With the game servers coming to a close several weeks from now, it is always interesting to see how other players are dealing with it.
One of my former guildmates (from Orgia Latina before I left to go back to my alt guild) who is from France decided to just delete the game. A few players logged in to say goodbye and deleted all their characters. Several others have logged in to just express their sadness in chat to a mostly non-existent audience. Still, other players continue to login to play what they can (trying to get dungeon runs or trying to get a 3v3 queue to pop). A few have also taken to the official forums to state how they feel. And there are some who did want to return to play but can’t due to the crashing issue with the latest build (1709) of the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update.
Prior to the announcement last Friday, I hadn’t played in awhile because it was frankly difficult to get motivated to do anything one way or the other. Now that I know that there is final closure coming, I decided to go through my warehouse this weekend to begin using up materials that I had been collecting for content that never came. I had tons of gold chests/bullions saved up (from guild chests and from Stormfront War). I had tons of archgemstones also from unopened Patron and guild tournament chests as well as cosmetics from the old Devilian form 3v3 chests.
I opened up all of those gold chests for example and went from 9.5K gold to 23K, had almost 4k archgems, and donned the 7 day wings which give a cool glowing effect (I have 4 more of them to use which fits well with the timing until the servers go down). I’m recording everything just to have some final memories to look back on (I also have a trove of footage from closed beta and from live throughout the last two years); the following are a few frame grabs from the above when I began going through my warehouse.
In some respects, going through my inventory was like going to a candy store. Playing mostly solo the way I did and not burning up/constantly grinding the same content (like the way others did), is ironically turning into a good thing because from now until March 5th, I can continually improve my characters (though I’m going to focus on my main).
Some may wonder why bother when it is all going to disappear anyway. That is part of the point with these online only MMO’s where it can all disappear at anytime. You play in the moment and enjoy the entertainment that it provides while it exists. I know there are many who felt this was one of the worst MMO’s to come to the west; to each their own. Sure, I am no fan of the way that Trion Worlds treated this game and its players (especially through 2017 with the near silence). But I’ve always enjoyed Devilian’s combat (despite some of its quirks) so I might as well play it while I can before this particular game world sunsets into the ether. In other words, this is my way of dealing with the impending shutdown.
I was originally planning to packet capture the game to have data to use for making a private server in the future. After thinking about that non-trivial task, I decided not to bother since it is better to just let it go. I do have the tools to rip all the assets from the Gamebryo engine to bring the models/animations into Blender (where I will try to get them into Unreal Engine 4 just so that I can play around a bit).
A fellow player from the former Ravan server whom I occasionally played with in 2016 (and who was also playing mostly solo), returned towards the last quarter of 2017 (after getting his computer fixed) and played quite a bit where his character is now better geared than my main.
I’m going to try and run content with him as we’re both pretty much planning to stick it out until the end. (plus I want that “Last Devilian Standing” title to have symbolic meaning when the server goes offline). I do plan on going through all the video I have since 2015 and putting up bits and pieces of it on my YouTube channel in a “Memories of Devilian” playlist.
