Taken right from the horses mouth.

www.faceofmankind.com

Announcement

We all know that you are eagerly awaiting Face of Mankind: Rebirth and we are
very greatful that you stayed with us. This makes the following announcement
even more sad for us.

The development of Face of Mankind: Rebirth has been canceled. There are several
reasons for this decision, of which some you might understand and others you won't.
The main reason is the lack of financial resources to develop the game and finish
it the way we want. FoM, as many other MMORPGs today, is a game that relies heavily
on visual content. For us, being only a small development studio with very limited
resources, it would be nearly impossible to make the game we want it to be. You
might wonder what there is to change? It runs fine and works in a way. That's right,
but not the way it's supposed to. And spending so much more power and private funding
into the project made not much sense anymore. There might be a time for FoM in the
future, but it's just not now.

We thought about several ways to get the financing done. We tried finding a new
publisher or getting investments from other sources. The best solution for the game
would have been a publisher who is not solely interested in making quick money.
Especially when it comes to MMO's, that have so much financial potential, the only
way to go is careful development, testing and a well planned release. This doesn't
necessarily have to mean a big multi-million budget. Many games are just oversized
these days.

After all, this is not the end for Duplex Systems. We have tons of ideas and plans
and are fully dedicated to develop those MMO's that the current market needs.
In a certain way, I have to admit that FoM was oversized as well. We accomplished
more than we were actually supposed to for such a small company. Many wondered if
Duplex Systems was just a one-man show. Altogether this is obviously not true, but
at times it was. And it made me crash down physically by the end of 2005. Even
though I was able to bring the development of FoM to an end, it made me change my
life and the way I run business drastically.
Beyond many other ideas, I always had the idea of a game that doesn't rely so much on
graphical resources, but is more module based and generated in a way, and in the
end could be done pretty well by a one or two man team. During the latest months
I made this idea more concrete and developed a game concept for it. The result
is Nanoverse Online, a very fresh concept in the MMO realm. At this time I don't
plan to release any kind of details just yet. This is to keep our ideas safe and
unique, which I hope you will understand.

Keep an eye open at:
http://www.nanoverse-online.com

Sincerely,
Marko Dieckmann
Duplex Systems

God damn.. this seriously made me cry.. remembering all of the good times we all had..

You'll never find another game like this..

Rest In Peace

Face of Mankind

I cried in real life :(

FoM was the greatest game i ever played, and for the forseeable future fom:r was the last great hope..

abandon all hope, ye who enter here.....

Bye FOM,

And another one bites the dust.

Well, this sucks... 

I feel bit strange with the idea that FoM is on a planet whe never reach.

Al the best guys and gl for Duplex.

This mmorpg wil stay forever in my mind.

EC rules the waves

I'm sure I speak for all of us who actually liked the game and didn't flame it...

Thats some serious Bull !@#$  and Ojom needs to go !@#$%. To all who read NEVER play with Ojom they ruined quite a good game, if they only had the staff and funds to make it a titan. Well it was good knowing you all fellow fans and not so much Crispy and his gang  but it made killing you all the funner and a unique part of the game unlike any others. Anyways RIP Face of Mankind and the avatars with it.

RIP EX Tristan de Mistral, Lion Heart, Mr. Smilez, Big Bad Dude, and other fun or suicidal anti-LED charecters

/signed

Just another gamer looking for something good

Unnick named guy

8r4nd4n

P.S. just had to add some last smileyz and humor to all who didn't like those names and those who did thanks for bearing with me while I grew up or started i guess. I will miss you all and hope to see you in other games

After all these "improvements" they were "working" on so they could relaunch FoM, they out of the blue cancel. But SURPRISE, they have a new mmo in the works for you all!!

I won't begrudge those of you who truly liked this game for whatever reason, but anyone who goes to these "developers" next game really needs a long vacation from gaming.....

First game in the Dead Gamess section!  Grats FOM

As to all of you people who thought that FOM would actually relaunch, I feel bad for you.  If they can't relaunch FOM, then I doubt that we will see any of these new MMOs they speak of on the market anytime soon.

haha face of mankind was canceled... ironic

This starting to happen more often these days. Same thing happened to Gods and Heros.

From the announcement:

The best solution for the game would have been a publisher who is not solely interested in making quick money.

Well, there's the problem with all MMO development in a nutshell.

Unless you can guarantee WoWlike success, the investors (who more often than not are looking exclusively at numbers, not the actual product, no matter what industry it's in) are not going to be interested.  There are very few rugged indivduals out there who see a product, think "wow this is cool!" and throw money at the developers to make it a reality.  More often they're grey men and women in grey suits who work for an investment firm that deals strictly with numbers, not dreams.

MMOs to be good have to be about putting people into a dream.  This is incompatible with ruthess American-Ferengi capitalism, which is about wallowing in money.

Hahah, good read! Don't want another WoW, you mean don't want to make $$ = flop!! Did this board recommend the games direction?  Hahah, to funny!

WHAT THE FUCK

The only MMORPG that I know of that has:

- No quests, only player-made missions

- No leveling, only promotion based on social actions

- No grind, no NPCs, no boring shit

Is dead.

RIP FoM. One of the best MMOs I ever played.

Fom didn't have enough content, and the game before even hitting Milestone 1 was getting stale.

A lot of Foms charm was solely based on "what if" in terms of potential for the game and was in no way a "great" game.

Perhaps its because it was so focused on player content (if you can call it that) that the game died, because its community for the most part is and was garbage -as fully seen at Ikoru's forums-

Although it was expected, it still is very sad to hear that such a great game which was once at it's absolute prime before it even launched was one of the best MMORPGs I ever played, is now at it's end.

The concept was there, the design just took a wrong direction. Such a shame that a game like that is no more.

Well that blows.

I think we all knew it was coming... but either way it sucks. This was a great idea for a game and while I played it I had a great time and to me it was one of the best MMOs I have ever played.

Who knows... down the road they might get back up on their feet and try it again... that would be nice ^_^

FOM started to die at the the end of Open Beta when developers and publishers never listened to the players.  The article mentions graphics, why is it all developers etc seem to still think that graphics are the most important thing in a game?
 

In Beta we were all happy with graphics, then someone decided to update the graphic engine just after we all spent months of ironing out all the graphic gliches and bugs. The change was for the worse, we still had the old style background and objects, but a totally new carachter frame which ruined the look and feel.
 

The point with FOM was that most of the roleplay went on outside of the game environment,  this was one of the few MMORPGS which encourages proper politics, relations, interaction , espienge, spying , inflitration , promotion, careers and so on.
 

FOM could have improved in a number of areas and been even better, another mistake was to turn it into a FPS game, which again was wrong, a direction that we could see in BETA. 

I had the joy to be invovled in closed beta right through to end of open Beta, it was the best MMORPG experience i have ever had.

RIP FOM

Originally posted by SioBabble

From the announcement:

The best solution for the game would have been a publisher who is not solely interested in making quick money.

Well, there's the problem with all MMO development in a nutshell.

Unless you can guarantee WoWlike success, the investors (who more often than not are looking exclusively at numbers, not the actual product, no matter what industry it's in) are not going to be interested.  There are very few rugged indivduals out there who see a product, think "wow this is cool!" and throw money at the developers to make it a reality.  More often they're grey men and women in grey suits who work for an investment firm that deals strictly with numbers, not dreams.

MMOs to be good have to be about putting people into a dream.  This is incompatible with ruthess American-Ferengi capitalism, which is about wallowing in money.

I'll be quoting this post in my design document.

I also enjoyed my time during closed beta immensely, no point trying to explain the reasons why, either people understand or they don’t, it was a paradise for role-play within a fps sandbox world with player generated content (what little there was of it).