Without much fanfare (there were no CM’s in-game to perform any sort of official sendoff), ArcheAge came to a close in NA/EU right on schedule on June 27 at 8:00 UTC. For US region players, that meant it was late evening on the 26th (west coast) through early morning (27th) on the east coast.
Having spent the day prior to closure running around most of Nuia (west), I spent the last 2-hours taking one final look around mainly Mirage Isle before heading back to my property. In-game, there was an actual pretty sunset happening at that time (so I just took in that view from the top of my beanstalk house). This day/night cycle plus the open world housing were the main high points of the game for me.
There were players doing their own events heading into the close (one in Mirage Isle and the other in Diamond Shores), but I just wanted to see the game off peacefully on my property as I had originally planned.
Unlike Devilian and TERA PC where I recorded a lot of videos, I really didn’t do a whole lot of this for ArcheAge (including ArcheAge Unchained). I know that part of this is because I didn’t take in a lot of the game (I didn’t do the ocean content, didn’t really do Auroria, and basically did not gear grind). Pre-Unchained, I was the definition of potato (playing mainly east) until I quit in 2017. Then it wasn’t until Unchained launched in October 2019 that I finally took part in the housing (what I primarily did in-game for what was the last 4.5 years).
As expected, the final moments of the game weren’t really a sad moment for me (but I do empathize with those who did feel devastated by the closing). It was more of “it is really finally over” because as I noted before, this represents the closure I was hoping would eventually happen with gaming as a hobby (and more so with playing MMO’s). I stopped playing Lost Ark a long time ago. I have no plans to play Throne and Liberty. Guild Wars 2 for me has been jump in/out (I haven’t played since the Inner Nayos map was released). And while they aren’t MMO’s, I haven’t touched Tower of Fantasy, Genshin Impact or Honkai Star Rail in months either. I really don’t miss much of it to be honest.
Like TERA, I have no intention of playing on any ArcheAge private server. Then going forward into the future, I have absolutely zero intention of playing ArcheAge 2 (part of what I have to say about AA2 is in these two tagged postings while the rest is in the recent service termination postings). Kakao Games Europe themselves as a publisher has also left a really “bad taste” (it was hard to imagine anyone could do worse than both Trion and Gamigo). How rapidly they dismantled their Discord is telling; the leadership wants no trace of the feedback left since a lot of it fell on deaf ears.
I may eventually give the AAEmu a try (I previously thought that it wasn’t being worked on but as it turns out, there has been ongoing work for a few years where a lot more of the game actually does function based on ArcheAge 1.2) so that I can at least experience the game world and parts of the housing system that existed around that version (similar to how I’ve been treating my entire TERA Offline setups where only on a few occasions, I loaded all up to run it).
