Dean Hall's Sci-Fi MMORPG Ion Has Been Abandoned
On June 15, 2015 Dean Hall, of DayZ fame, took the stage at E3 to announce his latest project: Ion. The game was billed as a joint project between his New Zealand based RocketWerkz studio and Improbable, the London based company behind SpatialOS. Hall announced that work on the Sci-Fi MMORPG had begun a year earlier and that it would be released on PC and Xbox One.
No gameplay footage for Ion was made available, but Hall described a highly ambitious project:
"I want a game that is not a game," he said. "I want a game that is a universe. A universe built not on scripts or quests, but on the laws of physics, biology, and chemistry. A simulation MMO that explores mankind's expansion into space; the chance to be a pioneer in a harsh universe swamped with the risk of death yet peppered with the havens of fortune."
-Dean Hall, E3 2015
Years went by with no further updates on the project. After some digging, Robert Purchese from Eurogamer has declared the game dead. At least Dean Hall delivered on the first line. Ion is definitely not a game.
Many readers likely had no clue Ion was ever under development. I know I barely remembered it when I saw the headline that it had been abandoned. No official announcement was made, but as Eurogamer reports both studios claimed they were no longer working on the project when asked. So what was Ion supposed to be? A trailer blurb claims:
From the creator of DayZ and inspired by the cult favourite Space Station 13, Ion is an emergent narrative massively-multiplayer online game in which players will build, live in and inevitably die in huge floating galactic constructions as humanity makes its first steps colonising the universe.
While Ion never made it out of the birthing chamber, the technology that was to power the highly ambitious 'game that is not a game' lives on. The persistent world survival game Worlds Adrift and the fantasy MMORPG Chronicles of Elyria both use SpatialOS. Improbable's technology takes a cloud-based approach to powering game-worlds. Put simply, swarms of computers work seamlessly to host a single game server. This approach is said to more easily allow a huge number of concurrent players to interact. Hopefully this technology proves fruitful and we see more MMORPGs offer larger persistent worlds that can service larger playerbases.
