Want your own MMO?

Posted on November 27, 2006 by Scott Jennings| 12 Comments

As seen on slashdot: Saga of Ryzom for sale, prospective buyer wants to take it open source.

Until now, Nevrax has produced Ryzom, as a typical commercial software company. Nevrax, not the players, decide what direction the virtial world of Ryzom takes. We want to turn this model on it’s head and give players control over the virtual world their character’s inhabit. We want to purchase the source code, game data, and artwork, so that we can further develop it by placing it under a Free Software license. Once this is accomplished we would reopen the universe of Ryzom to players and have it function and further developed under democratic controlled basis.

(Second link currently slashdotted.)

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  • Evangolis

    Looking at the Ryzom.org link, my cycnical side believes that we are looking at a great leap forward in the marketing methods of the paid beta.

  • http://www.damnedvulpine.com J.

    Shrug. (Horizons + Wish / Atriarch) * France = Ryzom. Techheads think they can build a world with nuts and bolts, dreamer-designers think they can be built by Sheer Force Of Will And Imagination. Neither is true, both end in failure.

  • Eddy

    I played a beta version of this a looooong time ago. Beta or not, I didn’t much care for it. It neither broke new ground nor polished the old. To my eye it was just another “me-too!” MMORPG. I don’t think there’s much they can do to save it short of reworking just about everything. That’s not gonna happen. If you want to succeed you need one of two things. A new design with LOADS of luck. Or an extremely polished design that rivals games like WoW. In other words, it’s nearly impossible. If your target audience is the US, you may as well give up on the new design aspect. Americans want new games that are exactly the same as the old ones.

  • VPellen

    “Americans want new games that are exactly the same as the old ones.”

    Call me a petty idealist, but somehow I get the feeling that’s not as true as some people would have you believe.

  • Rainer

    “based on the code, artwork and tools used in a #3 rated MMORG on MMORPG.com.”

    SoR is ranked very high everywhere. Strangely though, nobody realy likes it and 99% of the top votes are from IPs in France.

  • http://ve3d.ign.com/ Apache

    the first link works fine, I doubt a lot of people are flooding to read it ;)

  • http://www.mxac.com.au/drt Mike Rozak

    Old MMORPGs don’t die, they don’t even fade away. Instead, they get turned into open source/freeware. (Undead?)

    This is a problem for new MMORPGs; it’s like the (original) Star Trek episode where there was no disease on the planet, no death, and lots of overcrowding.

  • Nicademus

    There is something oddly poetic about J’s post.

  • Freakazoid

    I’d buy that for a dollar, but my revolutionary design ideas would be seen as nothing short of insanity and financial suicide.

  • Xyntar

    Atleast you’d be in good company, Freak.

  • Eddy

    “Call me a petty idealist, but somehow I get the feeling that\’e2\’80\’99s not as true as some people would have you believe.”

    Really? Look at MMORPGs. Before Everquest you had a couple of games, each different in terms of how they played. After Everquest you have tons of games, all more or less identical to Everquest in regards to mechanics. There is no real creativity. Everquest “defined” the genre, now everyone else makes games which more or less follow in Everquest’s footsteps. Sure, unique bits and pieces are added here and there, but ultimately they all play the same as Everquest but with different graphics.

    It’s true of just about any other genre. One game comes along, sells well, all other games mimic it. Anything that attempts to break new ground is ignored. Rarely, especially today, a fresh, new game comes along that does something different. The stars align, the developers sacrifice Christian infants to Satan, and it sells through the roof… and then a new genre is born and hundreds of games flood the market which play exactly the same as that game.

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