It bears repeating that here on Massively OP, we cover an immensely wide field of live games — so many that it can sometimes be difficult to keep track of what’s happening in each one (which is why our readers are invaluable in winging us tips about their favorite MMOs!). And while there’s never any shortage of news and happenings in the field of MMORPGs as a whole, once in a while we realize that it’s been a good long time since we heard anything about certain games that we used to discuss a lot in the past.
When that happens to me, I’ll often head off on a little fool’s errand to scout the website, Twitter feed, forums, and Reddit to see what’s going on. I hate to be out of the loop on games, especially ones that used to be more prominent in the news, but more often than not, the lack of news is because there’s been a lack of news.
You ever caught yourself going, “What ever happened to the original Darkfall? Or Runes of Magic? Or Fallen Earth?” I totally have, which is why I went on expeditions to see what I could uncover. So let’s catch up with these three games and see what is up!
Darkfall: Unholy Wars
It’s not that Darkfall is missing from the news today, thanks to the two reboots that were franchised off and are competing with each other. But what about the original hardcare sandbox? What about Unholy Wars?
To put it bluntly, Darkfall: Unholy Wars is dead. The official Twitter account stopped sending out notices in late 2014, although we were reporting on this game as recently as September 2015. Steam users report that the servers went down at some point, and both the game’s site and Aventurine’s site are offline and have been that way for some time. It’s an inglorious way to go out, without a proper sendoff.
I dipped into the Reddit, which mostly seems divided into three groups: the pro-Rise of Agon folks, the pro-New Dawn gamers, and the “we miss Unholy Wars” crowd, whom everyone tells to shut up. It’s a pleasant place, that sub.
Fallen Earth
I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for this imaginative post-apocalyptic MMORPG, which is why I’ve felt sad seeing it slowly drift away into obscurity following the GamersFirst purchase. Even free-to-play wasn’t quite the boost that this title needed.
Unlike Darkfall: Unholy Wars, Fallen Earth is still up and running… it’s just that there isn’t much else going on in terms of development. We last reported on the MMO back in March 2015, when the dev team (when there was one) was delivering a state of the game post. Turns out that this was pretty much the last state of the game to date, as there has been resounding silence from the team since. The last patch was delivered in September 2015, with only regular maintenance ever since, and the last announced subscriber reward was in September 2016.
So there are no devs or CMs talking to the community, no patches, but the game is still operating, which tells me that we have functionally maintenance mode right now. There does appear to be a dedicated community and economy still going on, so all is not lost. However, there’s a lot of talk on the forums right now about how bad the lag is and begging the studio to work on it.
Runes of Magic
It’s been a good long while since we last talked about Runes of Magic — August 2015, to be exact — but this World of Warcraft clone still seems to be ticking along quite nicely, albeit at a slower and quieter pace than it used to have. For starters, there was a community video contest that sparked this winner at the end of last year:
The last major content update, Patch 7.0 (Chapter VII), was delivered in August 2016 and added a new zone (Tasuq), increased the level cap, and added the Vale of Rites instance. Since then, there have five smaller patches, mostly activating various holidays like the Festival of Fire and the Flower Festival.
Just a few days ago, the team said on Twitter that it’s working on another content update, which will most likely raise the level cap again: “We’re working on new content patch with the game developer and we hope to share some info in the near future. Stay tuned!”
Wondering about any other games we haven’t mentioned in a while or would like some coverage of them? Let us know in the comments!
