Argentum Online
Argentum Online is an Open Source FREE 2D MMORPG, it has all the features of the classic MMORPGS: guilds system, magic system, combat system, animal taming, 21 skills, a world of more than 150 maps, towns, dungeons, races, professions.
The development of the game began in late 2000, the team involved in the project was not professional, just simple people on Internet with almost no experience in game development. When we released the first open beta version of the game we were told that we had to choose a name for our Development team, I really don't know why, I believe that it was for marketing reasons, so in this way the core of this team was baptized as NoLand Studios. So there is no credit for other teams. Even tough, it is true that plenty of people have supported the project and worked as much as any member of Noland Studios, we are very grateful to them, these people had a key role not only in the development process but also in supporting and providing us the resources needed to perform gratefully our work. They are also responsible of the game success.
The aim of the project was to make the first FREE Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game of Latin America and to learn as much as we could during the development. The project has never been thought to profit, and we will never do it. Now, December 2002, the game is in its final beta stages, it has been almost two years of development, two years of hard work. The game has gotten an excellent welcome from people on the net, there are more that 2000 active players, most of them from Argentina , Latin America and Spain . There are three servers available to play the game,two in Argentina and one in Spain; all the servers are full of life, as soos as you enter to our magic world you will see people running, talking and fighting around you. We have achieved a record of 375 simultaneous players on our main server, and usually there is more than 200 persons playing the game at any hour. We are working on the final version of the game, fixing a lot of bugs, making new maps, adding new features and reorganizing the staff of Game Masters. In a short term, we will release the final version of the game. We are also planning to release the source code of the project, we believe that anyone that wants to run his own server has the rigth to do it. After finishing the work on the final version we will realease the source code of the whole project. It will be our gift to the comunity.
Argentum Online I isn't a technological marvel, its 2D graphical engine is pretty basic, yet good enough to represent properly the magic world of Argentum. It is clear that the success of the game is not due to its technological features, the game was successful because we let the players do whatever they want to do. We don't ask players to fight wars that no one can win, we don't try them as fools, because ourselves, as players, don't want to be treated as fools. Our game doesn't fit to the "succesful" pattern of perfectly profitable game; we don't pursue money, we don't follow recipes, we are only guided by our imagination.