FREE MMORPG PLANESHIFT BREAKS 100,000 PLAYER BARRIER
Groundbreaking MMORPG is developed as open source software with developers from 11 countries worldwide and free to all players.

Turin, Italy (October 28, 2003) – The PlaneShift Development Team announced today that their pre-alpha technology preview of the MMORPG, PlaneShift, has exceeded 100,000 unique player accounts in less than six months.

PlaneShift is unique among the wave of upcoming Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) because it is being built by a volunteer team of programmers, artists, musicians and gaming experts from around the world that share the same passion: building an RPG game with no boundaries. While commercial MMORPGs have constraints based on budgets and schedules, the PlaneShift team relies on a worldwide community of talented developers to expand their game endlessly. The current technology preview, codenamed “Molecular Blue” was released to test the base networking infrastructure and to give the community an indication of what is to come.

“PlaneShift has been embraced by fans around the world because we know the developers share our passion for MMORPGs,” said Vicky Hoskin, a moderator in the PlaneShift fan community. “They love the genre and bring their professionalism to this project in a way anyone can see.”

This phenomenon marks the first time an Open Source 3D RPG project of this size has been delivered to the public in any meaningful state of completion. PlaneShift comprises more than 800,000 lines of code even at this early stage, including the exceptional work done on the 3d engine by the Crystal Space team. PlaneShift is in a category of software among the largest, and normally most expensive to produce pieces of software in the world. “We are not aware of any other Open Source MMORPG project at this stage of completion, nor any with even 5% of our user base,” said Luca Pancallo, Director of the PlaneShift Team.