Doctor Who MMO Closing Down

[Andy Chalk]

Doctor Who MMO Closing Down

Doctor Who: Worlds in Time, the MMO that launched in early 2012, will bid a final farewell at the end of February.

I had absolutely no idea that there was a Doctor Who MMO, but it sounds like a pretty fantastic idea. One of the great things about Doctor Who as a game setting is that you can do literally anything you want with it, and there's already such a huge catalog of material - enemies, allies, strange worlds and familiar places - that you could go for years without any worries of running out of fresh content.

It doesn't seem like that's quite what Doctor Who: Worlds in Time was all about, though. It was instead more of a browser-based puzzle game, and while it was fairly well-received by the few critics who looked at it - Kotaku [http://kotaku.com/5869658/the-delightful-free-dr-who-video-game-may-be-the-biggest-dr-who-thing-ever] called it "delightful" - the gameplay and kid-friendly cartoon style apparently didn't catch fire with fans of the franchise, as it has announced the end of operations as of February 28.

It actually looks not terrible as a very casual online game (although it's a bit slow loading new areas) and it's still possible to create an account and play if you want to see what it was all about, but the microtransaction store is offline so you'll have to earn your sonic screwdriver the hard way. Check it out for yourself at doctorwhowit.com [http://www.doctorwhowit.com/].


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[Lunar Templar]

I think I speak for many people when I say...


"There was a Dr.Who MMO?"

 

[Neta]

It's a shame that we're losing a Doctor Who MMO, but then again it was repetitive pay2win crap.

 

[Shadow-Phoenix]

I never even noticed there wan an MMO and now it's going to be no more soon?, well this sucks.

Still I hope we can get more Dr Who games since I did enjoy the first 4 mini ones the BBC released a few years back.

 

[CriticalMiss]

I had no idea this wasa thing, it sounds similar to Puzzle Pirates but with Doctor Who. If I'd known about it earlier I probably would have played it. Still, it would be nice to get a few more decent Who titles that are more than reskins of other games.

 

[Therumancer]

Well, this seems like a casualty of them simply not advertising because I didn't even know it existed. Of course then again I'm not really a "Whovian" by any stretch of the imagination.

Who knows, maybe the IP will be used for an MMO again.

That said, some of the negative reviews here from people who were aware do not surprise me terribly. To be honest I'd find it a challenge to do any kind of an MMO based on "Doctor Who", for the same reason I think a lot of the various attempts to do PnP RPGs have failed. "Doctor Who" for the most part is light on traditional action, and high on concepts, which can make for good TV, but isn't terrible exciting from a gameplay perspective. As a result it's not surprising they had to turn it into a puzzle game of sorts. What's more the entire "universe" is extremely character-centric, "Doctor Who", as the title suggests, is pretty much the universe for all intents and purposes. He occupies a very unique position within his cosomology that let's him do the things he does and get away with them, such a unique position that you cannot have other people doing largely the same things (like say player character adventurers in a PNP game... never mind on the level of an MMO) without ruining the concept and what makes Doctor Who special to a pretty extreme degree. Some compromises people have tried seem to have involved ideas like having the PCs be the Doctor's companions, which have been a varied lot, but given that typically the role of a companion is to act as a foil and be there so the Doctor has someone to show off to (while also acting as an audience surrogate) that usually doesn't wind up being all that satisfying.

That said, I will be interested in seeing the results if someone else takes a spin at it, especially if they want to develop on a higher level than that MMO seemed to be.

 

[008Zulu_v1legacy]

Doctor Who MMO - microtransaction store

I too had no idea this existed, but my interest dropped as sharply as it rose with that mention of a microtransaction store. Yeah I know almost every MMO has one, but reading it in print somehow lowers the overall quality of the game just by it's very mention.

 

[Alpha Maeko]

Time Lord race gets +5 to Fez, amirite?

...

 

[Chimichanga]

I blame Three Rings Design, this seems to be the same with all their games. Too small and ill-funded to add content beyond cosmetics; too shoddy with their coding to keep it from being buggy; too amateurish to balance out what little real content they do finally put out for their games to not be horribly broken; and finally, too hungry and desperate for sucker's cash that they will pander and powercreep the hell out of whatever items/game play features/etc. that they figure their main buying consumer demographic will want, unbalancing everything in favor of those who pay and pay frequently. Remember suckers, it's not "pay2win" if the cool kids are satisfied and say it isn't!

From my experiences with their products, OOO can rot in Hell and I'm glad to see them fail at their pathetic attempts to ape Zinga via pure player base exploitation.

Nothing but pure disgust for these guys. It just goes to show that even small, starry-eyed dev teams can be just as scummy and manipulative as the big boys.

 

[Lazule]

I hope its lesson learned for them. There are A LOT of MMOs out there and every single one is pretty much the same thing or a smaller. shorter kind of WoW.

 

[uchytjes]

This reminded me of this:
OT: From what I've heard, Doctor Who has never had a good game. I wonder how long it'll take for there to be one that is good.

 

[Neta]

The game was set around repeating the same four or five different puzzles over and over again, and paying real money for things.

 

[Chris Jacob]

Did they ever get grouping to work correctly? I kept putting off playing the game because it seemed like it would be more fun in a group, but I gave up after months of checking in and seeing it in the same completely broken nearly unplayable state.

It seems like their dev team had no idea what they were doing, which is a shame because I thought it had a bit of promise.

 

[Blow_Pop]

I've enjoyed it when I've played it but I played it very infrequently. Part of the problem, I feel, besides the microtransactions was that it was browser based so it's easy to lose it in bookmarks and a bookmark bar in your browser. And I loved that as someone who typically gets read as female regardless of what I'm identifying as for the day, that there wasn't the harassment that I've gotten in other games when people find that out. It was a nice playing experience. It had promise but ultimately it did need some work to work better. And sometimes teaming up with other players wasn't a whole lot of fun....