More time wasted

I noticed on mmorpgdot something about “Mourning”, one of those vaporware mmorpg projects that exist only to demonstrate how people are gullible and that mmorpgs are the new cult (just open a website saying you are working on a new mmorpg and the forums will get swarmed with goons). If you search for “mourning” on this site you can find some fun about its launch a year ago.

Here’s some recent fun:

Nuanced Entertainment to develop Age of Mourning.

Based in Greenville, South Carolina USA , with additional staff located all over the world , Nuanced Entertainment is focused on the development and research of Massive Multiplayer Online Gaming. Nuanced Entertainment consists of a tightly knit group of seasoned professionals which have held positions with such organizations as Electronic Arts , Blizzard Entertainment and NCsoft in the past and have been involved in many of the higher profile titles in the MMOG genre such as Everquest , World of Warcraft and lineage 2 as programmers and artists bringing with them an indispensable wealth of knowledge.

It looks like now everyone and their sister has Blizzard devs in their company. Come on, I really cannot believe that someone working for one of those three companies prefers to start a contractor studio to work on that sort of crap that will never get released. Is this really the only way for emergent developers to find a place? Nah, I don’t think it is, the situation isn’t that awful.

This is definitely a complete waste of resources. If you give a look at the website you can see that they are supposed to work on three/four projects at the same time (one is a MUD?) and that “Mourning” is being co-developed with another studio called “Loud Ant”.

But the most fun comes from the description of the game and main goal:

Age of Mourning is about your deeds and continued struggle to carve out your name within the world. Age of Mourning is about your bloodline. Most MMORPG’s claim to be realistic online worlds when in reality they are nothing more than static level treadmills that eventually only cater to the high end player base. Once you have “leveled up” and experienced all the low end content; there is really no purpose for it any longer and it rarely if ever gets any attention so it remains a useless forgotten experience when it could be much more. In Age of Mourning our world is truly dynamic and always changing. Because of our bloodline system, players have the ability to experience not only new high end content but also new low end content because of the endless life cycle of being reborn and dying while continuing their bloodline or lineage. This endless cycle allows us to concentrate on both the low end and high end experience and no longer makes the low end gaming experience useless over time. No longer is there a high end cap. Players will experience all the game has to offer continuously in a changing , endless , real world gaming cycle.

Eheh, yes. You have read it right. Their world is “truly dynamic and always changing” because you have to regrind all over again all the content every time you die.

They are trying to sell this as a quality. It’s incredible how many amateurish projects out there can reach those peaks of design stupidity. It’s really all on the most basic and elementary level possible. And they have no clue. Less clue than a player randomly picked from the battle.net community. I’m in pure awe.

I’m writing about this essentially because I already examined this silly point of view. And defined it “selfstabbing”.

See also this other shorter point of view.

That goal they want to reach is actually possible. But you don’t reach it through permdeath. You reach it through sandbox models and a flat power growth on the characters (no levels). Aka: permeable barriers.

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