Tag: Defunct

Gamigo Disables Ayanad Library On ArcheAge Unchained


Gamigo today announced that the Ayanad Library has been disabled on ArcheAge Unchained pending removal.

Howdy everyone,

The Ayanad Library has been disabled. It was planned to be retired in an upcoming update, but because of the performance issues it is causing, we have disabled it on ArcheAge: Unchained. Players that were in progress on Ayanad Library related quests, like the Ayanad Earring, will have those quests refreshed in an upcoming update. Affected players will be able to continue making progress after the update is released, which is anticipated for some time this December.

Thanks for your understanding and feedback!

~The ArcheAge Team

The Ayanad Library is an instance in ArcheAge that many players use to level up their characters. It also appears to be the source for major server lag due to the number of players opening instances.

Source: ArcheAge

Daybreak Game Company Registers Dimensional Ink Games


Daybreak Game Company looks like it’s getting closer to announcing a reverse Voltron move, splitting the business into multiple parts for one reason or another.

We’ve been following this for quite some time. Earlier this year, Daybreak began registering trademarks for new studio names that appear to be centered around its major IPs: Golden Age Studios, Darkpaw Games, Rogue Planet Games, Bronze Age Studios. Just this month, Daybreak filed for another trademark: Dimensional Ink Games. The purpose? Your guess is as good as ours, the filing just occurred three days ago.

Daybreak’s statement about the latest round of layoffs is even more telling:

“We are taking steps to improve our business and to support our long-term vision for the existing franchises and development of new games. This will include a realignment of the company into separate franchise teams, which will allow us to highlight their expertise, better showcase the games they work on, and ultimately provide tailored experiences for our players.”

The running theory with the trademarked studio names was that Daybreak would basically be splitting off their games into separate shell companies for some purpose (maybe to sell them). Daybreak’s latest comments seem to confirm that theory. Dimensional Ink has a Twitter account that was set up this month and has yet to post anything.

We will have to wait to see what this week’s news brings.

[NM] Rooster Teeth’s Game Launches, Immediately Dies


Vicious Circle is a game developed by Rooster Teeth Games and launched on August 12, 2019 making it just one month old as of this week. It looks like No Man’s Sky and not just because you’ll have to fly across the galaxy in order to find another person. It labels itself “an uncooperative multiplayer shooter in which mercenaries compete for loot against a terrifying monster.”

It is also a massive flop just one month after launch. Vicious Circle launched on Steam last month to a peak of 304 players and as of this writing has seen a 24 hour peak of six. Radical Heights, the dead Battle Royale game that shut down a long time ago, peaked at four concurrent players on Steam over the same period. And it doesn’t have functioning servers. Battleborn has a higher player count.

Warner Media announced this week that they would be cutting 50 jobs at Rooster Teeth, approximately 13% of the employee force at the company. Vicious Circle was not specifically mentioned in the announced layoffs.

Fallen Earth Is Dead, But May Return


Fallen Earth is celebrating its ten year anniversary with the announcement that the servers are coming down. It isn’t the way most companies want to celebrate their game growing old, but the unfortunate reality is that the game is just unsustainable in its current form. As Matt Scott, CEO of Little Orbit stated:

I’m sad to announce that effective 10/2 (or there about based on when the event goes live), we will be taking the Fallen Earth servers offline. Unfortunately after weeks of monitoring things and getting players feedback, I have determined the current state of Fallen Earth just isn’t sustainable in its current form. You guys have been very tolerant, but the player experience is terrible right now. It’s laggy and buggy. Servers crash quite often, and stacking is still disabled due to exploits. I don’t blame the player base for the low concurrency numbers. You need a better game to play.

The silver lining on this cloud is that Little Orbit would like to update and bring Fallen Earth back online at some point.

Source: Fallen Earth Forums

[Column] Champions of Titan, or, Schrödinger’s MMO


What is an MMO? A miserable pile of microtransactions.

Today I’d like to talk about Champions of Titan, or my preferred title; Schrödinger’s MMO. You may recognize Champions of Titan by its previous namesake Wild Buster. Wild Buster along with Guardians of Ember and a few other titles were removed from the Steam store where it was hosted under publisher Insel Games after it came to light that the CEO was manipulating reviews in order to gin up more sales. Insel Games has since gone on to exist in a mostly vegetative state, while its published games were either shut down or spun off to new companies.

Case in point being today’s topic. Wild Buster was spun off to IDC Games whose name does not, as it turns out, stand for “I Don’t Care.” It might, since a quick browse through the forums of many games that IDC publishes comes up with two major topics: The server performance is terrible and customer support is virtually nonexistent, and more than one of the forums just flat out wouldn’t load when I tried to boot them up.

Champions of Titan is alive and well, in a theoretical sense. In a practical sense, it doesn’t seem like the game has been properly functioning in quite some time. People are logging in to find that the game client no longer works, what with there being no character selection screen.

Now comes the hard part: How long exactly has the game been broken and is it broken for everyone? The answer to the second question is evidently no, as the earliest complaint that I found on the forums discussing the above issue dates back to October 21, however another player posted a first impressions piece on December 13. There are multiple threads discussing the fact that the game doesn’t work going through the end of July with sporadic comments from staff asking players to contact customer support.

It seems to be the case that nobody is really trying to play the game so the number of people getting rejected from the client not working is virtually none with even less willing to go on the forums and complain about it. I got a response from the IDC people after submitting a ticket that they are aware of the situation, and you would imagine that the game just being wholly inaccessible would be a major priority to be fixed right away, but after a week since my report and ten months since the earliest report, it’s apparently not the case.

But that’s just my opinion on the whole thing.

Whatever Happened To: Hello Kitty Online (Again!)


Hello Kitty Online. It can’t have been too long since I last updated everyone on what is going on with this quirky little game for kids who absolutely do not view this website. But Connor, I hear you shout into your computer, if you bothered to check your own post history once in a while you’d notice that you haven’t written about Hello Kitty Online since 2013!

So chalk this one up as another ball that MMO Fallout dropped. Hello Kitty Online isn’t the kind of game I would normally cover here at MMO Fallout, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the game has been offline for two years and I think only PC Gamer and MMOBomb have noticed that the game has been offline for the better part of the past two years. It’s not surprising as Sanrio had stopped supporting the title way back in 2012 and it looks like they just let the game drift off into the distance until 2017 when the servers went offline and never came back up.

Here’s to Hello Kitty Online. You snuck out the back door and very few noticed.

Everyone Missed It: Daybreak Permanently Closes Everquest Player Studio


Since Daybreak has fallen out of the public spotlight, nobody notices when they shut things down anymore.

Flashback to March 1 and you will find producer Nick Silva stating that the player studio is absolutely not dead, and will in fact return better than ever.

“In the meantime, we will be evaluating options for overhauling the Player Studio site with the intention of allowing broader categories of submissions and a more streamlined submission process.”

Unfortunately the player studio is yet another reminder that anything coming out of Daybreak should be taken with a grain of salt. In an announcement on June 22 that absolutely nobody noticed because not a single gaming website (including this one) reported on it, Daybreak quietly took the Everquest/Everquest 2 Player Studio out back and gave it the Old Yeller treatment. The announcement is as follows (their strikethroughs, not mine).

“Over the years, EverQuest II players have remained some of the most dedicated in any virtual world. Since Player Studio first launched, we have constantly found ourselves impressed and humbled by the boundless creative talents of our players. Over the years, members of our community have created countless new items that help bring even more color to the world of Norrath. After nearly 6 years, the Player Studio program has concluded for both EverQuest and EverQuest II. Player Studio items that have been previously approved will be released and remain in-game, but players will not have the ability to submit new items. We’d like to thank each of you for sharing your creations with us.”

This sunsetting makes Planetside 2 the only game remaining with Studio support, and the term “support” might be generous. The Planetside 2 sector of the Player Studio is performing fantastically, with the creator forums seeing an entire thirteen posts over the entirety of 2019. One of the posts is lamenting the fact that the user’s creation has been in limbo for over a year with nobody bothering to look at a simple decal submission. There has been roughly one developer post on the entire studio forums in the last two years, and that was to announce the initial suspension of new creators.

Source: Daybreak

Bless Online Goes Offline September 9


Among the splendor of the E3 game reveals, Neowiz has announced that Bless Online will be shutting down in the west as of September 9. The title launched into early access on Steam one year ago in June 2018 to a respectable peak of 28,000 players but players very quickly jumped ship due to a number of issues ranging from prevalent botting to balance problems and performance on even the best of gaming PCs. By the following month, the peak count had dropped by 80% and it never quite recovered.

To send the game off, Neowiz is launching a bonus experience event starting June 10th and running until sunset time for those of you who want to grind out some Steam achievements before the servers go offline forever.

Starting after server maintenance on June 10th, 2019 and until September 8th, 2019 23:59 Dungeons wants to be removed, and the Dungeon drop rates will be increased. Players want to see a 100% increase in Gathering / Mining EXP, Guild EXP, Dungeon Points, and Combat Points. Gathering, Mining, and Crafting speeds will be increased by 50%. 

Despite Bless failing in virtually every territory it has launched in, Neowiz plans on releasing a version on the Xbox One under the name Bless Unleashed.

Source: Steam

Atlas Reactor No Longer Sustainable, Will Shut Down


Trion World’s title Atlas Reactor will sunset on June 28, 2019. The title was launched in 2016 under Trion Worlds and transferred along with Trion’s other assets to Gamigo when the company suddenly shut down last year.

Mervin Lee Kwai, Vice President of Development at gamigo and a former Executive Producer: “Atlas Reactor was a truly innovative game built by a passionate group of highly skilled developers. I was lucky enough to watch our team breathe life into the world of Atlas on a daily basis. They broke the mold of same-y games, and a dedicated community rallied around the title. Despite the support of this great group of fans, Atlas Reactor never grew big enough to fund its continued development. It’s a shame to see this chapter come to a close, but perhaps we’ll have a chance to revisit the innovative spirit of Atlas in the future.”

As part of the shut down, players who logged in between January 1 and April 16 will receive a small parting gift. The cash shop has been shut down and experience, flux, and ISO rates have been boosted dramatically for the duration of the game’s life.

Source: Atlas Reactor

Survived By Is Being Survived By Everything Else, Sunsetting In April


Early Access bullet-hell roguelite Survived By has been officially declared deceased. Human Head Studios announced the impending closure today with supporters receiving full refunds. The title released on December 5, 2018, and unfortunately just hasn’t gone as well as Human Head had planned. Steam Charts shows that Survived By launched to a peak of 2,500 players in December which quickly plummeted to 369 in January and slightly over 100 in the last month. As of this publishing there were 13 people online.

The announcement has been posted below for brevity.

After much deliberation and sadness, beginning today, we will be ceasing development of Survived By. We greatly appreciate the time you’ve spent playing Survived By since our launch in Closed Beta and all of the feedback you’ve provided.

This decision hasn’t come easily. We still believe in the core idea of Survived By, but after careful consideration of the game’s progress since its inception, we feel we won’t be able to reach the vision we originally conceived.

We plan to keep the Survived By servers up until April 19th, 2019 and disabling all in-game real money purchases later today. To anyone who has supported Survived By’s development, we’ll be giving full automatic refunds to everyone who has ever purchased items or packs in the coming weeks.

Thank you all, Ancestors.

–The Survived By team

Source: Steam