Copying WoW - Flowers for Alganon

MMORPG.com's Bill Murphy takes a look at the recent furor over at Quest Online's Alganon and talks about how the game may have tried too hard to look and feel like Blizzard's MMO giant, World of Warcraft.

I feel a little bad for David Allen.

The man tried to create something epic and revolutionary with Horizons: Empire of Istaria, by making a seamless world that was driven by an ongoing story in which players would participate and thereby help direct change in the game world. But the game failed to gain any traction. Allen moved on to create a company called Pharaoh Productions, which had difficulty raising capital to fund his ideas. David shut down the studio in 2004 and left the industry for a while, only to come back recharged and ready to take on all comers with what he thought would be successful reentry into the MMORPG industry. With Gregory Wexler, Allen began the studio Quest Online and started production on Crusade… which would later become the game we now know as Alganon.

The game (soft) launched on December 1st of 2009 with a price-tag for entry, and a subscription attached to keep playing just like most AAA titles out there. On March 1st of this year the game went subscription free… just three months into its life. You still have to buy the client, and there is a free trial available, but there is no longer any subscription required to keep playing for as long as you want. It seemed that while Quest Online’s debut title wasn’t blazing any trails, it was holding its own and beginning to carve itself a nice little slice of the market.

Read Copying WoW - Flowers for Alganon.