Called it…. though it’s all happening on a much faster timeline than I expected; Gameforge announced that TERA PC will be sunsetting as Bluehole ends development of the game (server closure date is June 30, 2022 for all of the regions they control). Japan’s TERA PC service ended on April 20th local time (announced back in January). There is no word yet on the console version BUT it likely will end up being shuttered as well since Bluehole will also be shutting down the KR PC service on the 30th.
This also aligns with the Inven report about Bluehole Studio (the Krafton subsidiary that develops Elyon and TERA) being in dire financial straits along with the prospect of going under without assistance from corporate headquarters. Elyon itself will likely not last more than an year since it has been part of the problem with how development resources were essentially redirected from TERA over the years to complete the retooling of that game (from the original Ascent: Infinite Realm design).
Gameforge plans to run some events (<- if this is it, it’s a joke) to send the game off (it’s upcoming 10th anniversary in May is ironically not going to be the celebration that many thought it would be). This represents the end of an era in what was the heyday of Korean MMORPG’s that were also launched globally. As I’ve written before, this was not unexpected especially given the state of the content, the major population drop off over the past 2 years, and Krafton’s focus on PUBG.
Krafton is now a publicly traded corporation in Korea so there is no way to justify keeping the servers running in maintenance mode. The company has also showed they had no interest in allowing the game to be published by companies like VALOFE who have been willing to run a variety of near ghost town KMMO’s like MU Legend and Riders of Icarus.
The company honestly mismanaged this valuable IP especially over the past 5 years (leveraging it in all the wrong ways with failed mobile projects that were based on the franchise). The live service will go offline but as I also noted before, this will now spur on development of the leaked 92.03 server code from 2020. I’m going to have to login to the game so that I can snapshot all of my characters slider settings so that I can recreate them in the offline environment. While I will miss the live service, I won’t miss Krafton or Bluehole (this just puts a lot of things to bed including the focus of this blog in recent years). Some of this also is dovetailing with me beginning to move away from gaming in general (especially knowing the trash that is coming down the pipeline).
Goodbye TERA, it was nice being able to experience you in its better days.
