#3 The Chronicle
Rapid Reality was a company with a plan, a plan to create games at an unheard of speed to make them available to players through a hub site at one low price. One of the flagship games of this program was to be known as The Chronicle.
;)
At first blush, The Chronicle offered players an experience different from all others, best known for making a valiant attempt to cater to both a casual audience and a hardcore audience. They planned to do this by allowing players the choice between making a "regular character," your work-a-day hero types, much like all of the heroes in all of the MMOs you've ever played. The other option players would have would be to play a "main character". Main characters would have been the stronger and more powerful of the two. They would have been able to own land and lead factions. The only catch was that main characters were susceptible to permanent death.
Even with just a taste of what early concepts the developers had in mind, it is easy to see what might have drawn the attention of MMO fans, especially the "hardcore" audience that has been asking for an MMO perma-death option for some time. It generated so much interest, in fact, that players began to pre-order the game.
Later, developers changed the direction of the game significantly. So significantly, in fact, that they went so far as to offer refunds to their pre-payers. Things went downhill from there.
Between players complaining that the offered refunds were difficult, if at all possible to obtain, the eventual total cancellation of The Chronicle and the eventual closure of Rapid Reality as a company, many players were left with a bad enough taste in their mouths that it is fair to say that The Chronicle deserves to be listed as one of the five most anger inspiring MMOs.
#2 Dark And Light
NPCube made a lot of promises with the announcement of their first MMORPG, Dark and Light. A lot of promises that, to gamers screaming at the time for something new and interesting, maybe a sandbox to play in rather than a theme park, sounded like mana from heaven.
;)
Dark and Light players were supposed to have been able to look forward to a single shard game with no zones, no loading times. The feature list read like a Christmas list belonging to someone from the very vocal group of players who are looking for an MMO more similar to old school Ultima Online than World of Warcraft. As a result, the buzz surrounding this one was huge.
As time trudged along, players began to preorder, and the developers even unlocked the "Settlers of Ganareth" game, which was supposed to have been a prequel to the eventual game, giving players a chance to shape the world and lore that came before. Then, the game "launched."
I use the word "launched" in quotation marks because it really seems as though the game never really did make it. When players actually managed to get the game installed and running (our own MMORPG.com reviewer had trouble in his initial foray into the world), they found the world empty, many players having abandoned the game on un-delivered promises of systems like politics and housing.
In the end, NPCube's complete mishandling of the game not only drove players away, but also resulted in a series of messy lawsuits surrounding the game's engine that eventually put the company out of business.
All in all, Dark and Light was a frustrating experience for everyone: the developers, the players and journalists, the courts.... The 4.0 that the game earned in its MMORPG.com review pretty much summed it up with one descriptive word: Hopeless.
#1 Mourning
Mourning, AKA Age of Mourning, AKA, Thrones of Chaos, AKA whatever else these people called themselves and their "game," is one of, if not the, most cursed name in MMO gaming. While all of the other games on this list at least made an effort to try to produce a product for the end consumer, Mourning is the closest of all to being seen as a full-blown scam.
;)
The salient details of what exactly happened, and the way that the events unfolded are difficult to work out. Information available on the web is at best contradictory and at worst presented by people who are already so angry about what happened that it is difficult to take anything that they are saying as unbiased fact.
What we do know is that people who paid for preorders of the game were sent "collectable" discs, which turned out to be nothing more than CD-RWs with an old client version on them. We also know that the game, when 'released" was nowhere even remotely close to a finished game. I know that this is something that gets thrown around a lot in MMO gaming. "Oh, they're charging us to beta this game," or "they released an unfinished piece of crap." That, in most cases, is hyperbole. Most of those games are completely playable, but with some remaining bugs, or other problems. Mourning was actually broken and considered generally unplayable. We also know, for what it's worth, that the word fraud was actually censored out by the game's official forums.
If there were any questions about the infuriating stink surrounding this game, they were put to rest when the same game was promised to players a second time, this go around under the name Thrones of Chaos, a game that ended in similar highstrung, emotional fireworks and accusations of scamming.
In the end, the players and fans who were most directly affected by Mourning would be better tellers of the tale than I, so I will leave it to them saying only that it is the pure venom with which people speak or write of this title that grants it the title of #1 Most Infuriating MMO of all time.
