Post by Morreion on Feb 26, 2013 15:22:13 GMT -5
Rubies of Eventide (Wikipedia)
Rubies of Eventide (RoE or Rubies) was a "free" to play (donation-funded) massively multiplayer online role-playing game previously published by Mnemosyne, LLC. Powered by the Lithtech Jupiter engine, Rubies of Eventide is set in the quasi-medieval fantasy world of Vormis represented by a 3D world. The game launched in June 2003, shut down and restarted and after 6 years, ceased operation in August 2009.
The Game Archaeologist: Rubies of Eventide (Massively)
There are two things that separate Rubies of Eventide from the rest of the MMO pack and make it a fascinating case study. The first is that it's one of the very few MUDs that was transformed into a graphical MMO while retaining its roots in old-school play. The second is that it had an absolutely ridiculous number of playable classes: 104, to be precise. Some days I really miss the era when game designers would aspire to reach these incredible numbers.
...By early 2004, the studio said that the game's playerbase had declined to a mere 806 customers, not enough to sustain RoE's operation. There was nothing left to be done; on Valentine's Day 2004, the servers were closed.
...Usually, that's the end of our tales here. In this case, it was just the beginning. Unwilling to let Rubies of Eventide go, game developers Julia Howe and Jeff Grubb started a private server to keep the adventures going. The server didn't stay private long; fans discovered it and joined in with the fun. The population swelled to a point where the devs realized that they could probably get the game to run on fan support alone.
And so it was in August 2004 that Mnemosyne, LLC. came into being, and with it the relaunch of Rubies of Eventide. Though the game required a fee in 2003, players could now play the game for free. To help fund the cost of operation and development, the devs relied instead on donations and creative contributions by the community.
