Wish

The folks at Mutable Realms are sitting on a title that could make a strong impact on the world of massively multiplayer online role-playing games. But just listen to art director Thomas Blue for a bit and you will realize that Mutable Realms is not sitting back blissfully ignorant of what the fans want.

“Players want what they want,” Blue said, “that’s why we are all over the forums.”

Wish is set in the world of Ganedin, a fantasy world full of mythical beasts and strong feudal/renaissance influences in the buildings and game theme. The monsters are migratory and will never spawn twice in the same place. This is a game that is very much about choice and in many regards the game parallels that which is attributed to the real world.

Players must be trained in certain skills and can only carry so many skills simultaneously. But there are no classes, per se, and players can pursue any career that they wish. By using the skill, you improve it.

The playable races include humans, Cyclops, gnomes, elves, dwarves, and two new races will be introduced – dragonkin and imps. The game has a one-time quest system, and the latest patch updated the player interface to try to make the game more intuitive.

“One of the things that we wanted to go for was to make sure everyone can play,” said Blue.

Wish does support an in-depth crafting system and players can actually take control of the cities within the game, setting the tax rates and vying for economic control.

The world of Wish is huge but this game will not be broken into shards and rather will be a uni-server, one server for all the players who join the world. The uni-server will support more than 10,000 simultaneous online players in a seamless world.

While Wish will sport areas for limited player-versus-player combat, this is primarily a player-versus-environment game. Blue stated that every monster in the game is modeled on existing mythology. The game also uses the Wish engine which has been licensed to other games like Sui Tang Online. The sound of the game is wonderful, featuring theme music that is in line with time frame of the game.

Wish is currently on schedule to release in the first quarter of 2005.

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