Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
Dragon Empires: Game Cancelled
Admin
Administrator RarePosts: 5,623
In yet another shocking blow to the MMORPG community, Codemasters announced today that their highly acclaimed fantasy game "Dragon Empires" has been cancelled due to "technical issues". Here is the official, and very sad release from them:
Dragon Empires development ceased due to technical issues
Codemasters has taken the decision to cancel further development of Dragon Empires, the company's massively multiplayer online role playing project.
Dragon Empires received incredible support from its online community and won acclaim from PC and online media while in development. However, technical issues have resulted in the project's discontinuation.
Many of the game's development team, including programmers and artists, are being transferred to Codemasters' internal development studios to work on current and future titles.
The decision to close Dragon Empires' development does not impact on Codemasters' long-term ambitions in the massively multiplayer online gaming market and the company remains very active in evaluating future opportunities.
The Dragon Empires website and its popular community forums will remain live at www.codemasters.co.uk/dragonempires for the immediate future.
We will be keeping Dragon Empires on our game list as well as our forums for at least 2-3 more weeks to allow our members to absorb this painful loss. We at MMORPG.com would like to thank Codemasters for their innovations and contributions to this ever-evolving genre and their cooperation with our community and staff. We wish all of the development team there great success in their new projects.
- MMORPG.COM Staff -
The dead know only one thing: it is better to be alive.
Comments
Wow.
I wasn't expecting this one. Is it the competition from SOE and Blizzard? Or is it really technical issues? How many other creative products might be shelved due to product forecasting if that is the real reason as I suspect? Questions, questions.
I was looking forward to this one as I'm sure many others were as well
Hummm, I wonder if Calistas knew something or saw some writing on the wall? Guess he beat the rush out the door.
Omfg. What a waste. They are starting to drop like flies. When WoW and EQ2 come out all these perimeter games like Shadowbane, SoR, and Wish are gonna shutdown too. . .
And despite what they say I'm pretty sure that no DE = no Codemasters. You can't phuck up your first project like that and hope to survive in this business. . .
"I can tell you with no ego, this is my finest sword. If, on your journey, you should encounter God. . .
. . . God will be cut."
- Quentin Tarantino, Kill Bill
EQII
Requiiem, Templar
Neriak
"Shocking blow?" Gimme a break!
Just look at that list of forums to the left of your screen... can you say OVERSATURATION? The MMORPG market simply isn't large enough to support all of these games! Plus, with brand loyalty to names like Everquest and Warcraft, original settings are going to have an even harder time becoming successful.
This is only the beginning folks, there will be a few more of these games cancelled within a year I suspect. There are too many struggling games that are already out there (AC2, Shadowbane, Horizons, TSO, etc) to make publishers think that there's guaranteed profit in releasing an MMO... it's getting more and more risky.
Blimey
I was really looking forward to that one... I even might have upgraded my 1999'ish P3 machine to something decent for that game.
However, the expertise gained during development of this title surely isn't entirely lost.
First WO, now DE. What am I supposed to look forward to now?
Haha! I KNEW IT! If you see one of my other posts on this game you'd see I predicted this from a mile away. Also if you ever went to their website you'd notice over the past several months DE was 'hard to find' unless you went to the direct website.
btw You have to look foward to, Middle Earth Online, Vanguard: Saga of heroes, Everquest II, World of Warcraft, Tabula Rasa. If none of these games interest you... then hrmm your playing the wrong type of games.
>>>>>>>>>WHAT?!<<<<<<<<<
Dont take it as filler post but what more i can say?
now i looking froward to Mournings hope it wont have same end as DE
ou and i`m wondering what they mean by "technical issues" if every team pwned their pants when comming out some hyped tittle than how can we expect that somebdy bring some innovations into mmorpg genre
Wu name dizirgee->Tough Destroyer
lordken->Friendly Mastermind
Wu name dizirgee->Tough Destroyer
I`m Lawful Good Human Fighter Paladin
and you?
I've got to admit this did catch me off guard. The game promised to be something a little different and I was so looking forward to those landscapes!!
I've got to disagree with the person who wasn't surprised by this stating that if you look at the forum list you can see the market is oversaturated. If you do look at that list then you will see that the top section is mmos ALREADY released, running and making money.
Dragon Empires had very lofty goals and I would always wonder if maybe they didn't set their sights a bit too high. Still, rather than scraping the game entirely due to tech difficulties one would think you could simply change what you were doing or even omit it altogether, but in the end the decision was theirs to make.
World of Warcraft and Everquest II are big and will most defiantly have an impact on some of the existing game out there, but to say theses two games are the end all of all new mmos is foolish. Even the biggest of giants can come down or in the realms of mmo's get boring - fast. I predict rather than seeing a decrease in new mmorpg to hit the development stages is going to increase like nothing we have seen before, but the bar has been raised and if these companies don't meet or exceed that bar then they will fail.
Valorus, while I respect your opinion, to state that the market isn't oversaturated just because the top of the list is games that are already "making money" is kinda false in my opinion.
Lets see... out of that list alone, I'd say there are definitely some games not making much money: AC1, AC2, E&B, Horizons, Shadowbane, TSO and WWII. That's roughly 1/3 of the entire list of games!
And I don't know about games like Neocron, EVE or Savage Eden, but just the fact that I haven't heard much about them makes me think they aren't exactly rolling in dough either (I could be wrong, that's why I didn't include them in my initial list).
Plus, I could think of a few other MMO's that are in trouble that aren't on this list at all: Ashen Empires and Rubies of Eventide come to mind immediately.
What can I say? I just have a feeling that the MMO industry is about to crash and burn and only a few games are going to remain unaffected or manage to rise from the ashes. Only time will tell though!
EDIT: Just want to say that I'm not trying to be some kind of Doomsayer who is predicting the end of the MMO industry. I just don't think that there are enough people who are willing to pay monthly subscriptions to support all of these games!
E&B is going to close in about 3 weeks.
Rubies of Eventide has closed.
EA is evaluating TSO, which means they will probably shut it down in the near future.
Not suprised.
I wouldn't be suprised if Wish dies as well.
None of the games cancelled had any real innovative ideas or new genre. When you have to compete with EQ, WoW and DAoC why bother if it's not going to be different.
http://www.greycouncil.org/
This is one of the games I was anticipating for but they probably canceled after playing stress test on WOW.
It looked good it sounds good but then again its codemaster.
You just got Bootyknocked
You just got Bootyknocked
I agree with almost everything molecule said. After seeing all the money the original Everquest made, all the other gaming companies wanted to get a slice of the MMORPG pie. The problem is, the amount of gamers who are actually willing to pay a monthly fee is much smaller then that of normal games. With the normal non-subscriber games there are enough customers that they can all make games and not worry about it not selling. Unfortunately, saturating the market with tons of games doesn't work with MMORPGs. Sure each year the MMORPG community grows a bit, but there still isn't enough people to keep every MMORPG afloat with their subscriptions. On top of that, 90% of the gamers who play MMORPGs would rather play a big-name title like Everquest II or World of Warcraft over some obscure title like Dragon Empires or Wish. It was the gaming companies who screwed up, thinking that their game (how unoriginal or mediocre) would sell enough to pay for the vast sums of money it takes to develop these games. What's even worse the more original and inspired games are usually smaller ones that give up because they know that they can not reach the player-base of some of the bigger titles. From everything that I've seen over the last few years it looks like we are at a turning point for MMORPGs. Instead of vast number of MMORPGs (whether they are any good or not depends) the market seems to be shifting to a few big-name titles. And unless you don't have a big name or a vast sum of money, your game isn't going to make it in the field of MMORPGs.
Hope that I don't sound to pessimistic.
---------------------------- Desolation Guild Website ---------------------------
Currently:
Alpha: Guild Wars
Beta: AO: Alien Invasion
Playing: City of Heroes
Interested: WOW & EQII (yeah, both... deal with it)
Currently:
Playing: WOW & GW
And another bites the dust!
But I believe the end of DE was near anyway due the fact too less real infos about it.
BTW To the one telling Rubies of Eventide is dead: That is no longer true. It is live again!
Alphatesting (!): FreeWorld
:P
Betatesting: A Tale in the Desert 2; 2 unknown games coming soon!
Betatested: AC2; Lords of Everquest; Horizons; Fung Wan Online; Wish; Saga of Ryzom.
Testing: none
Playing: Rubies of Eventide
Retired: EQ; DAoC; SWG; Shadowbane; UO free shards, Ashen Empires; Horizons; AC1; AC2
Attempt to test or play: Darkfall; EQ2; Dark & Light, WoW, Mourning
Play My magic Tales
Play Rise of Immortals
Play Regno card game for free.
Premium membership available.
Codemasters will not even remotely go bust because of this failure - they make way too much money from their sport title franchises for that.
A am surprised by the announcement, but not greatly - codemasters have a history of cancelling titles mid-development and they are an extremely difficult company to work with. I'm just glad it was an in-house team developing it.
ARGH! I was really waiting for this game. I wanted to play is soo badly.
How can the just quit? They had such a good game, they had community support, they have truck loads of back story, and from what I saw of the beta they had playable code. What's going to happen to all that code that was written for DE? I unless they Codemasters revies the project most of that code and art is just going to go to waste. It must really suck for the programmers and artists who have spent years working on the game only to hear that the project is being sacked and all their hard work is going down the drain.
Yes. I rant. You have a problem with that?
Was very sorry to hear about this. It looked like it was going to be a very interesting project. It's a shame for us gamers (who like variety), but as a business model MMORPGs are a tough one - there are only so many players willing to pay to play, and too many titles competing for their dollars.
The one who really lose are the people who put all of their time and effort into the development of these games, only to find out too late that the accountants are really running the show.
City of Heroes
Pinnacle Server
DaBurner (30+ Fire/Dev Blaster)
DaBruuzer(30+ Energy/Energy Blaster)
DaBlock(low level Invuln./Fire Tanker)
BengalCat(30+ Empathy/Radiation Defender)
A Little Dab'll Do Ya!
http://www.californiagamer.com/eye_avatar.gif
http://www.realmsofkrel.com
Woot someone find my post on the Warhammer cancellation where I called this as the next one!! Hmmm the next one is really up for grabs. Mourning will be mourned.
Warhammer Online , Dragon Empires and Wish are/were the only titles I am/was looking towards to. Now 2 of em are cancelled.
I Curse the "well known titles" !
I'll take that bet... My money is on Wish going next. They're following the same delay schedule of all the other cancelled MMORPGs. "It'll be ready for beta in summer.... It'll be ready for beta in winter... It'll be ready for beta next summer.... Ahh eff it, we quit."
Looks like these developers are finding out how hard it is to make a MMO.
I hope that this buisness doesn't go to the "Well known" developers only, I like the idea of a little guy making a game
Don't you worry little buddy. You're dealing with a man of honor. However, honor requires a higher percentage of profit
And I'll take that bet. They at least had an open beta that proved they in fact do have a product in hand and not just some E3 demo or some perpetually in closed beta *cough DE, Mourning, DnL, etc cough*.
There is a difference of a product having a completley open beta and delaying it's next open beta than products forever in closed betas saying "We'll be adding more soon!!"