If you took the red pill and bought into The Matrix Online, you have less than two months to chase the white rabbit before it's gone forever. The four-year-old MMO is going to end the battle for Zion when Sony unplugs its last coppertops July 31. Originated by Ubisoft, the game was sold to Sony shortly after its 2005 launch and has already been cut back in size. The developers are planning a big send off, so if you've put aside the game you might want to jack back in for the time that remains...
Wow! 4 references in 4 sentences! Am I missing any? And how long did that take?
I count 5. :-) Didn't take too long, which was good since I'm pretty beat from rounding up all of the E3 news. It may look easy, but it's amazing how many details I wrangle when doing those.
This is pretty sad for me. Even though I stopped playing I always thought it was a great game. Sure it had its flaws. There generated mission system was nice but overused in my opinion due to a lack of real quests. Character customization was nice but it also had technical issues with ATI cards which is ironic since it has the ATI logo... plus my flash movies stopped working after awhile and I could never see new movies. But what I really loved was the combat which was unlike any MMO I've ever seen. Grinding in MxO was much more fun than grinding in any other MMO I've played, including WoW. And the game was different because of its setting and it used its setting well. It also had a very good skill tree.
I honestly think this game could have much better and pulled a lot of subs away from WoW. But the main problem was advertising. Everyone knew about the matrix movies but not even a lot of gamers knew about the MMO. I would talk about "MxO" and other MMO gamers would ask what it was. That's bad. I think SOE did an awful job, much like they did with SWG. I think they clearly wanted the license for the IP thinking that the IP was strong enough to make them money. But its still a game. And players are spending money on it more than they did all the movies combined so you can't simply run some servers and handle customer service. I think they treated these games almost like webhosting. And that's why these games are dying. They should have tried to sell SWG to Lucas to resell to BioWare or another developer and only handle the online servers. And they should have sold MxO to a developer that actually cares about the license more than just the money. I have no faith in SOE because of this.