Earlier this evening we broke the news on the upcoming launch of City Of Eternals, the first Flash MMOG from Ohai.
I have the rough footage above of in game play, and will add a proper screencast shortly (update – better video has now been added at top). This is a World of Warcraft style MMOG that’s free to play and Flash based. It’s also integrated with Facebook Connect to allow easy signup and, more importantly, you can play with your friends and see the real identity of other players.
Ohai is letting 500 TechCrunch readers in now, just email techcrunch@cityofeternals.com, and the first 500 people will get an invitation via email. You’ll also get 100 Ohais, the in game currency.
Arrington – so what are you doing here? What’s going on?
Ohai – i’m walking in the city alley…
Seriously, she’s walking in the alley, gosh!
as opposed to clicking on crops in farmville? This stuff is proven win. See WOW.
On Facebook? Asynchronous > Real-time. Except for poker.
It is simply impossible for me to imagine an online game not linked to Facebook (or Steam, which may also eventually succumb) just 2 years months down the road. Facebook is sucking the entire online game world into it like a black hole, and doing such at an accelerating pace. The better browser games will be able to get (Flash, HTML 5, broadband …), the faster the changes will happen.
yes, games like duels.com are effectively asynchronous and it works very well. but then sometimes people want to go spend 25 straight hours on WOW.
In comparison to the biggest flash based mmorpg (AQWorlds from Artix Entertainment) I think it looks relatively simplistic. Still most important will be how much storyline they will be able to put in, for example with AQWrolds there is a new story part every single friday, which in my opinion is the only way somebody can keep playing a game.
Simply because people are thinking a (social) flash mmorpg is somehow a new thing I decided to link the game I mentioned in my previous post, simply so that people will actually check it out (and have a fair basis to compare with):
http://www.aq.com
Actually, http://www.dofus.com/ is one of the best Flash MMORPG out there, graphically and technically. There releasing Dofus 2.0 in december, which is even nicer, and totally rewritten in ActionScript 3.
Ankama as proven to be on the edge of using Flash for MMORPG, along with AQ, those two are since a couple of years now, unbeatable on that field, and it looks like it’s gonna stay that way.
??? While Dofus looks great and is **authored** in Flash, it requires a [large] downloadable *.exe and is not playable in the browser.
Which means that a) it’s not in the same class as Ohai and b) it’s unfortunately in the same class as WoW.
You know that you can generate .exe with Flash only don’t you?
Sure it’s not web based (used to be in early staged like 5/6years ago), but it’s a nice full flash game. And i’m not saying anything bad against ohai, i’ve even considered applying back when they started and were looking for some Flash/Php people.
It’s an amazing job they did, and as flash game developer i’m admiring them for what they did
Or and by the way, Dofus is one of the most played MMORPG after WoW, with more than 2 Millions player
Compare AQ to CoE, then I see the graphic of AQ totally crap with the 2D.
Yes! Absolutely, we share your love of rich immersive storylines. We are already changing our areas on a daily basis and adding new missions every week. That’s the beauty of running a gaming platform that has been designed from the ground up to be web services enabled. We’ll be adding new stories every week!
Sounds and looks interesting, but I think they may of came too late. WoW seems to have gained a lot of market share and it’s going to be hard to convince the players to switch over to a brand new game.
WOW is about 1/6 the size of Farmville in terms of users.
Mike its a different demographic entirely, I am a big WOW player since Vanilla and I do not “touch” social games per the new definition and ofc not something as “basic” as farmville… Thats like Tetris and hits the same demo.
I think this is cool though, but is not directed at the same people (as I mentioned several times) so please keep the focus.
it is designed to bring parts of the WOW experience to the Facebook crowd. That’s from the company, so please keep the focus.
WoW is a copy of Everquest is a copy of Ultima Online.
Compare this game to the original Ultima Online.
Extrapolate a couple of years, and a couple more revs of Flash.
Get the picture?
That is totally off the mark. There is a huge difference between an MMO where you have to install gigs of software and then spend hours at a time playing and a casual MMO where you play for a few minutes at a time on Facebook.
I feel that City of Eternals is somewhere between those 2. As it beinga Flash based you won;t need to install tons of software, btu still you will have to spend enough time to become super creature in game & execute your strategy well.
Companies like OnLive are talking about streaming entire videos of gameplay over the web. Ohai is sending the engine and smaller bits of data, which is considerably easier and cheaper to accomplish.
It’s not “totally off the mark” to compare or at least extrapolate a comparison between a *traditional* MMO and this. One day we will have a WoW experience without an install and inside a browser — some might argue we’re there already.
I can see its attraction if it can both provide quest paths and killing but also socializing and crafting and such which is often what females want more of in virtual worlds.
I have to say that with a free account in Second Life you could get all of these things and if you spent just a bit on land you could have the tools to eject annoyances like this Shaun that came to hang out in your friend’s house there.
The reason why you could convert people from WoW is that it doesn’t have the relentless grinding of skills and combat and seems to have more off the path activities while still retaining the ability to do some questing and killing of monsters. There are few worlds that have the range of both war and peace and perhaps this one will do it.
You guys should invest into a camera stand…
This looks like a blast. Just wait until you can do this on the iPhone.
“Just wait until you can do this on the iPhone.”
yeah right,if it’s only flash based you’ll wait an eternity to have it on the iphone.Flash will never come on iphone.Only if they’ll make an iphone app for it.
You failed.
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcs5/appsfor_iphone/
I think it looks pretty cool.
anyway Mike, where’s the crunchpad?
I see myself signing up, getting an account, getting bored in 15 minutes, never logging on again.
Who wants to throw glowing balls at zombies?
re: iphone version — it was mentioned in the previous article that it’s underway. The backend tech here looks really interesting. Quick development on multiple platforms. A venture beat article on the launch mentions there are only 3 engineers and 12 people total pushing this out. That alone says to me there is some crazy kung fu going on behind the scenes. Looking forward to seeing how fast the next game rolls on this platform.
So I requested and invite and nothing…
Got any more?
Thank you for being interested in our game. We’re super excited to share it with everyone soon. Stay tuned, we will be sending out invites RSN.
OK, I have some more questions about this, since I found it sort of out-of-character for Michael Arrington suddenly to be *personally* using his “thought leader” status to push a particular MMORPG.
I especially wonder if this promotiong of this particlar MMORPG has anything at all to do with the furious critique of Zynga and other social games that have tacky and even fraudulent offers associated with them last week.
Does Michael Arrington have any personal financial interest in City of Eternals? Do any of the principles of City of Eternals have financial interest in any other company where Michael Arrington may invest? One has to ask this because TechCrunch isn’t traditional journalism, but the new sort of tech journalism where the journalists unabashedly invest in some companies they like and not others, and still go on covering them, and also decide they like some companies, and not others, in various trade fairs they sponsor.
So I’d like to get a bead on those sort of relationships if they exist. I’m also figuring that Susan Wu is a Better Worlder. She is not making a MMORPG just to make a buck. She wants to influence the human race to become “better”. So I’m wondering if Michael Arrington also has a stake here perhaps not financially, but morally, in “making the world better” through this MMORPG?
@Prokofy – STEP AWAY FROM THE TIN FOIL HAT!
Mike would have to disclose if he had any investment in Ohai or CoE. Just like he did with FLIP.
I received my invite a week or so ago. City of Eternals is still in Alpha and as such it is very, very buggy. Despite that I have spent over 40 hours playing the game so far. It is that much fun. I think the strongest point of the game is the social aspect of it.
I should mention I have never played a MMO before. I have always been into first person shooters. So maybe I don’t know what I am missing.
I think this concept has serious potential. I wonder how long before Zynga develops games like this?