Anarchy Online – Small Team, Planning for Future
No, this is not AnarchyOnline.UltimaCodex.com, I just thought it would be interesting to talk briefly about a game that came out just under 4 years after Ultima Online did, celebrating its 11th birthday a few months ago.
Like UO, Anarchy Online’s parent company is going through layoffs, and like UO, it was affected. In the Game Director’s latest monthly update, the team had this to say:
For Anarchy Online, this means that we will not be able to continue growing our team right now, as we had hoped. The work will however continue as scheduled with some exceptions; some of the additional features for the new player experience, like the new character creation, will be down prioritized until we have the play experience feature complete.
The silver lining is that the AO dev team has always been a small but very talented team, even while producing booster packs, so our team is in control and AO will remain strong!
Our Dreamworld engine upgrade is still one of our top priorities! We believe this is an important step in evolving AO and building for the future, and as this work is done in parallel to the rest of our commitments, we do not have to delay any other content because of this!
Ironically, I came across this post on MMORPG.com from two years ago:
Good lord, I just checked screenshots of this aging game and saw that it still has the same lousy gfx after all these years. They have been talking about that new gfx engine for years now and I think it’s safe to say it will never materialize.
It was back in 2007 that Funcom had mentioned they would be doing a massive update of the client/engine. It had received smaller updates a couple of times prior to 2007. Due to their small team at the time, they stopped work on an upgrade back in 2008, and instead started working with an updated engine used in the Age of Conan MMO. Age of Conan, and now The Secret World, are both produced by the same company that makes Anarchy Online.
The current engine upgrade they are working with is the same engine behind both the Age of Conan and the recently released The Secret World MMORPGs, which would represent a major update. There is another piece of irony – the Enhanced Client for Ultima Online that is in current use is based on the same graphics engine as UO’s sister MMORPGs Warhammer Online and Dark Age of Camelot, as well as other MMORPGs like RIFT, and other RPGs like Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.
I’m posting this, because even with a small team, the Anarchy Online team still realizes the importance of upgrading the graphics engine for the future. They have also discussed supporting both the new engine and the current engine side-by-side, just as the UO team does with the Classic Client and Enhanced Client.
Interesting parallels. While the high resolution artwork upgrade has been put on an indefinite hold, the UO producer still considers work on the EC and its artwork to be important enough to warrant a mention in the latest producer’s letter.
via Massively
