Does Marvel Universe Online count? Cancelled and cannablized for Champions online.
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Does Marvel Universe Online count? Cancelled and cannablized for Champions online.
Marvel's MMO has been started by 3 different companies: Wolfpack (Vivendi held the license for a while), then Sigil (under Microsoft), then Cryptic. It deserves and honourable mention somewhere.
SOE or 989 had at least one MMOG they canceled after several years of development but I can't remember the name. It sounded like an attempt to put a graphic frontend on the old university Empire game. I believe it was Smedley's.
The game was called Sovereign.
It was supposed to be a persistent world RTS. You set up stuff, and the server AI would run the place while you logged off. Early screenshots had aircraft carriers and shit like that, and Smedley was madly hyping the game soon after EQ1 was launched as part of Verant's madzor plans to take over the online world in 1999.
Before it was cancelled it became space-themed and much more traditionally hands-on RTS (clicky mass combat, which made the MMO-scale bandwidth budgeting a key problem to solve). It was pretty playable in the spring of 2002, but hadn't IMO yet found the piece that really took advantage of the MMOness in a way that distinguished it from Age of Empires or StarCraft or such. At least one member of the team had worked on various AoE titles, I think doing AI.
I have first-hand knowledge that it was still under development at least as late as May of 2002, FWIW.
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