CCP finished off White Wolf

Lönkka wrote:

A short while ago I had a talk with one of my mates who is involved and they are still in the process of developing the game.

Might recall this wrongly, but it might take like 1-2 years for it to come out.

CCCP has said that the World Of Darkness Online will be coming out in 1-2 years EVERY SINGLE YEAR. Two years ago, it wasn't being released to beta testing because of dresses.

That's right, dresses. The dresses weren't correct.

Why this MMO has been in alpha-testing longer than any MMO in history is incomprehensible.

It's because they don't know what to do with it.

At first it was supposed to be a gothic MMO aimed at a high-educated female population. Except those generally don't play a lot of games thus that wasn't found financially feasible.

Then it was supposed to be a more action based MMO similar to WoW and its multitude of clones set in the WoD world. That didn't go through because everyone that tried to make WoW in a new setting failed hardcore and went either F2P or simply stopped maintaining it.

So to make that WoD MMO working, it needs to find a niche similar to how Eve Online found a niche. Of course Eve finding its niche was more a matter of luck and being the only product "like that" on the market (and being released before WoW helps too) than the game being so insanely amazing. Don't get me wrong, I played Eve to death and still do so on and off, but it isn't really that great of a game compared to what else is on the market.

So the going guess is that they're figuring out wtf to turn it into and have focused their efforts on something that they expect will likely sell instead of putting all their eggs in the risky basket that's the MMO-market.

Izaak wrote:

So the going guess is that they're figuring out wtf to turn it into and have focused their efforts on something that they expect will likely sell instead of putting all their eggs in the risky basket that's the MMO-market.

What you say is useful and likely true, but they've had dozens of people working on this game for five years. They've invested millions into it already. They've already taken an enormous risk for a company their size. They probably removed all their White Wolf product lines so they'd have financial breathing-room to draw this fiasco out another year or two (besides all the other published reasons). They refuse to put the product into even a closed-beta test, since the dresses aren't up to snuff. Every year -- and I mean Every Single Year(TM) -- they say it'll be "1-2 more years". Oh, and dresses.

Not to mention that players have left EVE in horrifically large percentages in the last two years, and EVE is the golden goose that keeps the entire CCCP operation afloat.

All around, I think is going to be remembered as one of the greatest blunders of any gaming company in history.