Blizzard shuts down TurtleWoW, team is making new MMO
Private servers are something of an interesting breed within the MMO genre, TurtleWoW was pretty brazen in operation, offering custom content, built-in microtransactions, and even advertising itself in the same vain a full-fleged game would. It’s important to know that while private servers exist for World of Warcraft, they have to follow rules regardless and it seems the team have fallen short of that. But, hey, they’ve got a plan.
Last month, TurtleWoW was issued a cease and desist from Blizzard, leading to the team, now rebranded as Moonwhisper Games, has announced that they’re making their own MMO, per PC Gamer. The team notes that while it’s a lot to do, they already have experience creating assets thanks to the now-defunct server. This is the same team that made wholly original new areas, dungeons, and more
“… We’ve decided to begin work on our own MMO! We know this is an enormous undertaking. MMOs are among the most ambitious and demanding projects in game development, and we’re under no illusion that this is something that can be built quickly or easily.”
We have a hunch, it’ll have a decent community, but unlike how TurtleWoW could tap into the still-present World of Warcraft community, now, Moonwhisper has to fully advertise their game as… well… a game rather than just a server. It’ll probably float by for a while, but odds are, it’ll fade into obscurity if you weren’t a WoWhead who knew about the server.