>Von Neumann Defense Force was a huge effort, and even though I had high hopes for a while, there never was a great chance of any return, financial or otherwise. I still wanted to do it though. I wanted to work on it, because I knew a game like this needed to exist.
>But at some point, I lost that sense of purpose. That question, why this game needs to exist, I can no longer answer it. Without that answer, there's no point in continuing.
That's the big drafty room with the blue ceiling, amirite???
That said, I fail to see why expending so much effort to make NPCs indistinguishable from other players makes any sense in service of such incredibly boring storylines, or why there is so much finicky grinding that has to be done just to maintain a PC's rank, much less actually try to advance before dying of old age. To add insult to injury, apparently you only get one life, and once it's done, that's it (and they back this restriction with some truly diabolical system fingerprinting that as far as I know no-one has been able to spoof).
It's a really strange mix of technical tour-de-force (how the heck did they do that?) and utter banality (why the heck would they do that?).