The Awakening Project

The Awakening Project is a PC MMORPG game by DT Computers. It was to be a first-person medieval-themed online roleplaying game.

Gameplay
You could customize your character in many ways. You could choose a pre-designed class or invent a new one. Races would have included humans, elves, dwarves, and a flying race.

There were to be 9 primary attributes and 50-100 skills. For combat there was martial arts melee skills and seven types of magic. The devs would've allowed you to program your own spells, heavily restricted of course.

Learning skills and especially magic was a major time-sink. The more powerful spells could take literal months to learn. Some come with such heavy cost such as nearly draining all your HP upon casting.

You have two forms of health: hit points and life span called AP. Zero HP results in dying, and dying takes away your AP (1, then 2, then 4, then 8, etc). Your character has around 60 AP, which around 15 real-life years.

When you die you can either respawn with no items or wait until cleric NPCs find and heal you. They don't do it for free and will demand donation to their church. If you are caught PKing you'll be branded with a mark that'll make NPCs reluctant to deal with you.

One special item in this MMO is the Holy Grail. Drinking it restores your AP and it refills daily. Holding the grail for along time will result in 32 PA being taken off when you die.

You could play this solo or take on challenges as a team. There were plans for 'mega monsters' that would require a team to defeat. The devs said some monsters would require 100+ players to kill them.

The aim of the game is mainly role-playing. Moderation is lax, whether it be flaming, player-killing, or cyber-sexing. You could kill any and all NPCs, even quest-giving ones/

The world size was 27,000x27,000 miles. Players can buy land and colonise it to their heart's content. You could place and edit structures, trees, and even NPCs on your land.

There was to be no in-game chat apart from carrier pigeons. IRC was encouraged for regular chat. There was to be only one server, but a second server was considered. Cost for playing is $10-$15 for the CD and $5-$10 a month for a monthly subscription.

Cancellation
The Awakening Project was canned after the beta test failed to attract investors.

The beta CDs are still floating around out there undumped.