Creating an MMO isn't an easy job under any circumstances. Regardless of the area of gameplay -- terrain design, quests, loot tables, UI, back-end support -- all of them have a host of perils and pitfalls that can ruin the eventual player experience. Even so, no area of gameplay comes in for as much scrutiny as class design and balance. Players will accept a certain level of bugginess in quests, some misspeliings in text and an occasional terrain bug, but any and all perceptions of "class imbalance" are met with howls that can be heard all the way from Cathay to the Phoenix Throne. During GameSpy's day-long excursion into the world of Warhammer Online one of their breakout sessions with designers Josh Drescher and Adam Gershowitz discussed the way Mythic is approaching the daunting task of balancing 24 different career tracks.
Let nostalgia take you back to the lands you once roamed until they were cruelly taken offline and away from us. MMOGames list the top 10 MMOs that died and left us with a hole in our hearts.
I agree when it comes to The Sims Online. That game was really fun and nothing has even come close to it. I still crave a new Sims with online multiplayer. Blows my mind they haven't done anything like that since The Sims Online or even The Sims Bustin' Out on PS2.
Kevin from Denkiphile: "The first I’d ever heard of Titan was at the height of my World of Warcraft career, which was also the same time that several games, touted as WoW-killers, came onto the market and failed miserably. It made sense to me at the time that the only thing that could kill WoW was Blizzard themselves, but this also eventually changed with the advent of session-based, microtransaction-supported games like League of Legends. Titan was supposed to revolutionize and revitalize the MMO genre, but it certainly was not the first to crash and burn before its first flight. Here are some MMOs whose ambitions flew them too close to the sun."
The closing of multiplayer services can happen for a number of reasons. Sometimes there just aren’t enough people using a product to justify keeping it running while in others it could be down to complicated legal wrangling, like expiring licensing agreements, or even a desire to bring out a new installment.
One thing is clear though – many of these discontinued games simply don’t deserve to die, to be cut down in their prime leaving players without a viable alternative and waste all that time the audience invested in them. With that in mind, this article will count down the 12 games least deserving of being shut down, the ones that players the world over wished had kept going.
