Since Bluehole Ginno has most of their designers working on Devilian Mobile and most of their PC client programmers reprioritized to other Bluehole projects, the final level 60 raid will likely end up being a Heroic version of Tower of No Return (unfinished designs including the passage realm is something we will not see; some of that artwork/boss designs are showing up in Devilian Mobile though).
It would actually be easier for them to reuse Forbidden Sanctuary again since they already have the loot (consumable crafting materials for unique gear) mechanics already implemented in the original Korean and Thai versions but it wouldn’t feel as “fresh” going that route.
Reusing Tower of No Return would therefore be the next best option because it is already existing content that is now rarely run. The most difficult part for them would be switching out actual gear drops with the materials (that is so long as they stick with the same unique gear systems which is highly likely unless they already had new designs worked out and coded beforehand). On the flipside, they could also take the easy way out by just dropping unique gear and then finding some other dungeons to power creep and convert to the consumable loot drops (for the evolving).
I cannot see them getting rid of the evolving part of unique gear because it will be the only thing left to keep the remaining players engaged. Level 60 end game will not change retention rates though because as it stands, there isn’t much challenging content remaining at level 58 for players with 8/8 Capricious (and more so with weapon) plus anything over +9 Greater Alvir’s. The next increment of power creep is going to end up trivializing (for the remaining regulars) Abyssal Tower 91F-100F plus all archdungeons including and prior to level 56. Simply put, the amount of playable content is going to shrink considerably since Bluehole Ginno no longer has any incentive to rebalance other parts of the game.
Trion Worlds for their part has shown they are more than content to milk the remaining players so I don’t expect the lack of content to get in their way of focusing on doing what GoodGames had to do for nearly 9 months before player attrition made it no longer worth their while on even doing that (the Thai server will likely remain online until their publishing contract ends since they likely won’t see any reason to renew it).
I am very curious about the exact details of the terms of Trion Worlds deal with Bluehole Ginno. For those unfamiliar with how the business end looks like, Cardboard Edison put together a very good infographic about how publishers/developers tend to look at things when formulating a fair and reasonable contract. Gamasutra also has articles pertaining to this (this is one of them). IGN had this article (which was during a time where I looking to get involved as an outside investor/venture capitalist but not be directly involved in the game industry; something which remains true today). I also have an actual publishing contract document [PDF] (all sensitive info has been redacted).
Any revenue sharing is probably a non-factor now (numbers being insignificant) since most of that was front loaded (founders pack) and earlier (pre-server merge) player numbers of DEX and marketplace credit purchases. I would presume their agreement has additional metrics in place where meeting higher revenue numbers could result in additional (new) content being designed but realistically, the game hasn’t had decent player numbers for around an year now and never will given how the North American megaserver population is now no better than how it was on the old Ravan server. Europe megaserver population is slightly better but not enough make a material impact on Bluehole Ginno reconsidering placing any further resources back into the PC version of the game.
This is another reason why I believe level 60 will be an incremental release since Trion will be able to milk the game into a portion of 2018 (specifically catering to the few that have continued spending money).
