This is the wikipedia page before it was deleted. I asked for a copy so I could preserve it, especially considering I wrote/edited most of it myself.
Contents [hide] 1 History 2 Cancellation 3 Assets 4 Aftermath 5 External links
[edit] 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.
[edit] 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.
[edit] 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.
[edit] 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.
[edit] 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 Retrieved from "http://wiki.projectwish.com/index.php?title=Wish" Categories: 2005 video games | Massively multiplayer online role-playing games | Cancelled PC games
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Erik Briggs (Jerky) Project Manager My Blog
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