Glitch MMO "unlaunched"
Quirky title goes back to beta for more work.
Glitch, the eccentric MMO featuring input from Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi, has been "unlaunched" two months after it first went live.
A post on the game's official site today by Stewart Butterfield of developer Tiny Speck explained that the team need to make major changes to ensure the title's long-term success and have pulled it back into beta.
"There are two obvious and huge improvements we need to make: the first is to make the early game reveal itself more easily to new players so they can get into the fun faster," wrote Butterfield.
"The second and larger task is to give those players who have gotten over that initial hump and fallen in love with the game - spending dozens or even hundreds of hours playing - the creative tools that they need to change the world in more tangible ways: building whole new locations themselves, designing new buildings, setting up resource flows and forming flexible organizations to create bigger things together."
He added that the team had hoped to "evolve" these changes into the game over time. However, "making radical changes to core game mechanics is something that's a lot harder to do while the front doors are open," hence the return to beta.
It'll still be playable and new content will continue to be added but the developer might be slower to fix "non-critical bugs".
Butterfield didn't put a timeframe on how long the changes will take to implement.
Anyone who has spent money on the game and feels aggrieved by the news can claim a full refund via the game's official site.
For more on the title, give Christian Donlan's recent Glitch impressions piece a read.
"Glitch is extremely generous with the content you can access for free, and it's nice to poke around in a world that's so freshly minted - even if a lot of the stuff you're going to find in there won't seem particularly novel," he wrote.
"Where's it all headed? I have no idea. Glitch isn't a bad name, as things go - but perhaps, for the time being, they should have called this one 'Limbo'."