Sega publishes Oceanus' Legacy Online MMOG

Geartest.com Staff
Updated Feb 13, 2003.

MASSIVELY MULTIPLAYER: Sega and Oceanus agree to bring the massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) Legacy Online to a computer near you.

Chasing a dream can be difficult at the best of times. But the challenge is even greater when you’re a small company with limited resources trying to break into a highly competitive market from a city that is geographically removed from the hub of your industry.

The scenario is similar to the one laid out in computer game developer Oceanus Communications’ Legacy Online, which pits players against one another in a complex interplanetary contest to build and dominate corporate and political empires.

Video game industry giant Sega announced last week that Legacy Online (formerly Star Peace) will be the first title to be published in its new online developer program. The partnership between Sega and Oceanus marks a turning point for the Ottawa independent studio, which has invested some $750,000 in the massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) since they started work on it in 1997.

Where a traditional computer game is played by an individual in isolation, or by a dozen or fewer players if the game has Internet capability, MMOGs can support thousands of people simultaneously. Typically, events in a MMOG’s world continue even when players are offline, giving the world an element of novelty and realism that traditional static games lack. Legacy Online already has some 3,000 players worldwide.

Oceanus set out to capitalize on the explosive growth in popularity of the Internet and settled on building a MMOG as the best opportunity, says Legacy Online’s senior designer Marco Cultrera.

A theoretical physicist by training, Cultrera joined the Oceanus team in 1999 when he moved to Canada from Italy with his Ottawa-native wife, Lora Ricci, who signed on as the company’s public relations manager last year.

An abortive publishing deal with French publisher Monte Cristo in 2000 quickly highlighted the importance of partnering with an experienced game publisher, particularly when it comes to MMOGs.

"It’s a particular beast," Ricci says. "It’s not the same as a console game, and they’d never done it before." That inexperience showed in Monte Cristo’s decisions, like running the game servers in London, England for $25,000 U.S. a month while Oceanus could do so in Ottawa for $5,000.

Maxis - maker of the popular SimCity series - subsequently courted Oceanus to launch the game as the next installment of SimCity but the timing was off: Maxis and its publisher, EA, were about to launch The Sims and decided they didn't have the resources to do both.

Oceanus was ready to abandon the game and move on to other projects last year but decided to make a final effort to find a publisher, which they did with the help of Sherpa Games, a Toronto agency dedicated to helping independent game studios build their businesses.

The Sega deal’s timing could reap huge rewards for Oceanus. A report released last fall by California infrastructure firm Zona Inc. pegged the U.S. MMOG market at $600 million U.S. in 2002 and projects growth to $3.2 billion U.S. worldwide by 2006, with half of that growth occurring in the U.S.A.

Ricci says she hopes Oceanus’ success will help incubate a game industry in Ottawa that capitalizes on the pool of expertise that already exists there. "It’s only a matter of time."

The free pre-release version of Legacy Online can be found at starpeace.net.

 Related links
 Sega
 · sega.com

 Legacy Online
 · legacyonline.net
 · starpeace.net
 · screenshots

 Sherpa Games
 · sherpagames.com

 Metro International
 · Metro
 · Newspapers
 · Toronto edition