Gameforge announced the “open beta test” soft launch for Guardians of Ember (it had been in “closed beta” for the past few months for existing players, though that is more of a technicality in terms of the game being integrated into Gameforge’s backend).
GoE was previously published as a buy-to-play title on Steam by Insel Games, but was banned after evidence surfaced that the company was engaging in the manipulation of reviews for some of its published titles. Insel Games CEO (Patrick Streppel who was also previously CEO of Gamigo) is a known asset flipper who has a consulting firm (IME) in Europe which specializes in asset flipping titles (mostly from Asia). While Insel Games continued operating the servers and selling the game through other channels, GoE was eventually handed off to another company (MMO Rewards) before Gameforge acquired the rights to it back in the summer of 2018 (it will be free-to-play going forward).
The good part for players who put time into and enjoyed the game is that all their character data was retained in these moves. The bad part is that the Taiwanese developer (Runewaker Entertainment) hasn’t really done much to fix the core issues with the game (namely, the clunky combat and movement which is unsurprisingly unchanged since I last tried the game during a freeplay weekend back in November 2017). While I don’t realistically expect these issues to be addressed, I will go through the motions (providing some initial feedback to Gameforge) to see if the developer will eventually address them.
UPDATE: Gameforge had some additional localizations added (for EU region). After playing for a short bit, the same gameplay issues remain (combat and movement still lack punch/natural feel). Seriously, we have titles that have been resurrected from the dead several times like this one and Warlords Awakening running while the one I wouldn’t mind seeing the light of day again (Devilian), likely never again.
