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Old 12-03-2011, 08:26 PM
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Arilou Arilou is offline
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"Ten years ago I opened Wyvern's doors to the public after 18 months of frantic full-time development. I felt like I was on to something big -- something that the game industry would never understand. I was thrilled that within minutes there were already people trying it out. One guy even stuck it out for a few weeks, despite the bugs and overall raw experience. If you think there are bugs today, you'd be amazed at what he put up with in 2001!

Over the years we fixed bugs, added features, created content and built a community. And the player base just kept on growing. Watching people play Wyvern and become hooked was what kept me going for another five or six years. During that time we had unprecedented contributions from amazing volunteers like Teshuvah, Arilou, Legolas, Janica, Kiz the Wiz and dozens of others. I told the game publishers that you could build a world entirely out of volunteer contributions, and they didn't believe me. They just didn't understand how addictive this thing would turn out to be, I guess.

Wyvern has been held back for the past few years by technology . Wyvern's world is a rich, extensible ecosystem, and it has pushed the available technologies to their limits and sometimes beyond. Java did not offer the dynamic features we needed, and still does not today. Databases could not deal well with our loosely tree-structured data model. Browsers didn't have quite enough "oomph" to let us create a compelling replacement for the browser client. And so on. In retrospect it's almost amazing that Wyvern works at all. And right around 2005, we finally hit the wall. Wyvern was just a little ahead of its time.

Since 2005, Wyvern's core development has been in temporal stasis as we wait for the technology to catch up. Wizards are busy creating new content, which is wonderful, and we all owe them our thanks and appreciation for their continued contributions. But for Wyvern to achieve its full potential, we need to solve the hurdle of scaling up to thousands of players. And we also need to offer a cross-platform client experience in browsers and mobile devices. We need to do these things while simultaneously making the game faster, more secure, more robust, and easier to build and manage.

I still believe we will get there.

In the past five years we've seen tremendous advances in exactly the technologies that Wyvern needs. We've watched as cloud computing services like Amazon's EC2 have made massive scaling accessible to small companies. We've seen fantastic new JVM languages appear, languages like Clojure and Scala, which should allow us to make the Wyvern world come alive with far less effort than it is today. We've seen huge advances in XML databases and other NoSQL-style storage frameworks. We've seen the emerging HTML5 standard pushing browsers to become powerful enough to host full-featured thin game clients, and we've seen matching protocols like Comet that can give us a rich channel from the browser to the servers.

The pieces are all lining up. They're all still fairly new, but they all show great promise. Wyvern should finally be able to get fancy new plumbing to replace the technological outhouses it's running on today.

The game industry produces a few hit games each year that people play and forget, as well as a few MMORPGs that -- in my opinion -- lack both the charm of Wyvern and its user-extensibility. The rest of what they produce is me-too throwaway titles that they fund because frankly they have no idea what they want.

Fortunately, with the way the industry is evolving, it's increasingly clear that we don't need game publishers anymore. Minecraft has been massive slap in their faces, and yet the publishing houses still think that Minecraft is somehow an accident, a one-off. They just don't get it, and fortunately for us, we don't need them to get it.

For years I labored away on Wyvern knowing that a game's greatness is entirely independent of how it looks. And for all those years, you folks -- both the players and wizards -- have labored with me, knowing that we're on to something amazing here. If anything, games like Zelda: The Wind Waker and Minecraft have shown us that simple graphics are *timeless*. If you want a game to remain new and fresh forever, then you need to sidestep the graphics race and focus on letting peoples' imaginations run wild. I believe Wyvern has the purest vision and the best execution of this idea in the entire history of computer gaming. It might sound immodest, but those of you who've stuck with it for the past decade know exactly what I mean.

It's worth observing that in the past ten years, not one thing has changed about my vision for Wyvern. Wyvern is still the game I want to play most. In fact the only reason I don't play it is to avoid getting sucked in and disappearing. I need to get my ducks lined up before the next massive push to scale it up. For the past few years it's been a waiting game on the technology and infrastructure. Now that we're approaching the end of that wait -- or so it seems to me -- I have some critical decisions ahead of me. I'm faced with decisions about the right way to scale the game, about game balance at massive scale, about monetization while keeping the game free, about the trade-off between security and openness, and many other choices that I believe I need to get mostly right before embarking on a big overhaul.

But I'm patient. And I know you are too, since Wyvern is still going pretty strong after ten years. I think the next ten years has great things in store for us. I hope you're looking forward to it as much as I am!"

-Rhialto
 


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