to run into the same jackasses every session either, but that is accomplished with just a few thousand.  there is also something to be said for running into an old friend in a new area.

I'm confused,, I work at home and clicked on the wish client at various times of day and night. The majority of the times the client was down or when i did manage to log on (2:00 a.m. in the morning) it wasn't long before it went down again. How the heck did anyone mange to participate in live events? I wonder if my opinion would have changed if I had participated in one.

I liked the concept of One big world and all players interacting togethor in it.
  Instancing is a great asset, I still think AO has just the right amount of it, but  when I think MMORPG I think large communties and vast landscapes. Subconciously there's still that desire to enjoy a game so much I return that catass state I lived in the early days of UO. In other words if the content is fresh and intriguing I'lm willing to put in the hours to develop an avatar.
Segregating the population into small niches seems counterproductive or cheap way out of satisfying the Massive Multiplayer concept.

With all the damn vaporware cropping up in the last year or two I bet someone could combine the best components of all of them  into one decent game, heh.


Best of luck to all those involved in wish. I hope they all find work on new projects. Wiser for their experiences.

DAMNIT people! Sentences are started with a capital letter and end in a period. Haemish, where's the cartoon. We're in dire need here.

Allow me:

(http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2003/20030707l.jpg)

See also:

(http://www.penny-arcade.com/images/2002/20021011l.gif)

We gotta stop using that.

Ack! Didn't realize those were being linked from their site. I thought Haemish was storing it on his own webspace or summat.

If you're looking for interactive and dynamic stories, you're probably going to have to look at smaller MMOs. I'm not particularly familiar with the smaller graphical MMOS, but a lot of text MMOs that beat the pants off anything any of the graphical ones (big or small) can provide. The flexibility that text MMOs provide allow developers to do things like alter storylines based completely on what players are doing, and so on. One of our games is running a multiple-month story right now where we only planned the first month, preferring not to lock ourselves into a particular mindset regarding how the NPCs would react to what the players are doing. Issues that are a big deal in graphical games in terms of development resources simply aren't in a text game. Want an entirely new type of monster in our games for instance? Just write up the various descriptions, write a mobprog for it if needed, and define its attacks and attack style and you're done. Half an hour, at most, unless it's part of a quest or otherwise has more complicated mobprog logic.

And while our games are way more roleplaying and story intensive than the big ones, you'd find even more intense storytelling and roleplaying in the roleplaying-enforced games like Armageddon (armageddon.org) or Shadows of Isildur (middle-earth.us) .




And Kingdom of the Winds did this 5 years ago. Mutable Realms's claims were completely spurious.

--matt

Yes. We all realize the Kingdom of the Winds did it 5 years ago. It can be done. Eve has now done it in a fully 3D game universe and will continue to do it as their subscriber base grows. Has anyone hit 15000 so I can give proper credit once Eve hits that? The fact that Eve has obtained that in a 3D MMOG is quite impressive since others have tried and failed. I think that is the point, not who did it first.

It's not a matter of "can" anymore, it's a matter of "want to".

Even though on the surface it sounds cool as a marketing ploy, there just isn't that many reasons to want that many players on a single world, and several to not want it:

--content distribution: to have 15,000 players in a single world, you have to have somewhere to put them all, much less keep them busy

--performance: it's simply easier on the hardware (primarily the db server clusters) to parallel your critical performance paths instead of serialize them (and yes, I know that there are several mechanisms and schemas for optimizing that many users--but those are in business related db models that have been optimized over 20+ years in some cases, for very specific task structures. MMO databases don't have classes that teach any Joe Schmoe the umpteenth iteration of db structures and optimization for the tasks required)

--sociological research: there are quite a few sociological and anthropological studies that report the max "efficient" community size is somewhere between 200-350. After that, instead of a single community, it becomes a set of sub-communities. From a gameplay perspective, since most MMOG's that bother doing research are trying to enhance their "communities", they sometimes take things like this to heart.

--based on the relative success of MMOG's that use instancing in some form or another, less appears to be more to the current market, not the reverse. Players want their own little areas and worlds with only their friends, not tens of thousands of others (Personally, I think this is an artifact, not a true demographical observation of the MMOG market, but I seem to be in the minority on that).

You're right, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't drop everyone onto one server.  None of the games out now have player populations of 300 people.  It is, however, cause to design divisions into the game in terms of kingdoms, realms, guilds, cities, etc.

I happen to agree with you actually, but in all appearances, it seems that the current MMOG's don't--and seem to be working out pretty well so far in that decision. I think that if you are providing a "non-conflict" type of community building MMOG, then adherence to this type of population count is probably very important (anything bigger, and the sub-communities begin to form, and your "non-conflict" community quickly becomes a conflict based one, since as soon as you have more than one sub-community, they are by definition opposites in some form).

Now, in a conflict based MMOG, the separate sub-communities are critical to gameplay--at least if you want to actually have conflict. I would suggest that community conflict management is an important part of a successful conflict based MMOG, and that would certainly be easier with a smaller number of sub-communities, as opposed to literally hundreds or thousands of conflicting sub-communities in one geographical space.

In game terms:
well proportioned server:
--we're at war with X, Y, and truced with Z. A and B are allies. Anyone else is neutral.
ultra-massive server:
--we're at war with 713, 611, 123, 122, and 410-496. Our allies are anyone with odd middle digits, names starting with 'A', and anyone that is a truced, allied, or friendly partner with our allies 1023, 1022, and 1154, except when that conflicts with Rules 1, 3, and 7. Of course, that's only on tuesdays...

EDIT: Content added/adjusted. Sorry, I tend to forget to preview when I think I'm done, and re-edit...

For one, the problem is a tough one to crack.  Shadowbane made a good attempt at it with cities; when you're in a city, there is a decent amount of socialization tools available to make a city a social unit.  The downside is that there probably aren't enough socialization tools, and that should the population of your social unit drops (your GL quits, a large subguild joins someone else, etc), it causes other issues unrelated to socialization (like survival).

I don't think the two should be connected - it seems to put too much strain on the society, even within a PvP game.  Yet it does create a good barrier for entry, because you're unlikely to let in people from enemy guilds, and without some sort of barrier for entry these subcommunities are pointless.

It certainly is, and I knew your name sounded familiar, heheh. I ran what was arguably one of the largest/most influential nations on Fear for about 8 months, and the sheer amount of socio-political entities on one shard alone made just diplomacy a rat's nest of interactivity and dependent relationships--and was just about too much to handle for anyone, much less a techo-geek like me who could do it full time.

It was even worse on corruption as you know--even with the mega-alliances and all that shit, you still had endless chatter on /nation "is XXX friendly?", can I kill "YYY"??

1) And if you and you're friend are tacking around the server, trying to pick up other friends, and have to say (as I myself was never attracted to CoH) "Doh! Queynos 7 not queynos 1!" Does it really matter how this "instancing" garbage is handled as long as it means you can't just walk into "Hero City" and find your friends. Multiple location worlds, shouldn't have multiple instances of those locations. Now from my merchant standpoint, selling things, and letting people know I have them to sell is much easier if I don't have to worry about selling it 20 times, because I have to go through multiple instances. Want any more examples of how this is annoying?

2) Companies already have understaffed CSR's.  Call for a "GM" during prime-time, 90-120 days after launch. They always overstaff for that time period. The understaffing comes from monitoring 22 servers (I believe UO at one point was down to 1 GM per server/shift, with limited "helper" support). In a one world instance, all of your support is dedicated to the one place people play. This means unlike UO or EQ, where 700 people of GL or EQ server have a problem but only 15 on another server do, you don't have one staff begging for help from another team.

Which is more efficient? Well if you're going to throw everyone together like that, that means that you still require x support personell per person. Figure maybe 1 support person per 250 users (not sure what the actual industry standard is), but you lose the rounding because of some fraction of users that play multiple servers. So you actually save support cost!

3) Now WoW and EQ2 are both new and trading brands. If WoW didn't have Warcraft in it's title, well, one of my friends called that beta a "steaming pile of horse puckey." WoW, as he put it, "has very limited value" before it gets old. The problem is while you will say "Wish Fanbois" there are blizzard/WoW fanbois too. Was diablo good? Yes. Was Warcraft good? Yes. Was that latest single player warcraft really that good? No. Now EQ2 is an updated EQ, so it's going to garner the old numbers of evercrackers (I still don't understand the whole static quest thing, anyone? What is the point of such a system, you couldn't inject a little variety in it, could you?) CoH on the other hand, people have told me is pretty fun. I don't play it myself, but my friend says he likes it, but that it was getting a bit boring for him. Wish was his future play (or so he hoped). He didn't care about the instancing, but, he didn't care that Wish didn't (instance) either.

So actually the Risky thing is that Wish unlike: Tabula Rasa, EQ2, Lineage 2, or WoW, SWG, didn't have a fancy dollar name (Richard Garriot, EQ, Richard Garriot, the Warcraft Franchise, Star Wars) to "guarantee" a minimum ROI. That was the risk for Wish, and is for any other MMORPG without a big name stuck to it. That's nothing to do with the project, it's feasibility, or technical acumen. Nope, that's money politics :)

CoH did this very well and very unobtrusively.  Your chance to really see it in action has lapsed, at least until CoV comes out.  Suffice to say that there exists an implementation of instanced "main areas" which met with wide approval from a large playerbase.  At every zoneline and every train station, players had the opportunity to pick an instance of available zones, where multiple instances existed.  Moving from one to the other never took more than a minute.  

There was no crafting in CoH and very little trading, but a robust crafting/trading system would probably implement an auction house system that could persist across multiple zones, including instances of the same zone.

It's been debated back and forth a lot in the forums in other threads, but I have to admit I don't understand the rationale of turning a "Massively Multiplayer" game into a "Minimally Multiplayer" game by creating separate zones/areas/worlds/whatever you want to call them for very small subsets of a world's population to play in.

What the popularity of instancing games tells me is that the draw of a MMOG is not the same for all players in the target market, and in many ways people actually don't want a Massively Multiplayer experience, what they really want is a decent quality game to play with a small selection of friends.

That's not a bad thing at all, but I think the huge subscription numbers WoW sees, and all the other top end MMOG's are seeing is a consolidated result of much more than just the game's quality and it's MMOG nature--in many ways it's because the Minimally Multiplayer genre doesn't have enough members for them to be satisfied.

Which, in turn, implies that there is an "undiscovered market" of Minimally Multiplayer purchasers out there that hasn't been tapped yet, and ultimately will drive the subscription numbers of current MMOGs down by an undetermined amount when that genre is tapped.

Ah yes, but neither CoH nor Ryzom had fancy dollar names backing them either. CoH was started by a one man investment and a three man team and they used good business sense to make and sell a product to get more investment capital and obtain a big name publisher. Ryzom may not be long for this world, but they managed to make it to release. Wish could have gone the route of CoH and made some smart business moves, but instead the single monetary investor and lead of the entire project decided to try to go it alone and make due with limited resources. Poor management killed the game. They could have found capital if they needed capital, but that would have meant the sole investor dropping his ego and making some changes to his own plans for the game.

No, they really don't.

Define "beat the pants off". By his definition (interesting game systems), yes, they do, since text MUDs are far easier to get experimental with. Try any of the TrekMUSEs for example.

I'm being experiential. As in, in my experience, if I'm going to play a text-only game, I'll read a novel instead. Text doesn't do it for me, nor does it do it for the vast majority of game players. Which is why graphical MUD's have higher subscription numbers than text MUD's, despite the fact that text MUD's have much lower technical requirements on server and client side.

Text MUD's are certainly easier to edit, on the fly, but that doesn't mean they "beat the pants off" graphical MUD's, because most people, including me, won't be able to "get into" the game play long enough to care. I'm glad he likes playing with the artifacts of the past, and that enough other people do to make it profitable, but I'd prefer to play games made this century.

You kinda answered your own question in paragraph 2 there, but I would have to add that there are cases where instancing leads to far more immersion.  Mainly, these have to do with quest/mission-specific area populations (1) and with respawning (2).

(1) In CoH, it would be silly for a contact to ask me to go to an abandoned lab and clear out a nest of bad guys if that same contact had just sent some other guy to clear out the same area.  I might wander in only to find that Captain Super had already won the day.  Also, a non-instanced mission zone could not adjust its mob population to challenge the inbound group.

(2) Respawning is absolute immersion-breaking crap.  Its crap that has been required in non-instance games for so long now that we accept it without thinking, but its crap.  Instancing allows you to fix this with non-respawning mobs in a quest/mission-specific area.  

CoH did this right, WoW fucked up.  The beginning of the end for me in WoW was when I realized that mobs in our specific instance were respawning.  Why?  The place is ours,  - and we killed them.  So who are the mobs respawning for?

Ding ding ding; we have a winner!

Instancing to me has always been an attempt to provide focused fun to the individual/small group that is much closer to the pnp game systems this genre allegedly is supposed to resemble.  You can have much more flexibility and dynamism in an instance b/c it doesn't matter what others are doing in their own version of it.  Interesting game experiences, that;s what "quality" means to me (beyond the technical aspects of course)

The focus is now back to you and what you do, which is really just another way of saying, you get to be the hero.  Isn't that what storytelling has always been about, the protagonist(s)?  Instancing, for all it's faults, is a tool that can help make things interesting.  Standing in line to whack eternally respawning Vox? Not so much.

Xilren

Sorry for such a big quote, but I wanted to respond to all your statements:

--I should been more clear in my question: If what you want to provide to your customer base is a Minimally Multiplayer experience, why in the hell are you building a Massively Multiplayer (and all the infrastructure upkeep that entails) in the first place? Build a Minimially Multiplayer game from the get-go.

1) Ahh, but that right there describes why it's not "immersive" to me at all. How in the hell can you be immersed in a persistent world when the same arch villians have to be killed over and over and over and over again (or even can be killed in that manner). If Captain Super did win the day, then dammit, the world should know about it...not let me go ahead and win the day against the same opponents as well, just cause.

2) Bingo. Respawn is such a huge kludge, and completely destroys immersion of any sort whatsoever. Even with your difference of "CoH, they never respawned for me, while WoW they even respawned for me", you still are respawning..and therefore the player's actions are not interactively persistent. No matter what anyone does, Mob X is still gonna be hanging out next week waiting for someone to come kill him again. Instancing compounds this lack of interactive persistence in it's attempt to fix other issues.

Instancing IMHO is putting a bandaid on the symptom, instead of diagnosing the disease and curing it.

Note to mods: Sorry about the thread hijack, the convo has turned into something completely different...would it be possible to get a split off?

Those are fine examples and you'll not that in my post I was neither in support of nor against instancing personally.  I was merely stating that the trends among newer mmogs seemed to gravitate in that direction.  

Playing the devil's advocate there is another side to the coin:
A single gaming world requires considerably more content.  Instancing allows more people to use and enjoy the same areas.  A couple of examples a) If questmaster Bob tells me that I have to get 6 foozle pelts and there are only a few foozle spawns nearby, there will be an artificial cue created to obtain foozles from the closest spawn.  I say artificial because often there are other foozle spawns, human nature draws the most people to the closest location. b) Lets say that moles spawn quite fast and give both good exp and loot.  Well, there will be a higher demand for moles than there will be for other mobs of the same level.  This isn't a new idea, it has happened in every mmog released to date.  Instancing allows for more people to combat these creatures without the need for player created waiting lists.  Less wait, happier customers. c) Each group of players get their own special dungeon to explore.  The combination of instancing and random area generation makes for extra content with fewer expended resourses.  AO did a decent job with this, then CoH, then everyone else followed (LDoN, Catacombs, etc.).  People paid to have this feature... it sells.

As for multiple servers, it's an opportunity to play the game in a new environment. I'll call it a sort of replay value. If you've played any mmog, you'll recognize that each server has its own social structure (heirarchy if you will) with a unique economy, feel, and personality.  A single server has these traits also, but there are no other options.  What Wish attempted to do was to attempt to create microcosms by having folks congregate in towns.  It's difficult to assess whether this would have been successful over time given that we knew little about the entire economy or the transportation system.  If you'd like to see an example of a single server game in action, play a Tale in the Desert.  It's a wonderful game concept with lousy implementation.  The single server feels very much like you're trapped back in high school. I'll leave it at that.

Summary: I'm more in support of multiple servers than I am of instancing.  I think that instancing makes things much easier on the game developer as you can create more content with fewer resources.  As you stated above, instancing wouldn't be needed if the game had enough options for gameplay.  I do admit that I enjoy instanced dungeons... this may be an artifact of my EQ days when you zoned into a dungeon and immediately shouted "CAMP CHECK!".  There is no doubt that EQ had a large enough world to satisfy their player base, it's just that people tend to flock to the locations with the most favorable risk/reward.  In this case, I happen to enjoy instanced dungeons.  



Again, a very good point.  When I was thinking about it, I guess I was looking more at a grief/conflict standpoint.  With one single world, there is literally no escape from people harassing you using viable in-game mechanisms without having to quit the game (lost revenue).  With a multi-server game, you can either be moved to a new server or simply create a new character on another server.  This often is accompanied by a new set of people to meet and socialize with.  Multiple servers again offer a chance to increase replay value.  Anecdotally, every mmog that I've played, I've moved to multiple servers to see which fit my personality the best.  It may sound funny, but it's true.  




The problem that I saw with Wish was that a) it was an engine demo (proof of concept as it were) affixed to a boring game with a terrible interface and b) the novel concepts for gameplay left with Dave Rickey.  The graphics were dated, the combat was boring, and most people disliked P&C movement (I never had a problem with it personally).  Having tested it since alpha the game never really progressed into anything more than a new version of UO with less personality and a flashy P&C engine.  After 2 years they were still trying to deal with very fundamental gameplay issues... didn't you notice that things kept changing a lot?  They didn't really have a solid foundation for core game mechanics.

In my estimation, the number of people that really liked the game were a small minority as compared to the number that actually tested.  I would say that this was more the problem with Wish than the lack of a big name or an established brand.  The game was a long way from complete and still lacked credible support from the gaming community.  I think that Mark saw that Wish would be little more than a niche title and that would never produce the revenue that he would need to maintain and grow within the industry.  Knowing this, he pulled the plug.  

I beta tested both WoW and EQ2 and didn't care for either title.  To be honest, I'm still astounded by their popularity.  Both titles are little more than shiny improvements on older models.  Having seen someone post that WoW was the best mmog to date, I had to pause... I don't like the game but have to admit that WoW may actually deserve this title.  It's funny because Blizzard didn't really do anything all that much better than what we have seen from mmog's in the past.  They've just managed to suck less at the bad parts.  

In the case of WoW and CoH, they do add something to the mmog genre that has been lacking in the past: console-like fun.  The games are fun right out of the box in the same mindless way that space invaders was so many years ago.  They aren't deep experiences.  They're just light hearted fun.  Colorful graphics on a smooth engine with lots of buttons to mash.  I played CoH and had fun with it.  It wasn't a game I'd play longer than a month or two, but it was fun every time that I played.  It's just a different type of fun than the Pavlovian "ding" response we've been trained to enjoy since the Diku mud days.

EDIT: Some of these points were addressed above... I got distracted while writing and it took me a while to post.  Since starting like 8 more posts arrived.  I figured what the hell and tossed it out here.

Somebody had to say it. Not knocking people that enjoy text games, but this is one of those things where I just don't understand the appeal and never will.

I agree for the most part, but some good counter examples (the CoH example) were given in defense of instancing above.  The crux is that the "band-aid" (referring to flaws in the current implementation of mmogs) is making money.  A LOT of money.  Until the current models stop being profitable, the industry will be hard pressed to move the genre in a new direction.

Zepp, I want a good multiplayer game.  You've suggested that MMORPGs are not the place for that, and that I should play a regular multiplayer game.

But you want a game where each player's actions are persistent and affect the game world and - by extension  - all other players.  Am I allowed to suggest that you should play a regular multiplayer game for that?

Because frankly, the possibility of the gameworld being permanently affected by the average player horrifies me.  Players can't even be given persistent loot bags without arranging them on the ground to spell out scatological references.

Also note that your example assumes that there are a million devs writing and installing content all the time.  Content is the huge limitation here.

And having decided that true persistence is not desirable, any objection to instancing that I might have had falls away.

I'm not being clear then. My point is that if a game developer plans to give his players a "Minimally Multiplayer" game by using instances, then they should design the game as a Minimally Multipayer game from the beginning, instead of wrapping their real game presentation (1-20 players in an instanced zone) with a massively multiplayer design (and all it's inherent limitations), infrastructure, and marketing scheme. What is happening right now commercially IMHO is companies building a mercedes benz using a touring bus as the blueprint, and marketing it as an 18 wheeler.

If the companies would actually design a Minimally Multiplayer game instead of doing what I describe above, you would get more features, functionality, and awesome game play than you do now, not less.


Absolutely valid worry--but I suggest that isn't an issue regarding the persistent world itself (you see things like this all the time in semi-persistent worlds), but sociological concerns and other design areas.



No, not at all. In fact, the entire purpose of this model is that the world itself becomes the content, not static "expansion zones" that have to be released month after month to keep things new and fresh. By nature of the combined models (interactive persistence and hybrid genres) it's the players and the world itself that are generating the new and fresh environment.

...

You see the players as a source of content and interactivity.  I see them as a source of retardation and grief.   Lets move on.

Players creating content? And this game is free? Or is the hybrid model still pay to play? A community that builds over time will inevitably create some sort of "content", but not necessarily tangible content that other players would want to pay to experience. If I pay for a magazine subscription, I expect fresh, good content every month. I don't provide any content to them as a subscriber except perhaps for a letter to the editor.

I see Meso beat me to it so as he said... moving right along.

Poor choice of terminology on my part trying to abstract a large concept:

--(RTS) Players will utilize various architectural building set "prefabs" to create dynmically growing cities.
--(RTS/RPG) players will have functionality inherent to assign "quests" (either directly or via NPC proxy) to other RPG players.
--FPS players just by the nature of their play mode (inhabiting monsters as their play session) create dynamic "events" (and yes, this is not your standard 'scripted event' that some games have attempted in the past (SB), and not the same quality most likely as Wish describes with their "live content")
--failed diplomatic situations cause large wars over extended periods of time to occur, providing "content" for all styles of play.
--interactive persistence with the world environment causes extensive changes over time that continually and dynamically redefine the world itself
--rise and fall of NPC populations cause changing content as well based on geographical, economic, diplomatic, and military interactions with the environment and players.

I'm not talking about players creating new 3-D models and scripting new mobs. I'm talking about a pardigm shift away from "content" towards "systems" (see reference links below), where player actions are "content".

Some interesting links:
Zen of Design blog by Damion Schubert ("Ubiq" from Wolfpack/Ubisoft)
--The Overly Polite Content War Continues (http://booboo.phpwebhosting.com/~ubiq/index.php?p=108) (specifically his discussion, not the links, but the links provide good background)
--Experience Driven Design (or, Ubiq's 10 commandments about content vs systems) (http://booboo.phpwebhosting.com/~ubiq/index.php?p=107#more-107)

Other external blogs:
Jeff Freeman--Content driven development (http://mythical.blogspot.com/2004/11/content-driven-development.html)

That's just a start!

Ah, good good. Thanks for the clarification and the linkage, Zepp.

12805 views for this thread?  Me thinks F13 got some serious external linkage for this one, from some Wish-related site or other.

You are correct sir! (http://games.slashdot.org/index.pl?issue=20050110)

You may need to scroll down a tad

You know Zepp, on a diffrent (less competitive scale) I remember hearing an interview on my SimCity 2000 CD that had that rough idea.  Your SimTower could go in a SimCity and someone could play SimCopter in that SimCity...yadda yadda yadda.  It is an intriguing concept to say the least.

Btw, I know it's rare to be using real names on a forum like this, but it's "Stephen", or "dickwad"--Zepp is what I got called in the military, and I try to avoid it whenever possible!

Actually, the idea has been around for a VERY long time. Back in the late 80's-early 90's there was a set of games (Breach/Breach 2 was the rts/squad action portion I cannot remember the space empire portion but it began with an 'E' I think) where you would fight space battles with the first "half" of the game, and either land on a planet to do a squad turn based RTS type game, and/or actually board an enemy ship during the space combat portion, and it would literally hand you off to the "other" game (all on your own comp of course, using text data files---ahh, those were the days!).

Microsoft also played with the concept at about that time as well with their MS Flight Simulator/MS Air Traffic Control Simulators. You could actually network those two (back in the IPX days) and have the ATC player see the flight sim guy on his radar scope, and give him vectors for arrival and departures.

Welcome to F13 Zepp!  Err, dickwad.

Yes, nice to have you here, Dick.  Hope your stay is warm and fuzzy.

Rules of Engagement (and ROE2) was the name of the space portion.  The whole thing was called "Interlocking Game System", and I think they had a patent on it (probably expired by now).

--Dave

That's what it was, thanks!

Why not?  They get good mileage from the marketing scheme.  Guild Wars players will 95% of the time be in a virtual environment with no more than 16 other people, and 5% of the time with no more than a hundred other people.  In other words, roughly NWN levels of massive.  The only thing that could possibly qualify it as 'massive' is the fact that there will be a massive number of other players and you have a random chance of running into any one of them in town. . so there's some kind of massive potentiality.  And yet they get covered by the MMO press and seem to ambiguously market themselves as an MMO, because it gets them coverage.

I think the onus is on those who want a single server.  Statisticians have known for a long time that any random surprisingly small assemblage of jackasses is functionally equivalent to the complete population of jackasses.  There's no point in jamming 10,000 people on a server if you can get all of the grief and outrage interacting with a random  200 of them.

From what I understand, GW is not planning on using a totally provider centric server architecture are they? In that special case, they do get the "best of both worlds".

But when it comes to games that turn out to be hugely played only in separate instanced areas, ultimately, all that "massively" portion is just a hugely detailed (and hugely expensive) chat lobby.

I don't feel all that strongly about it quite honestly--I simply don't see it as a wise design decision if games are going to continue to become more and more targetted at 1-20 players in instanced dungeons. Now, assuming my understanding of their server model is even remotely accurate, it does sound like GW has a good design for what they want to provide.

You mean my ideas aren't new? ;p

The "dream mmorpg" I tinker with from time to time was jumpstarted by Dave's influence on me. More specifically the original project behind Wish that he hinted again on Terra Nova:

And why not join this with games that Lum and many other players enjoy so much and are just BEGGING to be translated into a massive universe?

Yes, I'm pointing to wargames and RTS.

Online worlds are perfect to offer various types of focus. From the first person experience (*) up to the territorial control and administration, transforming the game so it delivers systems similar to "The Settlers", "Civilization" or "Master of Magic". Or those wargames that only Lum seems to play.

*This* is how you give depth to a MMO. This is how you are able to use its strength instead of just creating a "Minimally Multiplayer".

So, why noone tries to move toward this? I mean concretely, if it's a good idea why noone tries to make money on something that at least sounds intersting to play and develop?

(*) Which is completely underdeveloped right now. Think at how much Doom 3 and Half-Life are able to trigger the adrenaline and emotions like fear, while the mmorpgs in general are so dumb and flat aside the graphical-induced wonder.

Yes, if anyone invented such a game, it would surely roll in money.  Guess we'll find out in April.

Thanks for the link--looks like an interesting game, but it's a pure RTS, wheras (after we hijacked the thread anyway), we're talking about hybrid genre MMOG's, so I'm not sure what relationship you may be suggesting.

Was also curious about the "April" reference...the game has been out in one form or another since 2002, and I didn't see anything specific about April 2005 on the web page anywhere.

Whoops.  I saw something that suggested it was going to get a box in store shelves in April.  I failed to notice that was April. . . 2004.

A quick note about instancing:

There seem to be two models of instancing available right now The COH/EQ2 version and the WoW version.

COH/EQ2 is where you have instances of alot of the major areas of the game to cut down on overpopulation (Queynos 1-7 for example) and of some quest areas.

The WoW model only instances certain large dungeons, what would be thought of as raid dungeons I guess.

I suspect the 2nd model wouldn't lead to as much of a minimally multiplayer game as the prior one does.

As for the Hybrid MMO idea:

I used to have dreams of something like this with a Wing Commander spin. This was back in the early days of UO. However, I have since learned, in large part due to UO, that players having control is B.A.D. Players are pricks and will do everything they can to screw others over so they can sit there and cackle like school girls behind their keyboards.

To make this hybrid work players would have to have some control and I just shudder to think of the consequences.

I doubt Toby's rolling in phat lewt, but I wish him the best in that regard. However, he's created a pretty good game in ToD if that's your thing.

And yes, it's been around for a while.

And, if I'm following you, their xbox live service is at least a step in the direction you are describing.  Sony's station pass would be another smaller step in that direction.

I take your ideas here as a good sign.  I came on to post something very similar myself.  I'll pick up where you've left off.

The problem with having a wide selection of game genres accessable through an mmo wrapper (I hope I'm following you correctly with that) is that such a game is probably impossible to make right now.  There is a  degree of consolidation going on in the games industry.  With studios of various genres coming increasingly under a decreasing number of flags, this method of distribution becomes increasingly feasible and desireable.

I think the real answer to all of our mmo woes is that one game cannot be all things to all people.  Given that, why not make a lot of games each for a limited set of people?

And very good games they were - lots of rulesmongering and hugely confusing to the newbie - Smashing.

I always got annoyed because I didn't have the 'interlocking' part of Breach - when you didn't have it, the computer 'simulated' your attack and somehow always managed to get your superior force killed in seconds.

Firstly, now the players have spread across the level range, zone instancing is rare in CoH.

Secondly you can search for and invite groups and members across instances and zones.

Thirdly, CoH doesn't run an economy at this time - you'd have nothing to sell. Some die hards try to sell enhancements to other players. It's pointless. Just ask anyone over lvl 30 for a but of spare cash, they have *lots* of it, and go buy in the store.

Forthly, even if you did have something to sell, and even if the zones were instanced at that time, CoH has global chat channels to do your deals in.

Fifthly if the issue is finding your friends, their is a friends function that tells you exactly where they all are if online, and a friend chat system that broadcasts messages to everyone on your friends list whichever zone/instance they are in.

There are many easy ways to solve the problems associated with occaisional zone instancing. CoH includes many of them, but I'm sure there are other ways of solving the problems as well.

Techincally impossible? Politically impossible? Economically?



I used the examples of RoE/Breach and MS Flight Sim/ATC Sim as examples of concept, but I didn't mean to imply that present day hybrid genre games should be designed this way as well. When I say hybrid genre MMO, I mean all in one server, and (most likely, it's a marketing decision, not a technical one) all in one "client". You wouldn't download the rts portion one day, and hte RPG portion the next--all are the same game.

It certainly involves a good deal of technical decision making to determine how to deploy game servers. You're fucked if you think it doesn't. I hope you're the marketing droid or sugar daddy, because if so, your ignorance is understandable.

And reading english certainly is a technical process as well. You're fucked if you think that something that appears after a comma means that it should be applied to the clause prior to the comma, not as a qualifying modifier to what appears within the same phrase.

The decision to either provide all of the game genres within a single purchase client application, vs providing different game roles in different client purchases (sell a "empire building/management" client, an "RPG/single player Avatar" client, and any other playstyle modules as separate purchase points is most certainly a marketing decision, not a technical one.

The FULL quote (not stopped at the very last word that seemingly supports your misunderstanding of the sentence) was:



Note how the parenthetical qualifier is in the same clause as "all in one "client"".

I hope that english isn't your primary language, because if so, your ignorance is understandable.

You're a funny man dickwad. You write a sentence that uses nested parenthesis, and berate me for my reading comprehension. That's certainly amusing. Now that you've been clearer, I certainly see what you are trying to say. You are still wrong.

I have checked over your posts, Stevie, with my mental red pen.  You should really think twice about correcting the grammar of anyone outside of the chimpanzee family.  

You cute little grammar monkey, you!

Hey man, no one twisted your arm to come back and try to insult my skill sets publically. Most people so far have simply asked for clarification, and I am more than willing to politely clarify any questions/misunderstandings.

You insulted me, I turned around and insulted you back with the same structure and syntax, while clarifying the point at the same time. If you set the tone, I match it, so don't blame me about it!

Can we consider this conversation to be part of Steve's initiation, or should we just tack more hazing onto the end?

And here I thought that slightly strange "We all love each other" thread will cut into our flame ratio. Thanks for restoring my faith in you guys.

If you are referring to me, I never claimed to be a master of the language myself. Many posts are free-flowing, and therefore are almost certain to contain not only spelling but grammatical errors as well.

I have no problem with anyone saying "what did you mean by this?" or even "woah dude, that made no sense". If you want to wrap that in insults about skill sets unrelated to use of the language however, you can certainly expect an answer in kind.

Its OK over there now, Boog showed up.

Beyond all the flames, would you expand upon this? Wrong in thinking that the decision to split out functionality into different purchasable modules is a tech vs marketing decision, or wrong in other ways?

The entire reason of this post in general is to find out how things are "wrong", but it helps to know why you feel that way!

You're still a monkey.

I think that you are wrong in thinking that it is simply a marketing decision to amalgamate the client code. There are all sorts of technical reasons why you would pay attention to how the client components are loaded. I do see where you are coming from, and you qualified it better by saying "product purchases". However, I'll still argue that it is not a marketing decision alone. There are good business reasons beyond simple marketing that qualify how you should take your product to market.

SW:G has an expansion (JtL) that adds a flight shooter element. I would imagine that not all the decisions to package as two purchases were strictly marketing decisions. The first thing that comes to mind is development cost. SW:G would have had to have been launched later to incorporate JtL from the outset, or more developers and more project management would have had to have been hired. However, Raph could stride in here and call me a big fat hairy bullshitter.



Touche. You will probably fit in here.

Good points on the packaging concept being both technical and marketing. I fully admit I tend to use abstract versions of terms a lot in posting, mostly because I don't want to have every post be 1,000 lines long in discussing a single point.

Interestingly however, with the engine that we're using, client presentation is simply a matter of which gui elements and script functions are packaged together. They are byte code compiled scripts, and of course there are security concerns regardless of how you obfuscate the byte code compiled version, but in general providing a completely different look/feel/information presentation for different client "modes" is a matter of a couple of days initial work, and then a few testing cycles. The engine executable itself isn't going to change at all in any possible "different mode" release packages.

Which is why I feel it's a marketing decision. The only two proven marketing models that work right now in the industry (at the professional level in any case) are "buy client, free access to servers"--WC3, etc., and "buy client, montly subscription fee to servers"--most MMOG's. Using a different purchasing concept is a risk, and that risk doesn't have much to do with the technology at all.

There are several other sales models being explored--the GW "incremental pay for new content" and derivatives thereof, down to the "micro-purchase" plans advocated both here in the forums and by some commercial companies as well, but none of these are really proven to work yet, only time will tell.

The question is, will the target market be willing to purchase a limited subset of player capability at a lower price, with the option of purchasing additional "modules" later on (or even all at once in some form of "package deal").



I'm not a flamer by nature, but they don't normally piss me off that much either. I tried hard to make sure I structured my reply artificially in the same manner you did, so it would be at least somewhat obvious that I wasn't serious, simply responding in kind. I'll eventually become as jaded as everyone else, and simply blow them off, I'm sure!

I prefer to call them "community building statements". ;)

In my limited time here, I have noticed that thread hijacking is a common occurance.  I think it all boils down to what you intend to do with it once you are at the helm.  Do you intend to fly us to freedom, or will you set a course headed straight into the sun?

You just described Jumpgate.  Otherwise known as "Lord of the Flies in Space".

That game had, without a doubt, the absolute worst example of what happens when a community is allowed to have any influence on the in-game fate of another player.

Just to comment the design idea. My idea isn't about directly "stacking" different genres. A critic I made to the space expansion of SWG is that I don't like much games with completely independent parts.

My idea was more about *integrating* parts and systems of different genres to give a depth to a massive world, rather then pack together  independent layers.

In my plan those layers exist but they are emergent, not distinct. The different features must blend, not offer different games to be played by different player-types.

I really don't like the idea of "stacking" because I believe the design must be always cohesive. More unity = more value. Instead the idea of stacking different genres sounds to me like grouping various mediocre games hoping that together they are desirable.

Please, Soukyan, put back your old avatar.  I always imagine you as that pretty, gentle looking woman.  She looks kind and thoughtful.  She suits your personality.

I'm feeling mushy.

Yah, but a retarded weatherman fits my perception better.

Is this where I say *ZING*?

Wow. That's two board votes for the return of Alizee within 15 minutes of the avatar change. Hmm... now I must consider.

[edit]Rasix: ZING![/edit]

Make that 3. When I saw that I was like "daamn.."..and I have no idea where the image actually comes from, or who Alizee is!

<<<<<insert dirty old man comments below this line>>>>>

>>>>>insert dirty old man comments above this line<<<<<

Alizee is no longer interesting to me. The weatherman avatar at least made me laugh.

Ok, thats certainly not what comes to mind when I think of Alizee.  Think more along the lines of France's answer to Britney, but better looking (and likely more talented).

Trivia: she's from Corsica, which despite being a department of France, is not in France, and is culturally very different. It's one of the most beautiful islands in the Med, and on my list of places I want to visit. Columbus was born in Corsica, as was Napolean. Paoli's constitution of Corsica had a profound effect on his friend Jefferson, and the US constitution owes much to him. This is one of the reasons there are so many historic towns called Paoli in the US.

Now you've learnt something, you can go back to thinking about Alizee:

(http://mysthixx.free.fr/gallerie/neu3/alizee241.jpg)

Edit: found a linkable source for the pic that doesn't try and sell BJ images.

Just for the unwary- cutting and pasting the above url is most definitely NSFW! I am guessing Cum Fiesta will set off alarm bells in pretty much any work environment (other than the porn industry).

Hey!  I was born 2 miles from Paoli!  How exciting is that?

honestly?

According to the statistic thingy I just noticed on this site, this is the most-viewed topic:

Most Viewed Topics
   
Rank   Views     Topic   
1   13796     Wish is cancelled

   
How exciting is THAT, Signe?

Is it ironic that if the game had garnered this kind of attention, then this thread may never have existed?

When trees fall in the woods, apparently everyone listens.

It's most viewed thanks to my lovely doll, Alizee. ;)

And it's Napoleon, damnit! Respect my favorite historical figure.

Napoleon,  Neapolitan. Bollocks.

If only learning was always this fun.

I didn't notice a whole lot of females discussing this, and I can't say I could tell from reading the posts the ages of the people posting, so I will state from here I am a female of the over 28-32 group, I am a professional in my field (heavy equipment parts and research,) with an associate level education seeking a bachelors in History/Education.  I have done online gaming since 1997, and loved every minute.  I sold out of UO a few years back and took it up again with the AoS update.  Anyway, I did the Wish 2.0 Beta, and I really liked it.  I had to fuss with my video settings quite a bit, my computer being 8 months old, the card is a bit wimpy.  The user interface was not as simple as that in UO, although this is not an altogether bad thing, just different and requiring a bit of getting used to.  The crafting/resource gathering was a bit over-complicated, but it really did require some effort.  The graphics were fantastic!--out of this world graphics.  I especially liked the "city" of Talus.  The character creation was unreal--I was able to create a character that looked like ME, really did.  That was a trip!  

I guess my point here is that I am really disappointed.  So there were some bugs and some flukes.  So there were some things that had to be worked out, and room to improve things.  Big deal.  Fix what you can, improve where you can.  Shrug off the rest, you can't please everybody.  People were griping; begging pardon, but isn't that what a Beta is for?  We're supposed to let the developers know what needs fixing, or ways to improve it, right?  So, developers, you should have done what you could, ignored the jerks who were being hyper critical, and built the game.  You had a terrific thing going there.  I'm very sorry that it's over before it ever really got finished.  I game to escape the very pressing stressors of my very much to busy life.  I would have bought Wish when it came out, and paid the monthly subscription without blinking an eye.  Last weekend, I was pricing a new laptop with the kind of video card I would need to support the Wish graphics.  That's how much I liked it.  You threw away a gold mine. What a waste.

...As if there weren't already enough reasons for this thread to hurt my eyes.

EDIT: thx

There. I removed the bold tag for you.

It just makes me a wee bit sad.

And, yes... I was honestly born about two miles from Paoli... just not the one you guys are talking about.

Sadly, the shiny wears off after about 2 days assuming this isn't your very first 3-d mmorpg.  If the only one you have experience in prior to Wish was UO, then your drooling over the pictures might be understandable.  That being said, gameplay > graphics.



Actually, by all reports this game was moving backwards developmentally, not forwards.  Besides, from the sound of things, a lot of the issue with the game should have been worked out back in alpha.  They supposedly did some major overhauls between beta1 and 2 but they apparently weren't nearly enough.

Let me ask you, what in your opinion, would the major selling point of Wish be compared to Wow, EQ2, SWG, EQ, CoH, FFO, etc tec.  It takes more than just a pretty game nowdays to make a dent in the market, so what was the hook?  Without one, they were doomed to be a repeat of Horizons...

Xilren

I know this was directed at someone else, but I'll give you my perceptions as a tester that started in early alpha and watched things progress. Their hooks (best I could surmise) were: a "seamless" single world that could accomodate 10's of thousands of players simultaneously and what MR called "live content".

Now the confusion here is that most people consider "live content" to be GM organized events.  Wish was attempting to take a different angle (at least this is how I understood it).  Their idea was to have an event team release random scripted events upon the world.  This could be in the form of large raiding monster spawns, world altering quests, etc.  From what I understand, it wasn't the type of event that we saw in AC or EQ where some guy pops in, reads a script, and spawns megafoozle_8934.  It was more the type that a raiding hoard of NPC's would be spawned and given AI to attack some given town/target/geographic area.  

Now, given that one of the things they were interested in doing was create an economy based upon player built/controlled towns, this is an interesting concept.  The problem for me was that the system hadn't even begun to be fleshed out, the combat was still terribly dull, and almost no economic issues had been addressed.  Couple this to a skill/use based advancement system and the game had a unique angle.  

The one thing that Wish was attempting to do was to create a semi-dynamic world in which large scale events would occur and include the participation of anyone from new player to advanced.  This was one benefit of their skill based system... given enough people, a crowd of newbies could actually assemble a decent little force.  

Given more fine tuning and direction, this title would have made a nice niche game for the UO/RP fan community.  I just don't think that MR found that to be a large enough market demographic to justify the cash it would have taken to really finish this game.  Of course, this speculation is entirely out of my ass.

While not wildly successful, Ryzom already does the AI driven "scripted" live content in the form of NPCs attacking towns, etc.

And Eve already did the 10s of thousands on a single server.

So really, they weren't bring new things to the table, per se.

When the things you need to fix involve tearing down the entire interface and game system and starting over AGAIN, for the third time, I don't think they were willing or able to do that. The game really needed to be rebuilt from the ground up.

As for the "live content" re: scripted events, the stuff Nebu talked about was the same stuff Horizons claimed to be offering when it removed PVP and changed the entire game. I think Horizons showed us that if your original design can't be done, changing it mid-stream isn't going to help it succeed. I'm also not entirely sure the Ultra MMOG 10k or more on a server was working right; almost every time I tried to login, the servers were down. Something was not right in Denmark... er, Alabama.

Project Wish (http://www.projectwish.com). I've never seen a canceled MMORPG with this kind of support.



I must have really, really missed something in that game.

You know another game that had a "large community following"?

Dawn.

It seems a small legion of hardcore fanbois will congeal around just about anything.

Hmmmm... Dawn, Wish, gratuitous shots of Alizee's ass, rabid fanbois, and f13's new game server...  I'm sure there's a good money making scam to be made out of all of this somewhere...

Perhaps an experiment is in order?  Anyone need a social-psych thesis?  April Tool's?

At some point the people funding the project say, "Well how much work is it going to take to make this work?" and the engineer says, "Well it's like this, the spec has changed so many times in the last year that the assumptions we made when we initially coded the engine and client/server hierarchy aren't valid anymore.  We pretty much have to start from scratch."

And then they cancel the project.  The whining of fanbois is rarely in it; as ego bruising as that may be.

Well, we know it certainly won't involve an actual, released MMOG, now don't we?

Please to not get this thread off-topic.

http://arco.nillahood.net/pub/girls/alizee/1090906404055.gif

http://arco.nillahood.net/pub/girls/alizee/1081814181298.gif

http://arco.nillahood.net/pub/girls/alizee/1079537138134.gif

<3 Kenrick. I have those videos, but not at work. ;)

Good point... fiXx0red!

You are a man among men.

Damn.  I asked nicely if I could have their stuff (http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=5744410316url), too!

Wow. Quite the bargain there. Shall we all chip in and buy ourselves a nice rack. ;)

i am excited about GW but of course i'm smart enough to see it for what it is: Diablo III, more or less.  long since tired of DII:LOD, i'm ready for the new shiny.  now you can craft in the chat lobby, whee!  i don't know how much of that i will do, have not bothered in any of the open weekends since E3, but it's a nice option, i guess.  the "outside town" areas are nicer, hooray!  is it fundamentally different from Diablo II?  not at the core.  but that's what i want.

for a real MOG, generally i like adventuring with a handful of people, but i do enjoy the random encounters and the busy community areas (unless they are high on lagahol).  the big-city aspect is great, but i need that balanced with some lost-in-the-woods time.  but like you said, i'm not incredibly passionate about either one.

You're trying to turn this back into a pervy thread, aren't you?

*blush* Was I that obvious?