South Australian developer, Hidden Waters, has announced their first project, a fantasy based massively multiplayer online role playing game called Restless World. The project is sponsored in part by the Federal Government New Enterprise Initiative Scheme (NEIS).
The team uses a variety of low cost or free open source solutions. Restless World is based on the Garage Games Torque engine, and various 2d and 3d graphics in the game are created in the Gimp and Blender. The servers themselves run linux, and will be hosted in the Internode data center in Adelaide...
"Restless World is a MMORPG that is based on our own, original set of rules. It is set in a varied 3D world full of all sorts of interesting creatures, which are unique to this world and not drawn from a Tolkeinesque world. There are no standard fantasy races like elves and dwarves, but players have access to a character palette with enough variation of physical appearance that they may create a character that resembles one of these races."
seems like every man and his dog is making an MMO nowadays. Still good luck to them :)
Yeah. Interesting the number of startups with MMO's on the way.. big hill to climb, but best of luck to them.
I can understand the attraction of developing your own MMORPG, but it's really just too big a task for a start up, I reckon. That's not to say it's impossible, a dedicated small team can still achieve something decent if they aim at a 2D isometric or low polygon MMORPG like Runescape, but that's still going to be quite a bit of work.
If they're going all out 3D and aiming for something like Wow, then it's really an impossible task.
I'd agree with you Souri. My first comment was posted before i checked the site.
If you are going to tackle an MMO then again I point to Imaginary Numbers Tactica Online as a sensible approach. IM are keeping it small scale, and they've established a unique niche rather than endeavouring to complete among the MMO's of the generic high fantasy genre. They also bring some unique aspect to gameplay such as turn-based combat.
At the moment there's simply too little information about Restless World but to be blunt, the artwork and site don't exactly instill me with a great deal of confidence. However, I still wish them well.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I'd have thought that the challange in developing an MMO game is not technical but rather that its the marketing and business side of things, getting subscribers, building a critical mass etc that is the really difficult part where most fall over.. (Hence the excellent logic of selling MMO middleware, do the relatively easy technical work, let someone else worry about the really hard business work). Not really sure how making it isometric is going to help you get subscribers, servers etc.. Just shave a few bucks off the development budget..
I'm not saying that graphics is the most challenging part of a MMORPG. The networking, infrastructure, heck, even the game design - balancing of all the items, races, weapons, skills and making it enjoyable would be much more involving than your usual game.
I mention the graphics since that's probably the first or second hurdle to jump. If you're not even going to make a realistic goal of that, then there's no point of going into the marketing and business side yet.
Networking and game state mechanics are nasty on MMO's. In other game types its relatively trivial. In MMO's a back tech design will sink your entire proj no probs.
Soz.. back=bad .. man Im getting old and senile..