Massively

I saw a Collector's edition box for Hellgate on the shelves of a local GameCrazy shortly after the announcement. I purchased it, simply so I could say I did. I kind of have a fetish for these dying games and it's very sad to see them go.

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I think the MMO market is a VERY competitive market, and only the best make it....Or companies with a lot of money. I purchased a collectors edition of Tabula Rasa in October, only to find in the next month that it was closing in February. Oh the irony. Was only £10 though, was a bit of a steal considering all the stuff they put inside it.

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I've actually enjoyed Hellgate: London when I played it. It's been a while since I logged in, but I picked up the Collector's Edition some months ago, thus I had the pet I could summon. I never subbed, I was/am one of the freeloaders. Sorry HG:L.

While it's MMO-lite, it did have its appeal. Great for some quick drop-in fun, nice graphics. Sure it's a tad repetitive, but I've still had some good times in HG:L.

I'll miss it... but of course there's still the single player mode.

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The MMO market is a not a competitive market, Its a crapware market one game called World of Warcraft is at the top and more designer houses now see how much money you can make with a MMO and a lot of more them any normal game so they make a gamble and put a lot of money into a MMO. However later they find out that there goes a lot of more into a MMO them just money and a big IP and that this things need the content from like 40 of there normal games for keep the users busy. They at the end take the easy way drop all design ideas they had and start looking at other games mostly Warcraft and Sony games and maybe now also Warhammer... They just go on taking the best part of this games and copy there butts off. Later one designer in the meeting say hey or game is not any better them Warhammer or warcraft. So they come up with 1 or 2 "New" things to put in it and market the game on that 2 things that most of the time feel like like added later. And best of all most of the time the money runs out way before the game is completed and they just release it and say hell we add the other crap soon people just keep paying the monthly feeds of 15 bucks.

So at the end we get games like Warhammer that can not keep me entertain for a full month or Crapware like Age of Conan that lag in content and still is full bugs. Or game like Stargate that not even pay the developers and maybe never make it to the market at all.. btw Both Stargate series are canceled now and a new one that plays on a ship a kinda Battlestar rip off does not help the release of this game at all.

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To actually answer the question at the end of the article, there's only one former MMO that I really actively miss. It was the most compelling, most immersive, most entertaining MMO I ever played, and I still dream about it sometimes at night: Neocron. And I say that despite the fact that they never did get game balance right, the missions mostly stank, and there was a clear and obvious drop-off in the quality of the content overall past the midpoint of the game: the usual problems of an MMO that has run out of funding and doesn't catch on well enough to fund further development. But I miss my rigger, which was one of the most fun character classes I've ever played in any MMO. And even more than that, I despair, I actually despair, of ever getting to play an MMO in any environment as beautiful, as 3-D complex, as rich in detail, or as entertaining as Neocron City's Plaza, Via Rosso, Pepper Park, and Industrial Area zones. I'd love to be proven wrong, but it's been how many years since Neocron (version 1) first came out, and despite all advances in technology, nobody's come close to matching it yet, and that makes me sad.

What ever happened to the environment designers who built those zones? I've always wondered why I haven't seen more of their work in SOME game or other since then?

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Firstly, I miss pre-CU SWG. SWG isn't dead but it might has well have been after that.

Anyhoo...

I used to have a great time with Asheron's Call 2 and I miss that one. Being a Tumerok Invoker rocked :)

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Mythos! I was really interested in that game and I thought it was looking really good. I never got to play it and now I have no idea where it is.....

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Mythos died with Flagship Studios. i think someone may "own" the rights to it now, but it is doubtful we will ever see anything more of it.

Both Tabula Rasa and HellGate had a lot to offer. They may not have been the BEST EVER, but they had some unique features. Both were worth playing, even if just for a while.

Hopefully we will still see some smaller studios try to get into the MMO business, but I have a feeling this will get to be like Platform gaming, where the small innovative (and poor) studios get killed off in favor of Madden 22 and Final Fantasy 40.

:/

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I still, to this day, yearn for a cleanup and reinvention of Horizons. So much hope and expectation, so much disappointment. If I won 20 million dollars tomorrow, I'd likely purchase the IP and hardware and licenses and reinvent that game, get a dev shop working on a fresh client and UI and network code, and rescue the models. Playing a dragon was incredible, and some of their ideas were extremely inventive and fresh. It's still one of the most interesting and robust crafting systems of any MMO to date, even if it is a bit long in the tooth. In theory, the world-changing events that they attempted were a precursor to WoW's world events like what they did for AQ and other server achievement unlock strategies, but in practice it was difficult and not well-executed.

The lair mechanics they put into the game lately are bar-none incredible and a very unique twist on MMO housing, but because they had no other new content to keep their existing player base entertained in the near future, they made it such an incredible crafting grind to get even one room finished that I decided I couldn't endure it and returned to WoW.

If another shop picked up Horizons and brushed off the dust, changed some of the fight mechanics and cleaned up the client to be as smooth-running as WoW's, I'd stay there forever. The RP community was (and still might be) hardcore beyond belief, with the dragon players having invented their own language that they used in most exchanges with the other races and each other to great effect.

I'm obviously a minority, though, and partly because I'm a huge fan of dragons in anglo-saxon and fantasy-spawned forms (don't care for the snake-like chinese dragons). But it would be hard for another MMO to come along and include dragons as a playable race and win me over unless they spent comparable time on the models. Some of the Horizons dragon models were truly eye-catching, and the plethora of texture and color combinations was extensive. Alas...

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