This weekend we got the news that Ashes of Creation is more or less dead, with the resignation of its creative director and CEO, Steven Sharif, along with some of the senior development team, with the rest seemingly to be laid off. From Steven’s outspoken social media presence, his personal funding of the game, some of its design, and an early Kickstarter campaign, there has always been a lot of drama around AoC, and I’ve not been involved in it or even following it all that closely myself so I won’t run through the details. Regardless, it’s pretty much always been divisive as hell to the greater MMORPG community, with people either pinning all of their hopes on it being the savior of the entire genre, or quite the opposite, being skeptical to the point of insisting that the game is a total scam. The latter attitude seems to have become increasingly prevalent over the years, which sadly means a lot of people in YouTube comments and Reddit threads are celebrating this news. Ugh…
“Ashes of Creation Early Access”
Personally, my main reason for being skeptical about AoC was actually because of how I found out and got to know more about – social media influencers in the MMORPG space making absolutely glowing video after video about it and usually not giving more than a mention of concerns about its long development time or niche features. Even when it comes to content creators I really like, my bullshit detector, while maybe not blaring out alarms, was definitely issuing warnings. Personally, I still don’t think it was necessarily a scam – everything we’ve been told about the game’s development could be totally true, and its recent troubles could simply be the result of them running out of funding, and that would still suck. Certainly, the odd move to list the game on Steam despite its state could suggest that, though others will see that as a final attempt to wring a little more money out of the game’s fans before pulling the rug out.
Regardless, I didn’t think it would be any kind of savior for the genre myself; even if it was amazing, its PVP focus all but guaranteed it would be a niche game, at least in the West, though I admit I was hoping I’d be wrong and I’ve intrigued by Intrepid’s attempts to design around that concern.
A few months ago Amazon Games announced that New World would cease all new development and be delisted. They followed this up in January with news that the servers would be taken offline in January 2027. This is a bizarre step – MMOs bleeding players to the point of being considered a failure is far from anything new, but usually they’re kept around for as long as possible to try to adapt to smaller player numbers and recoup what costs they could, usually getting put on some kind of life-support status and/or being sold off to another company who could attempt to keep it going in a profitable way. Just… closed down though? Weird!
“On the beach in New World: Aeternum”
What’s even more weird is that this announcement came just 2 measly weeks after the release of a massive new patch which added a whole new zone and storyline and included numerous additions, adjustments, and fixes. By most accounts, these changes were quite positive, and for the first time in years, it seemed like there was a good buzz around New World again. At the end of the day we probably don’t need to speculate about how this happened – Amazon has been making all kinds of layoffs and closures in recent years, and we can safely assume closing down New World was just another decision that made perfect financial sense in the cold, detached sort of way that only the biggest corporations can bring us. Whether it was made before the release of this new patch, or upon watching the player numbers immediately after, is unclear.
Not unlike the controversy around Ashes of Creation, New World has been plagued with issues since the beginning: a major design pivot away from a more PVP focused approach during development, massive bugs, many of which were rampantly exploited by players, a lackluster endgame, and bizarre handling of a lot of these things from AGS themselves, to be very terse. Yet, playing it at launch myself, I think I’d speak for a lot of people by saying that there was definitely something there with New World. While it wasn’t always fast, and yes, as mentioned, sometimes totally mishandled, these things were all addressed, and patches trickled out, including new weapons (which functioned something like mini-classes) zone reworks, system overhauls, the addition of mounts, a huge campaign overhaul, and even a rebranding and console launch, yet while many of these changes brought players back, nothing really seemed to keep them playing for too long.
As with Ashes of Creation, a lot of players made the game a target for extreme ridicule. I’m sure some were skeptical of Amazon entering this space, some felt burnt by how its PVP systems and/or its endgame turned out, and others, like me, were probably extra bitter about how close the game came to being great, yet absolutely wasn’t. Look at the countless negative Stream reviews the game has, and look at some of the played hours counts you see attached to those – hundreds or even thousands of hours is a lot of time to sink into a “terrible” game. Like I said, the game had something special – a unique setting, some interesting gameplay systems, great graphics and sound – alas, unless someone else manages to buy it off of AGS, that something will become nothing in about a year.
“Stars Reach Pre-alpha”
These are just the two latest examples of the terrible state of the MMORPG genre. We don’t see many new, big budget MMORPGs on the horizon, and coupled with stories like these, it makes you wonder if we’ll ever see another high budget, successful game, let alone a huge hit like World of Warcraft. As someone who has been playing these games since near the start, this definitely makes me a little sad, even if I can’t deny that few of these games turn out to be all that good, and even the good ones are often lacking. Still, the promise of MMO gaming is still there for me, that hasn’t changed, it’s only been tempered by harsh reality. On one hand, I still have hopes that Guild Wars 3 or maybe Riot’s MMORPG will be something worth getting excited about. On the other, while I considered backing the Kickstarter for Stars Reach – the premise of the game is intriguing and Raph Koster is saying all the right things in all the right ways – I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.
These developments, coupled with my last article, coincidentally just posted yesterday, in which I gloss over my time with the last 2 WoW expansions, have inspired me to dust off and finish some older articles. First, a series where I reflect on my entire history with MMOs, followed up by a series of articles to catch the blog up on the MMOs I’ve tried more recently but haven’t really written much about, including the aforementioned New World, which I’ve just started revisiting. Stay tuned…
Ashes of Creation screenshot stolen from Lethess on Steam. Stars Reach screenshot stolen from @Julia_CaSsian on Twitter.