MassivelyOP held an interesting interview with XLGAMES regarding ArcheAge Chronicles (formerly ArcheAge 2).
The key tidbits was that XLGAMES is calling it an OARPG (online ARPG) versus MMORPG primarily because they are emphasizing more of the single player journey within that larger open game world (which takes place 50 years after the setting in OG ArcheAge). Most of the multiplayer and large scale PVP gameplay is being made less of a priority (like PVP zones are no longer a mandatory thing that the story lines take a player through. As noted before, ArcheAge was shutdown in NA/EU in June 2024 and was also sunset in its home country of South Korea earlier this year.
To keep this short, I’ve chronicled some of my ArcheAge game play on this blog. It was mostly a solo adventure in this same style which XLGAMES is pushing with Chronicles. With Unchained, the majority of my time in game was managing my properties and tending to crops (adventuring around whenever I felt like it). Most of the PVE and PVP stuff I rarely engaged in. And the games story was uninspiring anyway so it was only later (like in 2023) when I finally completed the Hiram Mountains storyline in Auroria.
Thus I’ve long been playing OG ArcheAge (legacy, then Unchained, and the merged service) like an OARPG. While something like Chronicles would normally interest me, just knowing that Kakao Games will be running this is all I need to know how this won’t even have any sort of longevity close to what OG ArcheAge had (while all 3 NA/EU publishers were terrible in their own way, Kakao Games Europe ended up being the worst). Furthermore, Chronicles will be nowhere close to appealing to that toxic PVP crowd that helped to drive OG ArcheAge and Unchained into the ground. Thus it will require those other player demographics to keep the game alive.
The game will no doubt get the usual hype and traffic that new games tend to get (even with all of this recent industry backlash) whenever it does launch (it’s been delayed yet again according to Kakao Games latest Q2 2025 earnings conference call to Q3 2026). As I noted prior, I’m not going to play this (nor any other KMMO or to be more broadly specific, most online only games). Like many others, am looking at older offline titles and in my case, continuing to play around with various offline setups for TERA and ArcheAge (AAEmu emulator).
