no, nothing personal against jessica mulligan just that this is the 2nd failure to follow in her stint consulting. actually, i just always figured ryzom was doomed with or without him. i still sort of have a minor hate-on for turbine/jessica for the ac2 debacle but at least jessica has nothing to do with the current turbine spewing out ddo and lotr.
wow, that was a content-free opening post. well i meant to link: http://www.ryzom.org/ which is scraping together money to buy the ryzom ip itself.
currently topic of discussion on /.:
my mistake, ryzom has been bankrupt for a -while- not just a recent turn of events.
Respectfully, do you think you could use capitalization when posting here? A lot of us on this board write a lot of things about stuff, and you’ll make eyelids twitch when you blissfully ignore things like capital letters. Thanks!
If you’re too “busy” to capitalize, perhaps you could help us by waiting until you have such time as to use the Shift key? :)
There’s at least one Chinese chick who probably doesn’t think it’s pointless. She just made her first million real-world dollars selling virtual real estate in SL.
Also, Desslock, apparently Ryzom is rated #3 among MMORPGs on mmorpg.com. I’m not sure what their scale measures, but I’m curious what you mean by the word “pointless.”
The Evil Avatar site used to have some kind of bizarre “special relationship” with Saga of Ryzom, that clearly went beyond prominent adverts and frequent news postings about a game that was way beyond the radar of most gamers, or readers of that site. I think we frequently refer to these “special relationships” as “business”, but I could be wrong.
Jessica Mulligan was on the project for about a year and she arrived way past launch. I doubt she had much of an impact and they hired her mostly as consultant.
The problems of the game were elsewhere.
(btw, Ryzom was probably the most technically solid game among those who failed. I mean, Horizon still goes on? Ryzom was thousands times better.)
Technically solid?? Maybe eventually, but upon release it was almost unplayable. There hasn’t been an MMO launch so botched since WW2 Online.
Even more importantly, there was just no reason to play this game compared to its competitors. It had a kinda pretty, unique art style, and the overall plot involving roving bands of monsters was a great idea, but those are about the only things positive I can say about it.
Who would choose to play it regularly over WoW, City of Heroes/Villains, Guild Wars (without comparable fees)…or hell, even Auto Assault and EQ2?
I still remember when my review code for Ryzom appeared. It kicked off with quests that charged you with running to an NPC, and had time-limits so strict that you physically couldn’t do it. Memories…
I remember Ryzom from E3 and I recall that it at least had an interesting spell system where you could design your own spells. You had a certain number of overall points you could allot to a spell that let you change variables of the spell, such as range, damage, type of damage, etc. You could extend the range of the spell, for example, or turn it from a bolt into an AOE, but the points it would take to do that would mean you had fewer points to devote to the amount of damage the spell did. I thought that was interesting but not enough to spend time playing the game.
I tried the Ryzom trial ages back. The one noteworthy thing (Ryzom Ring) was an effort to let players create their own scenarios, landscapes, NPCs, quests etc. and have them be playable for other players in the game. It didn’t seem to really catch on or be all that well implemented (from what I read).
I liked that concept. Even the biggest MMORPG grinder must be a little bored of chasing Dangerous Pigs (WoW), clicking 20 “glowies” (City of Heroes) or tackling Generic Medieval Quest 2,097 (everywhere). So the idea of creating your own quests seemed appealing – but if virtually nobody is playing the game in the first place, it seemed a little pointless.
BTW I knew it more as “Saga of Ryzom,” I guess they changed the name to just Ryzom at some point.
As far as why would anyone play this or something else rather than WoW, EQII, COH – I’m a COH junkie but not everyone responds to those games. A lot of people would prefer something a little different with a smaller, more true role playing crowd (rather than Speed Leveling Phat Loot Gamers or competing with hordes of Gold Farmers). But given the maintenance costs of mmorpgs, it seems like a tough market to try to succeed with a game that can’t really go toe to toe with The Giants.
