Anarchy Online Massive Final Touches

We almost have another MMORPG on our hands! Anarchy Online is in its final stages; they (Funcom) were supposed to release it before Christmas but decided to push it back a little to polish those hard-to-reach areas so to speak and buff the whole thing to a sparkling perfection. An enlightening new dev. journal at AOVault by one of the programmers clues us in on just how big this gizmo is, amongst other worthy tids:

Rubi-ka is big. Huge.

I guess none of us really thought about how difficult it would be to navigate in such a big world. When we gave the first backroom previews of the game at ECTS 1999 we told people that our world would be so big that it would take approx. 3 hour to run across it. It later turned out that Rubi-Ka needed to be even bigger to fit the amount of players we are aiming for so right now it takes about 6 hours. You see why we had to implement a standard map function?

Spark your interest? Looking for more info? Cybersurf to Gamespot’s 6 page preview and/or take a look at the official FAQ.

On a tangent:
It appears that next year, 2001 could be to MMORPG’s like 1997 was to the RTS genre. If you remember, that’s when the avalanche of RTS’s hit the shelves in the Fall: Age of Empires, Total Annihilation, Dark Reign… and some duds.

Hey! Isn’t next year when we’re supposed to send two people on a top secret mission to discover a colossal monolith near Jupiter? Let’s just hope the Pentium 4 is good enough. *cough cough*