Browser game company Bigpoint this week announced the open beta for its gang-based action MMORPG Poisonville, which the company said cost 2 million euros ($2.5 million) to develop.
Bigpoint, whose games include Seafight and DarkOrbit, said that the 3D action game is the company's most expensive game to date and has been in development for nearly two years. Its price tag approaches what development costs were for last-generation console games.
The game launches directly in a player's web browser with no download or installation required, Hamburg, Germany-based Bigpoint said. Particularly for a browser-based game, Poisonville on its highest settings looks impressive from a technical perspective. Bigpoint used a modified Java-based jMonkeyEngine (jME) graphical programming interface in the creation of the game.
The developer also implemented motion capture for the GTA-inspired browser game, which pits four gangs against each other in the fictional America city of Poisonville. The game is free-to-play, with revenues coming from players buying virtual items such as weapons and clothing.
"A team of top-notch developers has done some great technical and graphical work, and of course we're rightfully proud of that," said Bigpoint CEO Heiko Hubertz in a statement. Bigpoint also has an office in San Francisco.
If the game has been developed using JmonkeyEngine or variation of it the user we'll need to download the java runtime for sure. So the game really needs a download to run.
Oh my, I just tried it. Quite a long series of 'loading game screens' yielded 676 files totally 91.6MB in my c:usersnamepoisonville folder -- including dlls and jar files. Game was sluggish, ugly, and basic. A lot of lengthy loading times and several bugs. The game wasn't fun at all.
Played through a prison escape, cop car escape, finding weapon dealer, buying gun, joining gang, then going to hotel when the game just exited on me. Either the demo was done or it crashed -- but I was done anyways.
They must have spent all the money on the fake guns they had lying around the office instead of making it easy to play. Still hope they work it out a bit, wasn't fun to play yet.
Played through a prison escape, cop car escape, finding weapon dealer, buying gun, joining gang, then going to hotel when the game just exited on me. Either the demo was done or it crashed -- but I was done anyways.