Thinking about Wish

psyconius · July 2007

Just thought I'd start a random thread wanting to hear about experiences people had playing Wish. I really enjoyed the beta and was sad to see it end

CaesarsGhost · July 2007

I never got to play Wish.

I DID get to work with a Designer from Wish at my last studio.

And I have seen this: http://www.projectwish.com/

CaesarsGhost · July 2007

Originally posted by Vendayn

Originally posted by CaesarsGhost

I never got to play Wish.
I DID get to work with a Designer from Wish at my last studio.
And I have seen this: http://www.projectwish.com/

now why haven't I heard about that game yet...looks fun.

cause, like the majority of indy MMO projects, it's still a pipe dream right now?

Kyarra · July 2007

I was in the first beta through last beta of Wish. I hated the point and click movement of the game, and the character models were not that great. They had alot of improvements to make in my opinion for it to ever compete with the mmmorpg's of today.

psyconius · July 2007

Originally posted by Riverstar

I was in the first beta through last beta of Wish. I hated the point and click movement of the game, and the character models were not that great. They had alot of improvements to make in my opinion for it to ever compete with the mmmorpg's of today.

No doubt. It still had some things to work on, but I really thought it was shaping up to be a great game.

The live events that the GM's ran were incredible. They spawned a dragon named Trogdor =P

They also had the ability to turn on and off war status between factions(PvP). So basically one of the dev's would rally up a bunch of players from one faction, another dev would grab the opposing faction, and all hell breaks lose

I love that level of interaction, and the dynamic aspect of it all.

Bladin · July 2007

if wish is the game i'm thinking about... I got into the beta RIGHT before they canceled it... and honestly. it was one of the worst games i've ever played, and i was not surprised at all when it got canceled.

Signe · July 2007

The thing I miss most about Wish is taming goats to help me kill their goat family and friends. That was gruesomely awesome.

psyconius · July 2007

The game was highly conceptual, and generally indie game developers appreciate it more than the standard MMO crowd.

As much as I hate to say it, even though it was canceled, the ideas were born and will show up later in other projects. What is MR doing nowadays anyway?

CaesarsGhost · July 2007

Originally posted by psyconius

What is MR doing nowadays anyway?

Well Dana Massey worked here at MMORPG.com for awhile and then went over to RPGvault, that's kinda when things went craptastical here.

Most the other dev's got jobs doing other things.

hercules · July 2007

i was in the beta and tbh it was bad.

Zulika · July 2007

I got into the beta right at the end and it looked like it needed lots of work, but there are many at that point that look the same.

Funny thing is I kept looking at that MR logo and wondering where have I seen it before. Then one day while I was at work I saw it - I have a bunch of gear where their servers were located. I can understand if they had cashflow issues cause that place isn;t cheap - hehe!

edit - not long after they shutdown I saw the servers on EBAY - for what I considered cheap. I thought those blade servers were supposed to rock hehe!

CaesarsGhost · July 2007

Originally posted by Zulika

I got into the beta right at the end and it looked like it needed lots of work, but there are many at that point that look the same.
Funny thing is I kept looking at that MR logo and wondering where have I seen it before. Then one day while I was at work I saw it - I have a bunch of gear where their servers were located. I can understand if they had cashflow issues cause that place isn;t cheap - hehe!

edit - not long after they shutdown I saw the servers on EBAY - for what I considered cheap. I thought those blade servers were supposed to rock hehe!

most the art got used in Irth Online...

Mysk · July 2007

Wish was a cool game that had some very rough edges. Of course it was in beta, so those rough edges were acceptable.

My first impression was fairly negative, but after playing it for a few days it grew on me and I eventually came to rather like the game. I really enjoyed how it was entirely skill based (you use it to raise it).

It needed its graphics fixed up and it needed a good bit of polish on the UI, but the underlying game was pretty darn good.

All in all it was quite a let down that they canceled Wish. It felt entirely premature to do so at that stage.

tidalbunny · July 2007

I played the beta. it was a pile of low-end junk. which is why ti was cancelled.

psyconius · July 2007

Originally posted by Mysk

Wish was a cool game that had some very rough edges. Of course it was in beta, so those rough edges were acceptable.
My first impression was fairly negative, but after playing it for a few days it grew on me and I eventually came to rather like the game. I really enjoyed how it was entirely skill based (you use it to raise it).
It needed its graphics fixed up and it needed a good bit of polish on the UI, but the underlying game was pretty darn good.
All in all it was quite a let down that they canceled Wish. It felt entirely premature to do so at that stage.

My sentiments exactly. It took a bit to get used to, but it was very unique feeling. Skill based made sense. You even got skill in the buff specialization line by buffing people and them going off and fighting.

Anofalye · July 2007

It was on my interest radar.

I have no idea if I would have played it or enjoy it, but I was trying to learn more about it.

Ackbar · July 2007

I played wish a lot from the beginning of the final beta to the end. It was an amazing concept and imho for the state of the beta it was working really well. The game was so immersive and amazing with the events and storytelling that i felt myself compelled to roleplay which is an experience ive never felt in a game since. Wish to me was something really special but unfortunatly the investors didnt see it the same way. There were a few performance issues which was the main problem with the game imho. The world was absolutely huge with a lot of users. If you saw those blade servers they ebayed there was something like 168 cpus in them. In any case it didnt really run that badly on my old 9600xt and i was sad to see it go. In a lot of way Wish was everything that Vanguard was supposed to be.

psyconius · July 2007

Originally posted by Ackbar

I played wish a lot from the beginning of the final beta to the end. It was an amazing concept and imho for the state of the beta it was working really well. The game was so immersive and amazing with the events and storytelling that i felt myself compelled to roleplay which is an experience ive never felt in a game since. Wish to me was something really special but unfortunatly the investors didnt see it the same way. There were a few performance issues which was the main problem with the game imho. The world was absolutely huge with a lot of users. If you saw those blade servers they ebayed there was something like 168 cpus in them. In any case it didnt really run that badly on my old 9600xt and i was sad to see it go. In a lot of way Wish was everything that Vanguard was supposed to be.

Maldach · July 2007

It had some interesting design features, but overall, it wasn't very good. Buying a rottweiler to help you hunt with was a really nice idea. The beta worked pretty good, was stable from what I remember. Skill decay was a bad idea. Like, really bad. I remember getting invited to the next beta stage and saying 'Meh'. I guess most people said the same thing, it was cancelled not long after that.

Coulda, woulda, shoulda.

Xadrian · July 2007

I played Wish during the last closed beta and during the brief open beta. It was a game that took some getting used to, but once you were there, it was a blast - especially after they got the story team doing live events. Since everyone was on the same server, all quests were dynamic and part of the ongoing story. Most quests would only exist until one of the players completed it and progressed the current story slightly. There were also some random quests and encounters thrown in that didn't necessarily pertain to the overall arch, but almost every quest/encounter was unique. The really cool thing is that if you happened to be one of the people that found a certain item, completed a certain step, or just happened to be first on the scene to a major battle, you'd likely end up in the in-game newspaper the next day. Newspapers could be bought cheaply from the town crier, and if you wanted to keep a copy of your moment of fame, you could hold on to the newspaper as long as you liked.

Unfortunately, they both underestimated the playerbase and overestimated their technology. One of the early quests was completed in no time, and a big bad guy that was supposed to win was killed by a dedicated crowd. The story had to be rewritten overnight to account for that branch, since no one expected that to happen.

There were a lot of weird bugs and complete lack of even the most basic optimizations (the sort of stuff that you DO NOT leave in for debugging purposes and therefore we should never have seen). For instance, whenever you'd get remotely close to an underground cavern, the client would slow to a crawl. The engine was seamless, but it didn't discriminate as far as what it actually loaded and displayed. One time I was near an underground city, and my camera slipped just slightly under the ground... I could see everything in the entire city, even though it was pretty big and at very least should not have been displaying to me. So the client was rendering thousands of polygons and hundreds of textures that were unnecessary. There were also some weird interaction problems on occasion with certain NPCs, but I don't remember the details anymore.

In addition, the network code turned out to be pretty crappy. The server was supposed to distribute the load of 10,000 players or more, but during open beta it was crashing non-stop with light loads of 2-300 people. Perhaps the net code itself was fine, but the gameserver had bugs up the wazzoo.

Too bad it didn't work out. With a bit better technology and updated graphics the game could have been a smash hit.

gamerman98 · July 2007

ugggghhhh most of the tards that come in to these threads to think they are cool "i played in the beta too and it was crap...(dorky laugh)" god i really hate those ppl...they shouldnt be gamers in the first place, dude..if you were really smart and knew anything about games, you would know that when you enter a BETA things do suck..and they have too for the devs to make things better. I played in the wish beta and had a really great time. its sad that the game is gone now.

Rabidaskal · July 2007

I'll always remember Wish for acknowledging they weren't ready for release, and cancelling rather than pushing out a crap bug product on the playerbase trying to make back some money before inevitably closing. Respect for that.

kishe · July 2007

The game had pretty steep learning curve but once you got the hang of it, it was great.

I'm still heartbroken that it was cancelled.

golfjerky · July 2007

Originally posted by wikipedia
History
Wish was a massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) under development by Mutable Realms. The developers of the game coined a new name for their game's genre, Ultra Massive Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, or UMMORPG, with the added word Ultra based on their claims that the game would be the first of its kind to support more than 10,000 simultaneous players in a single, seamless world, without any zones or "shards".
Wish was to be set in the fantasy world of Ganedan, with player actions having a lasting impact on the future of the land. One of the main events was to be an unending war between players and non-player characters, to unfold over the course of the game.
What set Wish apart from other games, in an arguably flooded genre, was its open skill system and similarity to Ultima Online. Taken from their website: "Ultima Online was launched to create a wonderful RPG experience in a massive online world where the focus was on the experience and not the mechanics. Since that time, there have been a slew of games, such as EverQuest, that have diverged from these original ideals. As in Ultima Online, Wish creates a world where the focus is on the experience and not the mechanics behind the game. No one plays single-player or pen-and-paper RPGs just to level up, and the same is true in Wish. We have created an interesting and social experience that, in the spirit of Ultima Online, sends players into a world where the gameplay, the world and the story are what is most important."
The Live Story content was also one of the major defining features of the game, which promised to keep players engaged in a never-ending, dynamic storyline.
Cancellation
As of January 9, 2005, the Wish Project has been cancelled. The reason is described in part of a letter from Mutable Realms, and reads as follows:
"Wish has been shut down because with the data we gathered during the first 10 days of our Beta 2.0 test, even with our best-case projections for player numbers, we could not have reached enough subscribers for Wish to sustain itself."
Many theories have been brought up for the lack of potential subscribers, one of which states that Wish simply didn't have enough publicity to garner more beta sign-ups.
Assets
Because of the amount of money, time and effort involved in the creation of the game assets for Wish, some of the former Mutable realm team formed Collossal Studios to help sell the assets from Wish. The assets from the game were put on the market, and many have already been sold. Irth Online (now Irth Worlds) is one of the more notable client who have purchased assets. Much of the office equipment and, most notably, the server were also sold ... on eBay.
Aftermath
The day the cancellation notice was sent, a number of (now former) beta testers bought a new domain called projectwish.com. In the first week they had over 400 former players joined to help in the support of their quest. They started with petitions, to which nothing came of. Originally considering purchasing the assets from Mutable Realms/Colossal Studios, the community decided that that was not possible, and proceeded to organize their development staff (made up solely of volunteers) to begin creation of their own game. They became known as Project Wish.
From their website: "Project Wish is an ongoing project to develop an EMMORPG based on the spirit of the now defunct game Wish. We are in no way affiliated with Mutable Realms, nor are we trying to copy or reverse engineer their game.
This project is following the spirit of what we feel Wish would have brought to the MMORPG genre, had it been finished. That being said, everything in this project is our own creation."

Project Wish has been in various stages of study, planning and development since the beginning of 2005 and is still active to this day (as of June 2007). They are using the Ogre3d graphics engine for the core of their client and ICE (the server technology Wish used)for the server in their quest to make a game similar to Wish. They have already released an alpha version of the world editor (DWARF) they will be using to construct their game world. Read more about them from their website.
External links

Mutable Realms website - now closed
Collossal Studios - Company created to sell the assets and home of the current website, with all the old information
Wish Vault
WishDB
Project Wish

Wikipedia just removed that from their site a couple weeks ago, so I salvaged the information (since I wrote most of it).

It is interesting to hear other people's memories of Wish. This thread is really indicitive of the sentiment that Wish had while it was still in Beta. As another person who was there, it is probably obvious (given what project I lead) that I liked my time in Wish. There were plenty of people who did not, however. As with any game, there is nothing that will ever please everyone. It is the nature of such things. Just like how WoW is not attractive to most Interstitial Gamers (<- Google that to find out the meaning), Wish was not the game for some. It was a niche game that would have had success with some. How many, however, is debatable.

While Dana works here, I doubt he could even tell you why WIsh was cancelled. The sole person with that information is Marc (Laukien). Many of the (ex)team members who came to visit Project Wish in the aftermath were just as confused as we were. They were truly suprised. I could post my theory, should anyone be interested, as it has more fact than anything written in this thread up to this point, but I will refrain right now.

Now, for me, the future is Project Wish. Does that mean I want to tout my game to the public? No way. We are not ready. I am here only because I watch the referring stats to my website closely. Truthfully, CaesarsGhost was close to the mark when he said: "cause, like the majority of indy MMO projects, it's still a pipe dream right now?". Project Wish is a pipedream, on in which I have been smoking for two and a half years, and one in which I will continue to smoke from until it is released. We have been called crazy by many over that time, and rightly so. To the rest of the world, I am crazy. I am fine with that title, as long as when the time comes, those who said it will eat crow. This could be 2 more years from now, or 5, but either way, we still will have more to show than Duke Nukem forever.

As I quoted in my wiki article, those who wish to really reminisce should head over to http://www.colossalstudios.com/Wish/, which is a mirror of the wish site before it was canceled. The only thing missing is the cancelation post.

[edit - fixed some ugly colored links]

Cheers,

Xadrian · July 2007

Ooh, a mirror. My newspaper mention lives on!

Zorvan · July 2007

Man, I remember trying to decide between Saga of Ryzom and Wish way beck. I was really looking forward to hopefully getting into the beta when it just went *poof*. I really think it would have went far, had it been released.

Howdy, Stranger!

Thinking about Wish

Comments

Howdy, Stranger!

Quick Links

Thinking about Wish

Comments