The world of Elteria is fully changeable. You can break it, you can build it. Even with basic abilities you can make holes in the world or create platforms in midair, you can throw your enemy in the wall and there will be a hole! The landscape is your weapon: shape it and use it to your advantage in fights with monsters or players! To make it possible, we use our own lighting-fast voxel engine that was in development for the last few years.
There’s a lot more to recommend No Man’s Sky at this point than there was when it first launched, by all estimations. The game has evolved in leaps and bounds, but you can check it out for yourself on your Xbox One starting in June. The title is arriving on Xbox Game Pass next month, along with netting a new version of the game on the Windows Store as a specific Windows 10 title.
My name is Andrew and I started a Canadian company Big Picture Games Ltd to purchase Darkfall back in 2015. We succeeded in March 2016 in securing a licence for the game alongside a second company called Ubergames based out of France. Uber has since shut down their version called Darkfall: New Dawn but we continue to operate ours under the name Rise of Agon. Given we’ve done this task thanks to many dozens of volunteers and a couple professional developers for just shy of 5 years I have a few insights into this. Our project is a little unique as the game we licensed was controlled by an indie game studio out of Greece that built the product themselves on their own platform. A larger studio game would be a very different endeavour than the insights below I imagine :).
This has a very complicated answer because there’s a lot of factors from technical to financial to simply getting enough dedicated following for someone to take a crack at it who can bring together all the pieces needed to even attempt this. MMORPGs are extremely massive and complicated interconnected pieces of software, the code base for our game is something like 2 million lines between engine and game logic. I’m not a skilled programmer but I do have a variety of experience in hosting, scripting and networks. My expertise is my ability to connect people and talent together, so understand that while I’m very technically inclined I don’t have expertise in the deep coding we work with at BPG :D.
It’s a gamers dream to have their beloved game taken over by the fans and it has a high barrier of success for several reasons:
-The owner of the IP is often controlled by a group of individuals and multiple companies/investors may be stakeholders. A case for selling/transferring the IP must be made that appeals to their interests, a viable business plan and a solid sales pitch is needed as is finding the right people to talk to.
-You need at least a small team of people with the right skills to get a project like this off the ground and typically a 6-7 figure sum of investment is needed for purchase of the IP, setup costs, development time/programmers salaries, legal costs for contract negotiations, server costs and building websites, business startup costs and intellectual property registration/transfers. We started entirely volunteer, no paid devs till we launched in Q2 2017, almost 2 years after the project started. You need to get a working Alpha, get experience in the code if there’s new to the project developers working on it.
-You will need to market/promote the project and get a following behind it to likely get any negotiations started to prove viability. We started a website and generated interest through Reddit, our forums and made connections with many community members and guilds from the original game.
-Negotiations with the owner(s) and a contract for either a purchase or royalties agreement. This process alone took about 6-8 months and was complicated due to 2 projects being given licences.
-When we got the contract finally signed and was given source code it was a jumble, little to no documentation and the original developers had moved on leaving us mostly to tinker and get it working nearly blind. Development tools were non existent and no pipeline to speak of we had to develop it all ourselves on a proprietary engine without even source files for most assets. We eventually were able to create a process to import/export assets effectively using modern 3D artists tools but initially we had no ability to insert modern built assets effectively for years.
-We funded the development by internally raising the initial seed money for the purchase through a few of our core team members. The initial cost was not too onerous as we had a higher royalty, the owners knew it would be a challenge so they let us take a crack with a relatively small up front sum. However we had to pay for website hosting and an initial development cluster which cost us thousands a month before we launched. Fortunately we had a large community of dedicated supporters that signed up for founders packages so we could fund the hosting/operational costs for over a year before we launched (March 2016 to May 2017). No personnel just operational costs were thousands a month in Dev tools/Alpha servers to run the testing grounds out of New York as we promised our supporters.
Anyways this is a little insight into some of the challenges we faced in succeeding in purchasing a dead MMO and reviving it. It’s been live 3 years now since we launched and we’re still developing it with thousands of players playing. We earn enough to keep the lights on and a small underpaid but very appreciated team of developers that are mostly past players. We loved the game and it’s why we took on this task, it has been a rollercoaster ride of trials and success, highs and lows. It is a very big endeavour to revive an older game which is why it is seldom done. We got lucky that things worked out like it did especially given that the team was created out of the old playerbase by myself gathering internet strangers together to cobble together a cohesive group and somehow pull it off.
If anyone is seriously interested in this kind of a project send me a message I would be happy to share some of what I’ve learned and mentor anyone trying to pull off this kind of project. It’s a ton of work but it has been extremely rewarding to see my favourite MMORPG played by thousands of fans and continue to be developed. I sadly don’t have the time to play as I’m a father of 4 with a day job plus running the game but I live vicariously through our players :).
-Andrew
CEO
Big Picture Games Ltd
As one would expect, the Frozen Tundra has no shortage of icy locations to discover, from ice caverns to snowy wilds to ancient ruins like an old coliseum. The new biome is also bringing some changes to the monsters in the area as well as new ones like the aforementioned yetis, along with a new class of weapon, with one weapon for every set.
Things in Wurm Online are getting a whole lot prettier soon. The devs have posted a variety of looks at the sandbox’s graphical overhaul. The update to the visuals mostly focuses on volumetric lighting, which is already improving the game’s atmosphere as well as bringing some new beauty to the day and night skies of the title.
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