I sure do think Uru was flawed, but the thing with a long term development project is to predict the future. You can do focus groups, playtest, and all sorts of analysis, but what you can't do is release a big virtual world with a long term development cycle as little bits of things. So, that's the challenge, predicting the future, figuring out how what you want to do intersects with what people are going to want. You want to give people a new thing that, perhaps, they didn't even know they wanted!
I happen to think that Cyan had a great game in the making but never figured out how to do an MMO with enough to do, if it did not involve combat. How could they have figured that out -- don't know -- but that's hindsight. Maybe the next developer to attempt to do that -- maybe they will do better.
After reading all this, I'm revising what I said -- I don't think the article about Harvey and There has anything to do with Uru, or any long term development project, particularly of something big.
On Harvey -- well, some people are good at starting companies, but not so good after they are started and on their way. Maybe that's him. Also, if we learn anything from There, we don't learn that it was unsuccessful -- we learn that it was very successful
On other daring MMO games - I happen to think Guild Wars was daring, not in the same way as Uru, but daring nonetheless -- in both the payment aspects and the game structure and architecture. It's based on combat but Arenanet did some innovative things. Guild Wars 2 and Rift: Planes of Telera - upcoming games -- have some very innovative aspects to them, though they are still based on combat. After the Gamescon and the PAX 2010 game conferences, GW2 is super hot - smoking -- really good press. So, we'll see.
_________________ mszv, amarez in Uru, other online games, never use mszv anymore, would like to change it Blog - http://www.amarez.com, Twitter - http://www.twitter.com/amareze
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