Just a little over 3 years ago (March 5, 2018), the NA and EU servers for Devilian were shutdown. Those 3 years came and went like a flash where today, many of those memories of the game, have faded with the passage of time. Many have moved on and contact has unsurprisingly disappeared for many (the usual fate when these games close because not everyone has the same preferences for whatever each of us has gone on to play).
A lot of my own “work” on preserving what memories I could of the game, has taken a back seat priority (including the course of the last year with this global pandemic). I still have videos I need to upload and I still have information to edit for my Devilian Info site for example. But when I began thinking about this (when I began drafting this particular posting a few days prior to the March 5th date), it also made me realize the state of the genres (both the MMORPG and MMO-ARPG) since that time as well as the companies involved.
Several months after the Devilian sunset, Trion found itself in insolvency and had most of its assets acquired by Gamigo. Bluehole itself reorganized several times including a re-branding (Krafton) effort that went absolutely nowhere (the company had intended to go public with an IPO for PUBG Corp in order to capitalize on PUBG) while seeing many of its projects post-PUBG, also go nowhere. Webzen which soft launched MMO-ARPG MU Legend in November 2017, quickly saw their game depopulate; it performed the first server merges in March 2018, went through another round of server mergers in July 2018 preceding their Steam launch in August 2018 where they provisioned a new server each in NA and EU (only to merge those into the single server per region), while Webzen handed their own game off to VALOFE GLOBAL to handle publishing duties in November 2019 (since then, the game hasn’t seen much updates).
NCSoft has continued to spin its wheels with MMO-ARPG Project TL (formerly known as Lineage Eternal which they previewed at G-STAR 2014). MMO-ARPG ELOA in the meantime made a rebranded (and buy to play) return as Warlords Awakening in July 2018 only to close once again in July 2019. Torchlight Frontiers which was originally announced as a limited MMO-ARPG, ended up having those plans shelved by going back to its single player multi-player co-op roots and renamed to Torchlight III. That leaves Lost Ark as the only other MMO-ARPG out there; Smilegate RPG soft launched in Korea in November 2018 (I played for several months) and has since launched in Russia and Japan. A western release has yet to be announced even though Smilegate and Amazon Games signed a publishing agreement in August 2020. IMHO, the business model will quickly make or break the game in the NA and EU (a frontloaded cash grab will result in the same fate for the game as these other MMO-ARPG titles).
The state of the MMORPG genre hasn’t been much better. Exactly how many new ones have been released since March 2018, and are still around? Bless Online was one of the biggest IP’s to launch (buy to play with over 43K concurrency on its May 2018 launch) and even I knew it was a blatant cash grab that had zero staying power (the game went free to play before shutting down in all regions by September 2019). Guild Wars 2 parent ArenaNet, saw their workforce pared down due to a reorganization. The company saw departures of many veterans since then (I sunk a bunch of time into the game during the summer and fall of 2019 and have been going back occasionally; it’s out of my usual game play rotation though). Bluehole did finally launch Ascent: Infinite Realm (renamed to ELYON) via Kakao Games in Korea in December 2020 as a buy to play title (it will also be buy to play in the west but Kakao has yet to announce when).
I’m playing two fairly old IP’s now regularly (TERA and ArcheAge Unchained). TERA’s previous NA publisher (Bluehole subsidiary En Masse Entertainment) was shutdown in November 2020 and is now with most of the other regions publisher, Gameforge. ArcheAge (and Unchained) NA and EU in the meantime are under the piss poor management of Gamigo (the one that is closing 4 games next month and the same one that its acquired subsidiary Aeria Games, has nixed the idea of publishing Bless Online since even they could smell a disaster with the technical issues that had plagued the title even with the touted rebuild project that was happening with the Japanese version). TERA contains the roots of Devilian (wacky characters and visceral combat in a 3D view) while ArcheAge Unchained in my 3D farmville title (ELYON will NOT be the game that combines these two).
I could go on in much more detail (I’ve done that in prior blog postings) but the more general point is that the genre is spinning its wheels (not helped in 2020 by the global pandemic which has forced companies to rethink the workplace). My general observation is that since March 2018 (when one of my favorite games came to a close), there HASN’T been anything new in this space to really capture my attention (I suppose Genshin Impact would be the exception but it’s a single player gacha game where the end game is pretty much time challenge combat) or to scratch that itch of Devilian’s combat (even if it did have a bunch of flaws and issues). Three years on, and I still miss this flawed and imperfect game.
