This truely is a sad and unfortunate loss to the MMORPG world. WISH had gained a massive fanbase around the world with tens of thousands of downloads from FilePlanet and equally as many account creations. The world was developing into something truely amazing and very different from the path that other MMORPGs take.

For all the time and effort that the developers put into making WISH what it was , and always will be in my heart, I thank you. You were some of the best development teams around! I won't forget you, not just for your game development abilities but also your being part of the community and treating us all like people rather than potential customers.

I will continue my days at home , alone , with nothing to do but hold onto whatever small possibility there is that WISH may be continued. This may only be a dream but it comforts me.

If anyone has any good information as to why WISH was cancelled , I'd love to know. Was it that WoW went final beta?

Well it got bad reviews and had lots of problems.. they had to face the fact that WoW and EQ2 have taken the majority of the population away already.

Beta Tested: Lineage 2, Ryzom, City of Heroes, RYL, EverQuest 2 World Of Warcraft European
Truly Loved: World of Warcraft

They probably got cancelled in part by their absurd dedication to PNC (point and click) movement instead of WASD.

-Sindyr

WISH still hadn't found a publisher. Think that's the biggest concern. Would find it a real shame if it was just about the complaints by some hungry children. Ofcourse there was things that could use improvement (WASD movement shouldn't be that hard to make). And engine stability or server stability can be worked out eventually. Like which game didn't have a problem with servers at start. I somehow think it wasn't really ingame related but rather some money problem.

Shame... was also just invited to the beta and like chopping up some trees...

Sorry to say I am glad to see it cancelled now rather then later, after testing it since the firts phase the gameplay was fun but the interface and graphics and the learning curve for some that are new would be and is jsut to frustrating, If you read their forums from first and 2 nd phase you wouldh ave seen the players main complains were about these issues and the random plagues etc that cut you off form major npcs that would be needed to play the game even if you chose not to participate.

Perhaps if they had listened to their player base more they would have seen this in the first phase, and please fan bois do not flame me I said this game would not make it to retail due to these issues(not that they stated these were part of the reason but I bet money they were.).

Goodluck Mutable Realms on your next project next time listen more to your testing base not too just the fanbois.

It is shame that I couldnt get my hands on the game because of this stupid fileplanet.com(you SUCK)

1. I think that the game was cancelled simply by the lack of money. There is no other reason. I mean, there are so many stupid games have a large fan base why wouldnt WISH had such.

2. It is strange that the cancel it so abruptly. And wtf this means(from the data we gathered from the beta) were all the ppl disapointed? Were ther a lot of lag ? It has to be sth serious to cancel it like that.

There is surely sth wrong about it. I think the mmorpg scene lost another good mmorpg

WoW devoured everything :(

To those of you who knock the Pnc system you haven't played Wish long enough.

After half an hour it seems very natural, and i actually prefered it over WASD (i take my example from AO)

Also this allowed there pathfinding AI to shine, and meant exploring was way less tedious.

I miss it already....

KAos_nyrb

i was doing wish beta, and i will tell you right now that wish beta 2.0 is better than any mmorpg on the market at the moment. the reason they closed it down was because they thought it would cost too much to have a 24/7 live content support staff, a server and world able to sustain 100k people at once, and other things. but i think that is complete rubish because there were about 50000 people involved in the beta and wish isnt a game that loses people over time, it gains them. it was such an amazing game and i would have paid 20 bucks a month just to play the beta 2.0

and fyi, mutable realms has closed down aswell...:(

glad to see yet another medicore game decide to cancel sooner tather then later.  I played for 3 hours on the day it went beta and let me tell you the game had lots of problems...the biggest is it couldnt compete with WoW, EQ2 or one of the other games thats allready on the market.

WISH was a good concept but was just another horizons like clone i.e. boring and mediocre at best.

Good financial decision. I didn't get around to playing as I was only accepted to beta 2 days ago. Reading peoples reactions though it seems I didin't miss much. The people who liked or loved the game were in the minority. Sub-par graphics (even if some where place holders), bad control, bad combat, etc. Basically the only thing the fanboys could say was, "IT'S 5 MONTHS FROM RELEASE, IT WILL EVENTUALLY BE BETTER."

I guess it's better now rather than getting more people hooked later and eventually having to cancel it anyway since I'm assuming the complaints about the game were not really fixable. The whole concept was wrong or it would have taken a lot of work and money to get the game to be competitive and appeal to the masses.

Having spent about 20 hours in the game as I got my acceptance late, I can't see what everyone is talking about. The game was great, and it looked great. I didn't see any sub-par graphics.
There were placeholders on some inventory items (but only while they were in the inventory). THe monsters looked good, the models looked good, things were working wel (there were bugs of course, but there always is)
I didn't get any frame lag except when I was in a few places where 100+ people were camped out, and there was only the occasional lag (which was greatly improved over saturday and today)
The game looked, and played well above anything else out there and its was a very poor decision for them to cancel the entire project, especially when they were only 1/3 of the way into the current beta.

Everything about the game was top notch, anyone who says the contrary just can't appreciate quality and deserves to be stuck with something like EQ.

It seems strange that the game would be cancelled so close to release and so far into beta. I would think that they would at least go ahead with release and see how they did.

I know 12 people that tried it and quit within the first 30 minutes because there was just nothing that really made it special.

the graphics were the same as everything else, worse then some, better then others. The gameplay was bleh.. Same old same old.

my guess is that all along the have been claiming to be the first Ultra Massive game, one game world for it all. This recent beta probably gave them the numbers to realize that what they had couldn't cut the mustard.

perendengue

This is what happens when the games have a long development cycle.Anything past 2 years and you may as well hang it up.With so many games on the market at some point the game HAS to be released or it will go into a cycle of trying to go to beta test.Even that can be costly.As it is games get released with graphics engines that are past their prime.
Unless the developers have the deep pockets of SOE or Mythic this is very real concern.It gets to a point where it becomes unprofitable to pursue it any further.They may even love the game they have made but it comes down to dollars and cents.

I'm so sad they are not going ahead with this title. From beta one I loved this game. I just wished I got a few screenshots to show my friends as I have beening ranting on about it for a while.

I guess there was good reasons for this but I was in to this game for the long haul over games like WoW and EQ2.

Wow this is a shock. I wish the Wish devs the best of luck in their future endeavors.

I persoanlly am one of the many that played it for 30 minutes and thought it was mediocure. I mean why waste my time with Wish when I can be playing WoW. I guess its just a different type of MMORPG for me, nothing against it.

-------------------------------------
Fantasy Tales Online

2 possibles reasons:

1- An evil competitor buy them out.

2- The devs lack a spine and they took the negative comments personnal and lose faith.

I am sad, Wish was not ''my perfect'' idea of a MMORPG, but it was holding my interest and I even annoy a seller a full 10 minutes to pre-order it, telling them they where backwards to not be offering me that option!  *grin evilly*

PS: If 2, I want to give you all a massive hug, you did a wonderfull job, dont take those comments personnal.  See, if everyone take everything close and personnal, we would still be playing pre-Kunark EQ and nobody would want that!

- "Solo is, will always be, the main market. A MMORPG that succeed with little or no solo appeal is doing great considering they are ignoring the main player base.''

This is indeed sad news

I was not a fanboy, but I definitely think that the game had great potential.

The devs did a great job of being there and the server stability got much better after they caught the initial bugs from the massive amount of ppl connecting.

I wish the mutable realms devs etc the best.

It's quite unfortunate because there seems to be some people that really, really loved this game. What I suspect is that these people were a relative, but especially vocal minority, vocal because the majority would leave this game instead of giving their thoughts on it and helping to shape the development.

The devs really, really listened to the community. I heard that auto-combat was taken out of Wish because of community suggestion, and hence combat became an exercise in useless button-mashing of the same two attacks over and over again, plus the occasional special attack.

That's an example of the devs changing the game to suit their fans, and alienating the majority that they need to buy the game. This extended out to the crafting, graphics, interface, everything because the voice of the majority of gamers would be outshouted by the voice of the relatively many, but actually few, fanatics who wanted it to suit them.

It's just my guess, but I really think that's one huge thing that went wrong with Wish. The whole finance thing, at this stage in development... I'm not buying it. They have other companies buying their technologies already, there's still another company AFAIK that's using the same engine / technology to make a Chinese MMORPG. I don't see how they could lack support anymore than the other MMOGs that continue to struggle along in development.

Edit: And btw, I didn't hate this game. I was one of the people that left. It wasn't the PnC movement, I got used to that, it wasn't the graphics, they were just fine, it wasn't the lag, I blamed that on my computer.. it just wasn't fun. I know it was a beta, I wanted to try it again when it came out, alas that doesn't seem like it's going to happen.

http://www.yabuz.com

This is very sad indeed.
I actually enjoyed the Wish beta alot more than I both EQII and WoW.
I got into the WoW FB in Europe yesterday and was shocked at how shallow if felt compared to Wish.

it was a good idea for them to cancel it this game was going no were good bad graphics always lagy i know it was in beta but still they did this to save them a lot of embrassment to them selves and their company

---

Originally posted by Azumi

For all the time and effort that the developers put into making WISH what it was , and always will be in my heart, I thank you.

---

wow so touching.. just a game dang dont gotta cry.

my signature is---> Richard Doan AHHH WTF i can't write in cursive!! Should be called Hand Printed Name. Oh well Silly MMORPG.COM

Uhm...

I have to say this is the biggest suprised out of all the cancelations...I guess the list just continues.

~Vie Est Merde

One day all will die, surely you but never I.

This a very sad day.

this game was going to be AMAZING i loved everything about it exept the "click-to-move" stuff i was really sad to hear that it was cancelled i guess only the dominating companies r gonna be able to make games then and they all seem to suck (i.e. SoE Blizzard) so sad i was really looking forward to this game and its never ending and ever changing story line

---

Originally posted by Kaos_nyrb
To those of you who knock the Pnc system you haven't played Wish long enough.

---

I agree with you there, I only played Beta 2.0 for two days and it became second nature (once i figured how to swap left and right buttons). WISH had far more scope as a MMOG than many other games, it took profesions and skill based advancement far further than WoW or EQII and didn't have the same veracious hack and slash style that EQII seems to require you to adopt.

My only reasoning for them having to cancel so abruptly was because the servers and archetecture simply could not support the demands imposed by their own artistic will. They were uncompromising in most thing, they knew they could push the technology to it limits before they would even consider making a sacrafice, perhaps the pushed it too far this time.

If you think about it WISH, is entirely different to any other game, as far as I am aware the only game that supports in excess of 10,000 players is EVE, its zones are comprised of interconnected solarsystems with coniderable load times transfering between the two, similar load times in WISH would of been unforgivable for it would stunt the game play.

I can only hope that it gets sent to the vaults for a couple of years, and re-emerges when the technology is there to support it. It must of been heart-breaking for the developers to see something that they put so much love and effort fall in to oblivion.

I'm actually amazed by people saying 'good it's cancelled'.
They don't understand the need for diversity and competition, they're happy with the average EQ & clones. Yes, mobs like coke and McDonalds too, even if they taste like crap.

This was THE GAME.

I'm very, very sad, now all I can do is wait till a similar thing happens again.

This game had an air, personality, the community was building up very, very nicely, the live content provided very diverse, exciting, and interesting moments (hours) for those who was interested. The rest could go about just as in any other game, having fun crafting, killing - whatever fulfilled their needs.
We participated in building a sawhorse and forge for our town, fully player-organized and done. Took half a (real) day to complete, most of the townsfolk of windok was helping (players!), and we felt like a community.

This game was very different - no matter what our shallow 'wow & EQ rulez, others are crap' type friends are saying. Nothing like the average.

I'm happy for them having their games.

But we, few tens of thousands (at least), probably mostly more mature players who wanted this feel, without players killing each other ruining the fun & the overall trust all over the game, and with a lot of real interaction, working economy (yes it started up nicely too), wondeful, detailed, personalized cities, mountains, landscapes, we could have had this game.

The reason of shudown must have been something in the background, most likely with the company (mutable realms). The game was going on well, they overcame the first problems with the server settings, the game was working all day very nicely, weeded out a lot of bugs, made improvements, wrote the newspaper *every day* - about players deeds and other stuff happening online. I think they did not have the faintest idea they'll be sacked the next day. They were working day & night too.

This was the first game *ever* I felt like playing a real RPG, just like in the old days with the GM and the players sitting around the table for seemingly very short nights or whole weekends. :-)

Point and click? who cares? If this is your biggest grivance, you'll need to learn and experience a lot in this world yet. One can forget it in about 10 minutes, and completely get used to it in a few hours - well anybody who's still able to learn.

The engine was a good one too, the bug reports were more about the misplaced objects and game elements than the engine's crashes. Not that there weren't any, but for a beta it was fairly stable.

I'm truly, deeply sad. A real RPG is lost for the world forever.
If you missed out on it, you missed out big time, but at least you don't have this gut-wrenching feeling of loss now...

I totally agree with Horvathi.

I was hooked, really. I have played pretty much MMORPG's around and most of them, sucked. They were such limiting, all was thought for you. Someone in WISH beta 2.0 said, that WoW made things much easier. That saying made me almost laugh, ofcourse WoW IS much easier, in Wish you need to _think_.

I played WoW and decided to continue playing it after realeasing because it was so long best in the market. Itself I find World Of Warcraft mediocre.

Yes, My support to Wish was so long vocal. I had time only at weekend to play Wish beta couple of days and didn't get involved before this deeply. It was almost perfect, except some bugs and improvement of quests maybe. I really like idea of all items are craftable by players and also the idea of economy based on players. Also, I like idea of plagues of cities, there must not to be safe spots. Why should there be?

Most of it, I liked idea of freedom of choice, no class templates. Also, idea of rogues (real rogues) was really promising (wasn't implemented to beta yet).

Also, one guy in game, when news was arriving, promised to start Wish relief, will see. I am ready to pay for it it's current stage to finish it. And, if they are not able to finish it as Ultra MMORPG, let it be just MMORPG.

Also, I do not believe in selling rights to other company, it's like 99% that they will crap the idea and will come another clone of the clone of the clone.

I usually get angry couple times per year. This was one of these times. (Sorrey for bad english.)

Wish was THE GAME.

Potential MMO developers need to get it in there heads that competiting in the MMO market at this point in time with basically IDENTICAL products to highly successful and polished games like eq2, wow and Lineage, not too mention second tier titles like DAOC and so on, make it virtually impossible to crack the market now. WoW and Eq2 are exceptions due to not only excellant products but massive hype which virtually guarantee's good initial sales.

If the problem was financial, im not surprised. Id rather put my money into say Anarchy Online 2 then yet another fantasy based MMO in a market thats been flogged to death. People say "Well, it works doesnt it" Well it use to work...we have seen several promising titles cancelled - Mythica, Dragon Empires and now Wish. How many more have to go before people realize its flooded, obviously those in authority at Mutable Realms did.

The industry needs some serious creative flourish to take place. COH showed you can make an MMO based on a popular theme (superheroes) that hasnt been flogged to death and make a success of it. It can be done.

I still cant believe there hasnt been trully successful titles based around horror mythology - vampires and so on. That genre is ripe for the picking and some company with the vision to see it through is going to set the scene on fire again. Then there are titles combining resource management, strategy, warfare and so on in an MMO like Planetside....theres certainly more scope in modern military MMO's.

Ive yet to see an MMO embrace politics as a theme in any serious way either, yet where all familiar with it, and the desire to wield power is within 90% of us.

Ok its risky, but if its done right it CAN work. Its certainly better than virtually guaranteeing failure but releasing yet another clone of a clone of a clone. WoW itself is the ultimate clone.

Wake up Devs and Publishers, its time to move forward.

" polished games like eq2..."

Well it is a bit overstatement. EQ2 is far from polished:) I still cant use 2 of my spells from the last patch, etc. I wouldnt call it a polished game. Cant comment on WOW, cause i havent played it yet.

WTF is this! stop canceling games i like

The MMORPG genre is really getting saturated with games now and I think the bar has been raised a lot by games such as WoW and EQ2. However the concepts of WISH were very good and just like UO:X was cancelled that too had some good ideas. I don't think this will be the only MMORPG in development, or currently active, that will be cancelled this year.

I also believe that players are now more cautious about subscribing to games for a full 12-months just in case it is not around any more (talking about EnB here as an example). Personally I think the business model of monthly subscriptions will change to something more like top-up cards for mobile phones where you pre-pay per hour, the more hours you buy the cheaper it is, but that won't tie you in to another 30 days. That way the casual gamer is happy because they don't waste money on game time they are not playing and the hardcore gamer is happy because they get more game time cheaper.

Agreed Hashman

The most successful business models i think will be those with the greatest number of options available to subscribers. Although we have to keep in mind that companies need and prefer the security of stable payment schemes like monthly subscription. The idea of charging say 20 cents per hour for play would scare many companies, but also play into the hands of those with highly addictive titles :) Much like people overspend on mobile phones, many gamers would be caught on such a scheme...but its an option. I also think that considering how many gamers complain that the last addon just ruined there favourity game, the option of a tiered pricing depending on what addon's the gamer wishes to use is another good option. In the end choice is a good idea. Flexibility is good

- Hourly Rates

- Pricing based on addons installed and used by the gamer

- The standard monthly, quarterly and yearly sub rates

- more expensive subscriptions based on "premium" services and extra benefits that dont several impenge the "average" player within any given game.

All four options are worth consideration

it was a sad day for me

I liked the game and had much fun at it.
wish 2 had many bugs, lags and other things that weren'T good, but i don't like the graphic at wow too.
graphic of wih2 weren'T bad, but i think most of the people didn't like the graphics and say it is bad.

When i was played the game my first 30 minutes, i couln't say it is a good game or a bad game.
but you didn't shall make an opinion of a game after 30 minutes escpecially a beta game.
i know, when you play wow you liked it after 30 minutes, but i played this game one week in the OB, and all the time get some quest and killed some monsters, oh sometimes i mined or played in a party, how amazing.

some people like to kill only monster and do nothing other, but for me this isn't a real rpg.
a real rpg have to have a world which is alive. but i didn't have this feeling at wow.
in wish were there live events with make this game so unique and i never seen before(example:a city was sieged of about 1000 goblins, and we fought about 7 hours against it, this very funny or a city was attack of 50 monster).

i accepted when people like wow which are easy and have good graphic and more things they like,but not everyone want this at game. Some people want a complicate game, wich complicate craftsystem, economy and other things wich are more or less complicate.
and for me isn't important to have very good graphics, or controls like PNC, or easy game to understand, i want a game that makes fun. if the game doesn'T make fun, it can have the best graphic all things, but it will be shit.

And gyus, if you don't like the game, you shouldn't say that it is bad.
and i say that wow is good, but i don't like it.

i will never foget wish2 beta and wait for a game which is similar like it.
thank you mutant realms.
(sorry for my bad english)

greets zaarab

LOL... Thats all

I was shocked to find it cancelled so abrupty.  I had played it for about a week and it was starting to grow on me.  I don't prefer PnC, but I'd gotten used to it.  When you turned the graphics up to high, it really looked beautiful, but I had to set the graphics on the low setting to get good fps.

I wasn't impressed with the fighting system, but the crafting was interesting.  It still needed a lot of balancing but the potential was very good.  Same thing with the quest system.  The live content was very ambitious and probably a big factor in why they coukdn't afford to run the game.

Their two big selling points, live content and a single world, were probably also their downfall.  The live content meant that it took lots of extra people to support, it which means higher cost of operation.  Having a single world meant that their subsctiber base would be limited to what could be supported on that one world.  I suspect that as they added people to the beta and saw the limits of what the server could actually support, they realized that they could never support enough players to pay for the cost of running the game.

---

Originally posted by NJCopycat
The game drove me nuts with the 4 hour download, the 1 week wait for activation with all the patches, then to only get 1 day of game play? Sorry for your lost everyone...but this much trouble just to beta test....not worth all the crying imho

---

1) The game download wasn't big, it was a little over 1.2GB, thats half the size of World of Warcraft, and a third of the size of EQII.

2) Waiting to be activated is part and parcel of Beta testing MMOGs, I waited for weeks to be activated on EQII, months to be activated on singularity to beta EvE : Exodus, and a day before the release of Core Combat! Other games I have been activated on instantly (CoH, LII, PlanetSide) its all luck of the draw, if the computer picks you to be part of the first wave then great, if not tough luck on the draw... do you complain each week that you don't win the lottery?

3) The only reason you only got a short time to play Beta 2.0 is you wern't selected immediatly (see 2) marc said that they have analysed the data provided from the start of Beta 2.0 and decided that there was no way that the they could sustain the game. It was data gathered from Beta 2.0 that made mutable realms decide to cut their losses.

Why does it hurt when I pee?

This is so funny is almost sad

i guess the devs finally played the game and experienced how awful it was.

smart move wish.

-----------------------
"Dont make me get my flying monkeys"

well i hope the source code is made available, would love to run a private server

Dun! Dun! Dun! Another one bites the dust!

Physics, gameplay, controls, graphics all were crappy at best.

No wonder they didn't have a publisher, people w/ the mind set 'MMO's are the cash cow of the gaming industry! Let's make one!' have NO CLUE.   I gave this game a valid attempt for awhile now and I just wasn't 'feeling' it.

Beta Tested: Everquest+ Expansions, AC,UO,AO,DAoC,L2,CoH,Wish,WoW,EQ2

Wish goofed up. Simple. If I get a horrible package and when I open it up, there's another horrible package inside and when I open that up there's another ugly package, I throw the rest away. Why? Because there's lots of great packages out there already.

There were 60.000 beta players signing up. I wouldn't be surprised if half of them uninstalled the game after seeing the horrible performance and even more horrible interface. They missed out on a great game though with lots of potential.

I see people say that you need to *think* in Wish and that it is much more complex than WoW. That is the biggest crap I heard. A game can have BOTH a good interface and be complex. If Wish had the interface of say Horizons or WoW people would stick longer and actually enjoy the game more.

In any case the devs learned a lesson. To get to players, you need to captivate them the moment they log in. With 100 different MMORPGs fishing in the same market you cannot afford a steep learning curve. A steep learning curve is not needed for complexity. Chess is incredibly complex, yet it is learned in 15 minutes.

Skullkrusher,

In this case, it just might, I'm pretty sure all the server tech they were using like the ICE engine is open source.

Hang on to the client though just in case they do release it because the NDL Gamebryo and Realtree stuff isn't open source and would have to be stripped out for the game to be given away.

That said maybe it could be easily ported over to a more easily available 3D engine like UT or Source or something. You already have the artwork etc, maybe someone will code a backend engine for it anyway.

Sure you might not be able to support lots of players on a typical home server but I bet it could support 10 or 20 easy enough. Hell if I was one of the Devs, I'd rather make the server code available open source after all the work I put into it than just have it fade away into nothing. Might not make money off it, but at least you could know people were enjoying all your hard work instead of it just being thrown away.

This is the second game that I was watching with in anticipation to get cancelled. The other was WARHAMMER ONLINE.

Sadly, having vision does not equate to having financial backing. The sudden announcement may have been due to personal reasons of individuals at the head of the company. Ultimately you need financial backing today, since you have to compete with SONY (EQ2) and BLIZZARD (WoW) whose large coporate backing.

Look at AC and AC2. Bought back from a neglectful Microsoft, they (I imagine) just barely support themselves.

My theory is: Mutable Realms knew they were unable to further finance it, but by going "live" beta, they could show would-be backers that they had what it takes (which they may have, we may never know.) Alas, sans funding, the game was doomed.

If anyone is out there at Mutable Realms or the Old Warhammer Online folks, reading this, I have a huge suggestion.

With all the hype generated, try to sell private shares of the company to PLAYERS, say $10 a share. For every share they get a free month when the game goes public and a space in Beta if they buy X number of shares. Then either offer to buy back shares (at X% increase) or offer dividends after X number of years. While a lot of MMO players are tight fisted fools who want something for nothing, there are a number of more loyal folks who may send off some dough to own part of the company and have a little voice in what is done.

IF oh say 50% (a hugely unrealistic number) of the 50,000 beta testers invested $20 then Mutable Realms would have a $500,000 cash injection.

Any Devs, etc of these games or others feel free to contact me.

Anthrorob

z3bra,

I am wondering what MR, is going to do, depending on who you have listened to they have had their funding pulled / been sued / gone all but bankrupt. Surely they (or the administrators / recievers) are going to be looking at striping the work they have done to peices and selling it to the highest bidder.

If so there is little or no hope of ever seeing Wish again, perhaps the only hope is the lead designers will be snapped up by one of the bigger games manafacturers, although I get the feeling that marc and big EA would be like chalk and cheese.

I enjoyed the beta test.  I never had any problem downloading. Zipped right in but i do have a good Cable connection.  Knowing full well ahead of time that this is Beta and the game would be wonky and suffer a lot of shutdowns so they can tweek this or that. Servers will need configuring for the demands placed on it.  Yes I been down the road before. The PnC movement didn't bother me. And the fact that you could get direction from guards and sit back was pure pleasure. Specially the first time you get to a new city. No more hollering Anyone know where the so and so is at? The combat system while at first is bland after getting more and more moves you can have real fun finding out what combos will do the most damage to which mobs. To me a much better system that click and sit and wait to see what happens. To my surprise a well timed kick gave good damage to some mobs.

The biggest problem I could see was after almost a week a whole bunch of people could not play anymore simply because thier graphic cards were not up to par. Maybe the numbers of beta testers dropped so dramatically they figured they wouldnt have a big enough player base to make a profit.

Who knows? Only the MR people and they are not talking.

I found this interesting. It's from the FAQ page on Mutable Realms home page. Apparently it wasn't heavily funded enough and the "private investor group" had second thoughts...

1.7 - How secure is Wish's funding? Will it definitely release?

The Wish project is heavily funded by a private investor group, which allows the product to be complete before launching. We will not rush out an incomplete title.

Goldengate:
"... Apparently it wasn't heavily funded enough and the "private investor group" had second thoughts..."

And how on earth can you claim you know what exactly happened to Mutable Realms?
Wait for the news, don't jump to conclusions without knowing any facts.

Most likely they've made some calculations based on the beta test data and realized the game would cost way too much (for the players) - this is my opinion, based on one letter from devs on the beta forum (not the message you can read in the news).

With all the seamless wold design, huge map, zillions of custom items, live content, I can believe they underestimated the cost, altho it's still a very ugly mistake and a late wakeup. But probably there was something else in the background and we may never get to know what.

Oscillate:
be happy, you probably would be just as sad as most of us who tried the game.
I played for roughly a week, and I'm very-very sad.

There could be a hundred reasons why it shut down. The top ones would be IMO (in no order)

1. Private investors backed out. Although I doubt it, because it was already near finished.

2. They realized they couldn't deliver a big part of the game. Whether that be supporting there entire population on 1 server(which I never expected to work if the game got over 20K simoltaneous players)

3. The realization that the game wasn't as big as they would have hoped, and still had too many problems to fix.

yeah, and add to it
- copyright infingement / law issues

We can keep speculating, that was basically going on the last day on the beta forums, with only two pieces of information, one the official letter which does not say anything basically, second was the aforementioned email quoted in a forum topic, which I did not copy out.

For point 2.: it was working, even tho I don't know the actual (player) numbers, but I know that it was well in the thousands simultaneously online (gf was playing too, on the other end of the continent, and seeing the acutal numbers in different town guild I can make an educated guess :-)). They did overcome the difficulties, so it's quite possible. Altho it might have required resources extreme. There was no comment on it. But for this reason I don't think it was that extreme, if it would have, they'd have probably dropped some sidenote or hint along the line

3: possible, that they've planned for many many more features, and seeing the progress on the current stuff they've calculated a release date of 2010 ;-) ok it could be a factor, yes.

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Originally posted by horvathi

And how on earth can you claim you know what exactly happened to Mutable Realms?
Wait for the news, don't jump to conclusions without knowing any facts.

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Horvathi,
Where do I claim that I know EXACTLY what happened to Mutable Realms? I said "apparently", which means 'appearing as such, but not necessarily so'. I wasn't attempting to jump to a conclusion, merely speculating based on what little we know. And it's probably, at least in part, a fairly safe assumption. Most projects aren't cancelled because they're flush with money. And if the private investors continued to commit funds to the project, it's not at all likely that the devs, after having committed so much to Wish, would choose to cancel the project based on their own concerns about its long term financial viability.

Well, since the game is cancelled, I guess the NDA no longer applies?? I was a beta tester since 1.3, and it was a very nice experience. After being in betas for things like Horizons, Eve, Neocron, Sims Online, Planetside, AO and a few more, it was pretty cool the way the devs stayed in contact with the testers, they were VERY present in the forums, always a dev or 2 in game to be bombarded with questions and suggestions, as well as the awesome live action events and the way you could participate, earn some fame and nice loot, and get your name in the paper! Get a title if the dev thought you were doing a good job even.

Then the game went to Beta 1.4, which was a small version for the E3 show. Beta 1.5 came out a few months back, and it had it's share of issues, but all seemed solvable. But the tester base was small, usually about 50 people online at any given time.

Now cut to Jan 1st, open of Beta 2. We older testers got a few days early preview before it went public, and it seemed we were in for a bit of a rough ride, server was down as much as it was up. Now the horde jumps in, and the server was very unstable, being up for 2 hours, down for 4, up for 4, down for 3... etc....... continued on until yesterday, when they pulled the plug.

Lack of a publisher is not a good thing, but I feel more likely is some core part of the game, it's engine, or the cluster server setup they were trying to use just didn't/couldn't scale up the way they believed it would. It had to be something that just couldn't be fixed, even by throwing more money at it, which I'm sure wasn't very plentiful anyway.

I'm very sorry to see it go, PnC movement takes a little to get used to, but there are a few games out there that use it, and are still going, so that was a minor issue. Good luck to all the awesome devs at Mutable Realms, I sincerely hope that I am wrong, and maybe it was just running out of money with no publisher. In that case, someone may come along and resurect it. I'me not a fan boi, but it was really the best experience I've had beta testing a game, and will long remember it. And it was pretty fun to play as well........

I played wish for a while, I know that the lag was horrid and the servers were so fenicky.  If I could I would buy the source code and get funding to finish that game.  Possibly even launch it.  Yes, I know wishful thinking.

Lugh

Really localhost,

You see its fine and dandy to complain about other people to start a stir, but the truth is I have the cash to back it.  Don't get drama queen on us cause you have trouble livin with mommy.

Lugh

Lugh, do it! Or what about Anthrorob's idea: "With all the hype generated, try to sell private shares of the company to PLAYERS, say $10 a share. For every share they get a free month when the game goes public and a space in Beta if they buy X number of shares. Then either offer to buy back shares (at X% increase) or offer dividends after X number of years. While a lot of MMO players are tight fisted fools who want something for nothing, there are a number of more loyal folks who may send off some dough to own part of the company and have a little voice in what is done"

In a week of playing the Wish 2.0 beta I went from being a rusted-on UO player to seriously considering closing ALL my UO accounts when Wish went live. So I'd put money into it for sure. Someone just tell me where to sign!

Seems a lot of the nay-sayers here played Wish for about 30 minutes, if at all. Yes it had problems, but it was a beta for chrissake! The devs were doing an exceptional job I thought ( but maybe im just used to UO where bugs hang around for years lol). They were not only fixing the problems but even implementing new stuff - like overhead chat which they put in on about day 6 as a result of player feedback. I never got totally comfortable with the PnC but didnt seem completely off the cards that the worst aspects of it could be toned down. And I thought server stability actually improved a hell of a lot in the last couple days, I didn't get one crash, only planned take-towns with a warning message.

My money would be on the VC's having got cold feet/upscaled costs/no publisher - but opinions here about the reason for the cancellation are just that, opinions. I hope one day we find out the real story although likelihood is the staff were all made to sign non-disclosure undertakings when they got their checks, else we would probably have heard something more by now.

It was an experience I'll never forget. Wish Beta 2.0 really rekindled my love for these games and I'll dream of one which is similar to it. Thank you to the Mutable Realms devs who put such heart and soul into it.

MR killed my elf! Damn them!

Golden Gate: " ... I said "apparently" ..."

You're right, I apologize.

http://www.projectwish.com/

sublmnl,

NDA or not, sooner or later someone's going to cave in and leak a bit more of the story I'm willing to bet. I'm sure given the ability to do so anonymously on the internet, it's only a matter of time. (as in using public Wi-fi spots, libraries, fake names etc.) Someone will eventually talk.

Thats a quite a bad news. Still, maybe it was a wise desicion to close the project now and not after spending another million for launch. Wish was full of interesting ideas, however it would take a lot of time to convince ppl that these ideas are what they will like. PNC, graphics that is below what is already live in WOW or EQ2 but more resource demanding, only these factors would be a real stopper for new players. At best the game would take some small corner of the marker like Shadowbane or Neocron.

Still I'm sad, cause one more promising game with NEW ideas has been closed. What original projects still left? DnD Online? Hope it will make until release.

WISH pretty much did what I've come to expect from gaming companies these days. They hype something up, they get onto the right foot about it, but then they try to exceed some mythical standard and fail. I'm feeling a little jaded by their sudden, seemingly unwarranted and totally unexplained cancellation.

Ironically, they tried hardest to appeal to remaining UO players; most of whom still play UO because its demands on their computers are less, and they are well established. Those that were going to "abandon ship", did so a long time ago. The community remaining in UO is something of a sedentary creature, comfortable in its hole. I should know, I'm still part of it.

But what Mutable Realms did was nothing more than I expected, I supposed. I have been fed from the hands of a game that consistently makes promises it can't keep and disappoints. They've gotten much better, but for people like me, it is too late. We are already pessimistic about MMORPGs.

I'll be keeping my fingers crossed that something comes out that really strikes my fancy. I'm most upset because I had a lot of friends looking forward to leaving UO for something they believed in - and they believed in WISH.

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Originally posted by numatic

There could be a hundred reasons why it shut down. The top ones would be IMO (in no order)

1. Private investors backed out. Although I doubt it, because it was already near finished.

2. They realized they couldn't deliver a big part of the game. Whether that be supporting there entire population on 1 server(which I never expected to work if the game got over 20K simoltaneous players)

3. The realization that the game wasn't as big as they would have hoped, and still had too many problems to fix.

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"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars"
- Oscar Wilde

Actually for many (yes, guess what, long time MMORPG player that are not interested in EQ2 or WoW) it was the god game they craved for. Now we try to get it back/revive it.
Visit www.projectwish.com to stay in touch with all and keep being informed what goes on.

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Originally posted by Xirzin
Think it might have had something to do with the fact that the game didn't support MMX cards?

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didnt support some AMD processors either and i think thats a pretty large chunk of gamers out there w/o "uber computers" (like me) so i guess they might try to make it less stressful on some of the not so new PCs

BTW this is about wish being cancelled all of u damn EQ2 lovers/haters just need to stop "poisoning" all of the forums that arent even about EQ2

i played the game for less than 5min, i really thot the game was a step back in modern gaming; i thot this because of the graphics....i know it was still scheduled for release in 5months, but for me it was like,"why am i wasting my time on this shit when i need to get my troll rogue to lvl60 in WoW"

but i wanted it to succeed....i'm goin to need another option when i get tired of wow, and it has to be exciting and fun.

9/11 Remember 4 ever.

"I can't say I was that sad to hear this news. I found Mutable realms to be incredibly arrogant and there fan boys to be unbearable. They all acted as if wish was some kind of gaming god that was going to take mmorpgs to the next lvl when it was in a fact a mediocre everquest/UO clone and having more than a certain number of people on one server doesnt constitute a new game type, lol there was nothing "ultra" about Wish."

Yell it from the roof tops. There was one mod in particular who could not say enough how wish was so "innovative".

The game was canned for the simple fact that it was below par.

Just to illustrate how ignorant and annoying Wish fan boys are I have found some quotes from ProjectWish.com-

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Wish was pure genious in the making, the first of it's kind, Wish was GUARENTEED to be the MOST popular, and the MOST content/Open/Social RPG of all time, and would be sure to wipe clean all current MMORPGS off the face of this Earth

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the MAIN market for Wish was word of mouth. People played it, saw it was the best MMORPG they ever played, told friends, and they played, enjoyed, etc. People who were playing WoW/EQ2, entire clans/guilds in those games signed up for WISH beta, and couldn't wait to play it, and when it came out, they stopped playing WoW/EQ games and started Wish, and had just about thrown out the other games, when Wish died:(

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So you see the problem is NOT players. Wish was so good that I could see people going out and buying a PC just for Wish

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By the beginning of 3.0 Wish would have had more beta singups/players than probably EVERY mmorpg out there combined. After playing even a few days of WISH and you're an expert on online games like I am:).....You could tell WISH would destroy 100% of all competition and this is probably why EQ/Sony either found a reason to sue or buy out MR:(

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Well i watched projectwish these last(and its first ;) ) days.. and they're storming ahead .. can't take long till it crashes ;)
Also I guess a lot of those people are overestimating some of their ability of really getting such a project done...
just my 2 cents :)

Wow, that's amazing how much negativism some people can amass in themselves.
Guys, if you accept a little advice: try to go on positive sometime soon, all-negative thinking is good only one thing: killing your mind and soul slowly.

Yes, you can keep ranting about how much you hate wish, but tell me, will it achieve anything?
Will it help anyone? Or you simply trying a feeble effort to hurt someone for the fun of it?

Wish 'fanboys' are mostly mature players as it seems by now, who know what they miss from today's market's hiped games, and clearly the opposition is the sub-puberty player base of the current 'top' games, who enjoy trying to look like very informed with very strong opinions.

Do you guys expect anyone to take you seriously at all? I hope not.
Before you do, put something on the table. Build something worthwhile. Please.
Or at least try to think: why would it hurt *anyone* to have another game on the market...?
Maybe it would have some advantages? hm? Especially a free one?
You wouldn't have to go ask mom to pay for your next month...if nothing else.

Well it would be great if that project did really have success... still i think a lot of people there get carried away by their enthusiasm for the project, but will not stay around.
I don't really have to see this project fail, heck if they really DO put up a game in the end it could be just what the players have been waiting for.. who knows...

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Originally posted by zamoth_bg
It is shame that I couldnt get my hands on the game because of this stupid fileplanet.com(you SUCK)
1. I think that the game was cancelled simply by the lack of money. There is no other reason. I mean, there are so many stupid games have a large fan base why wouldnt WISH had such.
2. It is strange that the cancel it so abruptly. And wtf this means(from the data we gathered from the beta) were all the ppl disapointed? Were ther a lot of lag ? It has to be sth serious to cancel it like that.
There is surely sth wrong about it. I think the mmorpg scene lost another good mmorpg
WoW devoured everything :(

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You have all the reason

Estrados, it's always like this.
There are always people who have the most fantastic, full-blown ideas, willing to devote all their time, and just disappear when it comes to hard work. I'm sure it has been calculated in. Besides the whole thing just started a week ago, it's way to early to form opinions on the outcome IMHO.

There are already projects out there going this way, it's possible that the community will simply join one of those. Nothing's been decided yet.

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Originally posted by Lughmyrden

Really localhost,

You see its fine and dandy to complain about other people to start a stir, but the truth is I have the cash to back it.  Don't get drama queen on us cause you have trouble livin with mommy.

Lugh

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Sorry, I was actually talking to Sindyr and his comment "They probably got cancelled in part by their absurd dedication to PNC (point and click) movement instead of WASD."

Not sure why the forum did not Quote it like it should have. 

Well, what can I say? Oh yeah...Bah bye! I was in beta and I honestly did not give Wish enough of my time to give a good 2 cents worth. It just wasn't what I'm looking for. Maybe the devs will take thier experience elsewhere and come up with something even better! In the mean time....there are others on the horizon....

DARK AND LIGHT

http://www.projectwish.com

This is an ongoing project to create a game with the same feel that WISH once had. Currently in very early development.