SOE has long said about its games that no matter how many or few players a MMO had, as long as it made money, they’d keep the lights on.
Seems that day has come for The Matrix Online, which will be sending red pills back into the real world July 31, but they won’t go quietly. Major events in the virtual universe will be revisited, leading up to a world-ending event, so if you have a MxO account gathering dust, now might be the time to plug back in and have one last romp through the city.
MxO was one of the first MMOs to try and model hand-to-hand martial arts in any realistic way (kung fu MMOs like Twelve Sky seem to make it entirely too magical). The game was built on a three-way faction war between the Machines, the Exiles (rogue programs) and the Free People of Zion, and was just chock full of innovation. Unfortunately, the game came out as interest in the movies waned, and it never got the chance to stand on its own, apart from the IP.
The devs will move on to other projects within SOE.
(Thanks, Warcry!)
Oh man, I got the email last night and I think we double posted this about 10 minutes apart.
Next time Tipa….next time….
I hope they give Vanguard one of the devs 🙂 Silius could really use some bodies!!
I’m kind of sad about this. I never played the game, but I have a good friend from WoW for whom this was his first MMO love. He’s always tell me about what craziness he was up to in MxO. I’m bummed out his favorite game is going away.
One of my 2009 Progdictionations was that any SOE product that did not get RMT was doomed. I was thinking Vanguard when I wrote that, but then it got RMT.
Games made to be played through the Internet have to be compatibile to the whole Internet, or are ill-conceived.
The Matrix Online was Windows-only (no Mac, no Linux). Good on Windows, bad on the Internet. Ill-conceived games die.
I’m not sure MxO’s failure was entirely due to it not being natively available on the Mac or Linux. As a Linux user myself, I’d love to see more games work on that OS, but I’m not holding my breath.
@Lux – I’m not sure reality bears out your opinion. By your logic EverQuest II, Warhammer Online, Lord of the Rings Online, and many other “through the internet” games ought to be dead. Even the original EverQuest made only a half-assed attempt at Mac support, and it certainly is alive and kicking 10 years later. And then there is Free Realms.
And, on the flip side, CCP offered Mac and Linux client for EVE Online but stopped Linux work on it due to lack of interest. And their Mac client is currently pretty lacking at the moment. It has been crap since Apocrypha, so is quite clearly not on their priority list.
I make a point of comparing Mac and Windows versions, if they exist, of games that I play. The only company that really does a good Mac client for MMOs that I have seen is Blizzard. I understand that City of Heroes has a Mac client out now, but I haven’t seen anything on how well it plays.