The folks now responsible for Ryzom , the MMO that the community just won't let die, has posted some info on what their new goals are!

As many of you have asked in the Forums to know what our plans are concerning the future of our MMORPG Ryzom, we wanted to let you know that they are mainly :

1. To get profitable and raise enough money to allow us to finance all our development dreams.
2. To get all our new Developer Teams up to date with the Ryzom Code - which I can assure you is no little task as the code of Ryzom includes millions of lines.
3. Meanwhile, with the help of our new CTO Vianney Lecroart, we are preparing a yearly dev plan of tasks, milestones, and goals that we would like to achieve, prioritize and define; in short, all the things that will make our game even better like completing bug fixes, implementing new missions, creating new content and new game features that we think you will love and deserve to have.

Every day we are thinking about where we want to go and what we want to achieve for you. But we don't want to make the mistake of planning bad decisions because we hadn't prepared enough or we rushed into these decisions too quickly; we want to prepare ourselves as best as possible before giving you any straight answers. Don't forget that an MMORPG is an extremely complex living thing, especially Ryzom.

So as you can see we have quite a lot of work ahead of us, as we now have behind us; lots more thinking and preparation in the pipeline before we can answer for definite all of your questions. Don't think that because we didn't communicate very much these past months that we were doing nothing; don't forget that we've only had the game data for less than three months and look at what we've done so far, it is already something to be very proud of : we have redone our website entirely, we have reopened all three shards for free to everyone less than one month ago and last week we opened our new Nel MMORPG engine open source website (http://dev.ryzom.com ) where, if you are a coder and want to help us, you can join our new open source community. As well as this, we have been recruiting and forming new developer, customer support and marketing teams at the same time!

A lot of you have probably been wondering how long the testing phase and the associated free access for everyone will last. Well we can tell you for now that Ryzom will stay free for everyone *at least* until the end of October , and possibly longer. If you haven't done so already, or if you don't know what we're talking about and just want to try out game for free, you can download it here , and you can create a FREE Ryzom account on this page (Hurry up, no credit card required for the moment Wink ).