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Horizons' history: Birth - Near Death and possible Resurrection?
xauss
Member, Newbie CommonPosts: 384
Here is an (incomplete) history of Horizons - anything that YOU think should be added, or is inaccurate or incomplete - plz add below so i can edit it in...
1998
Artifact Entertainment (AE) website launched from Dave Allen’s home
Nov 1999
David Allen hires James Jones to generate investment for AE’s ambitious project with 14 player races, and an enormous, seamless game world.
Early 2001
Still no decision made on game engine
June 2001
Decision to use unreal engine finally made
July 2001
David Allen leaves as CEO after a long running feud with James Jones (DA’s storey told here). Horizons goes into communication blackout. (Story can be found here (scroll down till you find it) since it has been blocked from archive)
Aug 2001
Unreal engine dumped, various others evaluated. Decision to start writing a new engine using Intrinsic Alchemy as a base
Oct 2001
1st round of layoffs
May 2002
Horizons seen at E3 2002 – blackout over as previews appear on gaming sites and screenies released.
Jan 2003
Distribution deal agreed with Infogames.
May-Nov 2003
Closed beta – serious issues with lag and server and client crashes also not fixed by OB
Dec 2003
Horizons launched in Europe (5th), with US servers going live a few days later (9th) with widespread and serious performance issues
Jan 2004
David Bowman becomes the sole project leader for Horizons as James Jones steps aside into a different project
Feb 2004
2nd round of layoffs
June 2004
3rd round of layoffs
July 2004
Verio launches legal suit against AE for 1.8 million in unpaid contracts. James Jones leaves AE. AE files for bankruptcy protection.
Sep 2004
Consolidation of the US servers in order to cut down on hosting fees. Announcement of prospective sale of AE’s assets to Tulga
Oct 2004
The 3 European shards consolidated into 1 (unity)
Jan 2005
AE’s assets sold to Tulga Games (David Bowman is both the new corporation's Statutory Agent and the sole manager) AE is bankrupt and the debts are written off.
Nov 2005
Peter S. Beagle (author of ‘The Last Unicorn’) signs on to provide story support.
Late 2005
The Dragon Ancient Rite of Passage is completed
Jan 2006
PvP added at spire
Early 2006
Tulga look for a purchaser for Horizons
May 2006
‘Settlements’ expansion announced to include more racial housing and new monsters. Speculation over a new engine for Horizons.
July 2006
EI Interactive buys Horizons from Tulga - since none of the development team was hired by the new owners, it seems remote that they could possibly maintain the game, let alone continue patching and adding content
August 1st 2006
EI Interactive changes the billing system of Horizons. The new system is setup through an insecure network and many subscribers complain of multiple billing
August 5th 2006
EI Interactive places strict moderation rules on the community forums. All posts and topics are to be read by a moderator before being approved
August 15th 2006
EI Interactive suggest that the billing situation is resolved
August 2006
EI Interactive suspends new member registration on the forums
Nov 2006
Pixel Magic Corporation announces their acquisition of EI interactive, fooling no-one with the name change
Dec 2006
Pixel Magic announce that the Blight (test) shard is to be shut down with no character transfers with the exception of one guild to enable the European Unity server to have a new US server 'Unitas' **Edit: EII/PM even got this wrong since no such guild ever existed**
Jan 2007
Chaos sever crashes - rumours of more unpaid bills...
Feb 2007
Chaos back up …
Q1 2007
Erroneous billing still reportedly persisting
Q2 2007
game still chugging along with billing 'unattended' - blight and unity taken offline (blight purportedly to provide a home for unity players to be called 'unitas' - which never happened)
July 18th 2007
Vitrium LLC aquires Horizons. Details of the change of ownership from Pixel Magic Corp. / EI Interactive publicly unknown at this time... Vitrium is headed by former Tulga CTO Rick Simmons and many of the developers from the former (Tulga) development team. Dave Bowman, due to commitments with Certain Affinity, will not be involved except as a consultant on design
Mid August 2007
Blight server is back up and running, and Istarian citizens experience the long forgotten 'patching' phenomena as well as discover that there is some customer service. New billing system under development and discussion to include multiple subscriptions on a single account, allowing players to stack subscriptions or services to their account, such as multiple plots, concurrent logins, consignment slots or character slots. Unity characters still unaccessable (with Unity gone) with Vitrium undecided as to how and where to 'rez' the European nomads, some of whome have re-started from scratch on Chaos and Order servers since their main characters are in limbo.
Sep 2007 New secure fee schedule implemented, PayPal based
Oct 2007 Vitrium commit to porting Euro player base to US servers, and enable a system for plot-reclamation from inactive accounts
Comments
Chaos crashes and burns hard. its offline now with a total hardware failure.
Rumors of server hosting not being paid and PME not being allowed physical access to the servers till the outstanding bills are paid are rampant.
This could be the beginning of the end. But that was probably when PME/EII acquired it for 2 bits and a shave.
You know, I read about this game for YEARS and even tried it when it came out...
Needless to say, let it go. Just Let It Go. It's sad to say that, I know, but honestly, wipe the data from every single server, burn the physical servers themselves, and salute it one more time. Not trolling or anything, but just saying, this game has LONG outlasted it's usefulness...
Let It go.
nice trolling justfinch and godpuppet... i assume from your posts you want me to add:-
Early 2004
JustFinch and godpuppet try the game and dont like it
Star Citizen – The Extinction Level Event
4/13/15 > ELE has been updated look for 16-04-13.
http://www.dereksmart.org/2016/04/star-citizen-the-ele/
Enjoy and know the truth always comes to light!
trolling... a troll is a person who enters an established community such as an online discussion forum and intentionally tries to cause disruption, often in the form of posting messages that are inflammatory, insulting, incorrect, inaccurate, or off-topic... seems to fit your "wah! wah! - i dun like horizons, i think its a pos" post in a thread documenting its history to its probable demise in the not-to-distant-future
however, since i dont think "Godpuppet tries the game and doesnt like it" should feature as an event in its' history, it makes it off topic, and your post trolling - perhaps you should post on one of the threads asking for opinions, or start a new one.
kthxbye
I need to clarify the Blight guild situation
The Bloodoath ascension guild did not exist
BloodOath was one of my dragons the I publicly transformed and the screen caps were posted on the official forum under BloodOath Ascension.
Ei/pm DID NOT DO ANY RESEARCH into who played on Blight and ASSUMED bloodoath was a guild , which made them look more and more stupid , then again they did not research ANYTHING before implemtation of poxy ideas see non secure billing page, multi billing and inablity to canceling accounts.
Squarely a thumbs down company
deleted
==========================
The game is dead not, this game is good we make it and Romania Tv give it 5 goat heads, this is good rating for game.
It's still there believe it or not. How long will it continue to run. Well, that is the current question. There are two shards you can currently play on chaos and order. Some have had problems with chaos at times and it seems to have stabilized for now.
You can still play but beware the overbilling continues even from people who left the game two years ago. Also it seems you can have an unlimited amount of characters per account. Some have said that you can log into old accounts without having to pay. The current company cannot seem to fix the billing and also appears they do not care to fix it. There is NO contact from the people running this game and hence also no support nor development.
If you can live with these problems go ahead and play there is about six months of content for you.
Does anyone know is Unitas up and running yet (since blight servers were supposed to be used for that purpose) ? if so when
if anyone has anything else to add to timeline please post it here (e.g. date when satyr's were added, or any other info on server downage, PM rumours etc)
It is sad that this game got so screwed by billing.
I work in the industry and fixing billing issues is the easiest thing a developer can do. What they are doing is just plain lazy and they ruined a potentially great game. Had they just realized that their billing system had been corrupted and given a 2 month free grace period while they got a reliable system in place they would be better of as they would have a much better community supporting them.
Billing did not kill this game....
The owners who have manually billing people with year old accounts is the one killing this game. The new owners have been deceitful to their players and are now hiding from those overbilled people.
They have yet to install a billing system that works as it is supposed to. They still continue to overbill people manually to this day.
If you have EVER had an account to this game you better go look at your credit card statement you might be surprised to see an EI Interactive charge there.
Oh and good luck trying to contact these people they seem to have changed their phones and addresses quite frequently just ask the BBB on trying to get in touch with these low lifes.
*Agrees with Ankua*
long live king neuro
Is there even an MMO out now with 14? playable races, let alone a playable and fly-able dragon?
Is there a crafting engine that comes close to Horizons?
I've tried 10-15 games since Horizons (new beta tests included), and still haven't found anything close.
IMHO, i think the Settlements expansion and the rumours of the new client were just blowing smoke to raise the subscriber base to show prospective parties interested in purchasing the game... i.e. EI Interactive (now known as Pixel Magic). i think even they said something about looking at the code to see what could be done about certiain performance issues, but how they would do that without retaining any of the staff from Tulga was never explained
if someone were to re-release it with a new engine, with little or nothing new in terms of content would i play it? probably - so long as EII / PM was nowhere near it
the 14 races were DA's original designs, the DB designed game we actually got had 11... Human, Elf, Fiend, Gnome, Saris, Dwarf, Sslisk, Satyr, Dryad, Half-giants and Dragons, but still way more than most, as are the 29 adventure schools and 21 craft schools.
aye same here, the way the game mechanics worked it encouraged large scale coop, even among strangers, to accomplish things together that actaully significantly altered the world you lived in. revolutionary.
alas i think the whole mess is so tied up in lawyers and red tape now that no one will ever touch it. The best one can hope for is that some mmog designer who played HZ incorporates some of the same types of systems in a whole new gameworld.
Or how about this...
dedicated, influential players in new mmos *cough*AoC*cough*
make an effort to make detailed suggestions to those devs and nudge them into implementing some of HZ's revolutionary concepts.
On another topic - did Peter S. Beagle have a good experience working with HZ? Did he get paid? Was he satisfied with how his work was implemented? imo the genre needs more Professional Storytellers because, just like voice-acting, there's a difference between James Earl Jones and some guys brother-in-law.
It is dishearting to see how far the game has fallen with the new management. I would really like to see another mmo developer provide us with playable dragons/drakes beyond vapor-ware.
Funny story. For a time after they took over, I was an avid EI flamer on the Horizons boards. Then, after the censorship, er, "strictly enforced moderation" started, or I got banned from the forums (I forget if I ever did), I quit the game (which was a pain in an of itself). 2 months later I got a personal email from Dr. What's-his-name (Trask?) from EI, flaming ME, telling me to stop badgering them, and that I've never even paid a monthly fee (total BS). I replied, saying, as usual, you don't have any of your facts straight, about anything, and that I'm been a paying customer since such and such, it took me 1-2 months of hell just to cancel, and I haven't posted a single message to the forums in over 2 months. I said, you can't even get a single point of my case right, and you think you can run a game like Horizons?
Never got a response. Lol.. They're a total Micky-Mouse company.
Is there a single thing they did right after acquiring the game?
I wish EI could sell the game to a great dev team backed back big money and re-release the game, but they're too stupid for that. They would rather completely bury the game first.
I like the comment someone made about how they fired, or, "did not retain" any of the current dev staff. I'm a developer, so once I saw that, I knew there would never be a new engine or bug fixes anytime in the near (or distant) future, and that's when I decided the game was dead (and quit), thanks to EI. Also, EI made public statements that the game engine ran fine! and had no plans to change anything, that's another point when I knew they were clueless.
I'm all worked up now.
i can only hope that anyone in billing loses their jobs, wives, homes, whatever. they deserve it. that statement isnt hate, just a wish on the folks that screwed me o so long ago, and are now screwing others, my previous posts, some old, warned of this very thing.
burn in hell horizons, hope you folks all lose your jobs.
now....can i say i told ya so?
can you smell that?!!...............there is nothing quite like it.....................the smell of troll in the morning............i love that smell.