Elyon is going free to play instead of buy to play, and delaying the launch to October 20th in order to make the necessary changes.
Cutting past the PR, this means they undershot pre-orders by a wide margin; numbers that must have been bad enough that they knew it would be impossible to sustain player counts for even the first few months after launch.
For myself, it was a quick decision after seeing the cash shop in CBT2, that the game was overpriced, and that I would not be buying it. Kakao Games overestimated the base price for what is now a generic MMORPG. Bluehole themselves failed on delivering the original steampunk aesthetic and aerial (plus surface to air) combat, turning it instead into this watered down bland game with an unremarkable and unmemorable game world. I mean TERA’s game world at least has a sense of place and some memorable locations. And it’s action combat still feels and plays much faster since not all of Elyon’s combat, has eliminated the Line-of-Sight system that was used in its Ascent: Infinite Realm incarnation. Eloyn’s combat is still fun, but could’ve been a whole lot better by just completely adopting TERA’s combat.
But seeing the current state of TERA (due to the lack of imagination by the current design team; a team that is often times resource shared with Elyon), it makes sense why Elyon feels blah. Going to go off on some tangents now. As I’ve mentioned before, the designers that worked on TERA in the earlier days, were the ones responsible for giving the game its personality and quirky designs; that is why it maintains a niche audience (but one that has been eroded by really lousy design decisions over the past 2 years). Elyon does not have that because part of its actual development was in full swing when Bluehole was going through all these corporate changes once PUBG became an early access success. What was then known as the Bluehole Alliance, morphed into the Krafton Game Union where the emphasis also pushed the subsidiary companies to make games that could succeed on their own. Ascent: Infinite Realm and thus Elyon, didn’t even borrow the piece of intellectual property that saved TERA; Elin’s.
The designers were so conscience about that, where they shied away from anything that drew upon the Elin race for inspiration (since the last thing they wanted was for the game to be seen as a TERA 2). And there are other interesting race designs (like the Baraka and Amani) in TERA, that put the character designs in Elyon to shame. Not even the Ein furballs in Elyon can match the Popori in TERA (IMHO).
What Elyon has is better tech and modern designs that makes it feel up to date. But it lacks personality across the board. Ironically though, it borrows heavily from TERA’s cosmetic collection with a few new additions like a hoverboard and motorcycle mount. To be honest, if Elyon had not been a contractual obligation in the first place, Bluehole would’ve been better off making an actual TERA 2 (and that thing would’ve minted them money because TERA has nostalgia behind it).
Some folks may then ask why Mini TERA” aka Devilian, failed. While it was revamped with TERA assets after Ginno Games was acquired by Bluehole, the game itself was not the direct result of Bluehole Studio designers. It used completely different tech (Gamebryo engine, PathEngine, etc) that required a different production flow. The NA/EU publisher (Trion) was also a lousy partner; one that ended up quickly treating it as a cash grab, and pulling their resources from it (like canning the associate producer who was the main driver in terms of working with Bluehole Ginno) shortly after launch. Resource limited Bluehole Ginno (a subsidiary unit that was not part of the main Bluehole Studio group that worked on TERA) was also being stretched to work on a mobile version of the game (one that ended up being a really half-assed design which straight up used an Elin as one of its playable characters). Basically, a lot of that is chronicled in this blog under the Devilian tag. Ironically, Devilian’s failure led to PUBG (Bluehole Ginno ended up working on this game by necessity when it became clear that the Devilian IP had no future; that subsidiary eventually was renamed to PUBG Corp and one of its original co-founders, is now CEO of Krafton).
And therein lies the problem. PUBG was an accident of a success. PUBG is from a genre where the design expertise is foreign to what many Korean game designers know very well (battle royal first person shooter versus MMORPG). The PUBG IP represents the majority of Krafton’s revenues now. Krafton’s leaders have never known how to harness and parlay their original success (TERA), into a viable string of products. The company has tried numerous things including IP licensing with little success. The original design of what was Ascent: Infinite Realm, was unique enough to possibly serve as a fork in the MMORPG road. But we know how that has turned out with it being this generic MMO renamed to Elyon.
In summation, it’s because the company leaders lack vision; it’s been more of a “throw a dart at the ceiling, and see what sticks” approach. They’ve been more concerned with figuring ways to monetize the IP, how to make the company attractive for M&A, and more recently, with finally going public (which they did in July). The company has recently been more about throwing more eggs into the PUBG basket because that is where the numbers are. They are trying some other media related work on the side (including tie ups with K-Drama), but this company is nowhere near Blizzard Entertainment level (in terms of having IP’s that could be parlayed into something like a World of Warcraft movie).
Being a publicly traded company now on the Korean stock market, means they are now under public scrutiny. This business model change for Elyon does not bode well for the game because Kakao Games also wants to see a return on the investment they made. Kakao is well versed in cash shop mechanics given how they handled Black Desert Online. Transitioning the game to free to play before it has even launched, is a bad sign of things to come (including the eventual blatant P2W cash shop mechanics). It’s easy for them now to say that cash shop isn’t going to change “because they want to live by the ideals” they had originally set. But given how the game industry mainly cares about the metrics, we should all know the exercise by now. I’ve mentioned it before regarding my negative view of the longterm longevity of this game (given how unmemorable and generic it is). That hasn’t changed any; it’s just that they’ll be able to churn through players now that it is free to play. But that won’t change the high probability that this is also a good candidate for closure in the future.
