Gods and Heroes Canceled 29
WarCry was one of the first with the news that Perpetual Entertainment's years-in-the-making MMOG Gods and Heroes is now canceled. The title was due out in August, and was pushed back after changes to the animation system were put into place. Now on 'indefinite hold', it appears a game just weeks or months away from release will never see commercial production. From the article: "Our source tells us that the majority of the Gods and Heroes development team has been let go as part of the move, which comes only a few weeks after they had downsized and pushed back the release date. The Star Trek Online team, those who worked on the Perpetual Platform (which was recently licensed to BioWare) and a small number of people from the Gods and Heroes team will be remain with the company." For a great deal more usefully cynical commentary, F13 (as always) has us covered.
Grand realizations... (Score:5, Insightful)
They probably realized that it would take much longer than a few weeks or months for the development to catch up to the hype/marketing. A more accurate statement would likely be "A game we were led to believe was just weeks or months away from release..."
Re:Where the money is ... (Score:3, Insightful)
WoW supports casual playing and is well polished. That's its key to success. There's no *real* reason why an MMO needs to seek the numbers that WoW has in terms of population. EVE is anything but a casual MMO and seems to manage a profit.
Re:Where the money is ... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Where the money is ... (Score:5, Insightful)
If you spend most of your time on EVE flying from A to B, I'd say you got something wrong. At least I don't. Most of my time is spent "productive", i.e. making creds. Also, flying from A to B doesn't take nearly as long as it took a few years ago, mostly because it's now possible to jump pretty much into the gates (if you know how, which isn't rocket science and quite possible to stumble upon).
EVE can be tedious if you want to play it "seriously". To take this game serious, you have to be a beancounter, because that's what it comes down to. You'd have to spend your time watching charts and see market trends if you want to be "successful" (or, rather, more successful than the guy next to you not able to do that). It's not a game where you hop into an instance and "do stuff".
This is admittedly not the right cuppa tea for everyone. EA tried a more hack'n'slash approach to space MMORPGs and failed after running it for 2 years. They made about every mistake in the book with the game, granted, but still... I don't know if a space MMORPG akin to fantasy MMORPGs can be done sensibly.
Re:Good. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Grand realizations... (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the whole genre just has some inherent flaws. There's no way anybody's thought of yet to get around the fact that there are other people doing things in the game that you already did... It's like there are a bunch of people playing a single player/minimally multi-player game on the same map at the same time, but with a unified economy. I think that Puzzle Pirates is the closest anybody has come to making it seem that you as an individual actually have the impact on the world the role you take on represents. Most of these other games are simply "massive" to allow chat, mid-sized (Yes, 40-80 players is mid-sized) PvP, and an excuse to collect a monthly fee.
That's not to say there's no value in playing these games, but I don't think they come anywhere close to living up to the "massive" hype. I wouldn't hold up too much hope for 2009. You're better off hoping that Fallout 3 is good, and stop worrying so much about whether there are a bunch of other people around you destroying suspension of disbelief.