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The Game Archaeologist: Four efforts to preserve dead MMOs
As I type this, we are now living in a post-Warhammer Online world. You can probably tell by all of the rampant looting, devastating earthquakes, and heart-rending sobs coming from your neighbors' homes. For me, it's a strange thought that this game simply isn't there at all any more -- and there's no way to go back and play it, ever. Or is there? When it comes to MMO sunsets, there are varying degrees of death. Sometimes a closure isn't as final and complete as we might assume, and between the passion of developers and those of fans, we're able to revisit these games long after their expiration date. For a writer who is keenly interested in preserving MMO history, these efforts are of great interest. So today we're going to look at four ways that people are trying their hardest to preserve dead MMOs -- and even let you play them once more. And I'm going to write about this without using the forbidden "E" word, too!
Camelot Unchained video shows 1,000 players on-screen
City State has updated Camelot Unchained's Kickstarter page with a new video and a technology roadmap. Lead programmer Andrew Meggs is both our guide to the two-minute clip and the author of the textual accompaniment that talks up everything from the demo's level of detail to various goings-on with the CU engine. Meggs says that the 1,000 characters glimpsed on-screen are only "hitting around six percent CPU load," which gives the team a lot of wiggle room for all of the "prediction, decoding, and lag compensation" tasks it's currently working on. Read the full entry and catch the video at CU's official Kickstarter site.
Camelot Unchained's team puts gameplay over graphics
City State Entertainment co-founder Andrew Meggs shares a tough question that any smaller MMO team has to answer from time to time: What happens when you have to choose between graphics, gameplay, and performance in developing an MMO? In a new blog post, Meggs says that for Camelot Unchained, graphics are the first to go on the backburner. "When it comes down to the sheer number of [polygons], any time we have to choose between that and delivering on our core gameplay, we're going to choose the gameplay," Meggs writes. "That requires certain sacrifices." Even so, Meggs said that the team is adept at putting a lot of personality and flair into the graphics it creates, it's just that the focus is creating a game that lasts: "We know that we're building a world for characters to live in, not a theme park for tourists to visit."
