It hasn’t even been been a week since Temtem‘s studio Crema prompted mods to lock down the game’s subreddit and tried to convince everyone that the game really is an MMO, seriously and also that it’s totally still working on Temtem after announcing Temtem Swarm – but now the studio is stepping in it again.
A new letter to the community opens off with a lengthy amount of waffling over whether the game is or is not an MMO, arguing that the developers never really meant to make an MMO; it’s actually an MMO-lite, which is an MMO but also isn’t and these goalposts are on wheels and move around really easy.
“From the get-go, we at Crema have described Temtem as an MMO-lite; this was our desired tag from the beginning, and the one we would have used across all our platforms had it been possible. Due to the lack of this tag we settled for the closest one, which is MMO, as we believe Temtem is massive, multiplayer, and online, with all players from any part of the world, on any platform, coexisting on one sole global server, and with a unified economy that encompasses every player. […] We understand now that seeing the game being called an MMO everywhere led to expectations that we have failed to fulfill. It started with the use of the MMO tag on our Steam page, which was then followed by our publisher, the press, and the general public. While Temtem does fit the MMO bill in our eyes, we understand it does not in everyone’s eyes, and that we should’ve acted quicker to curb this trend. We apologize for the confusion this might have caused to some players.”
Whether or not the game is an MMO, the studio also announced that it’s ending Temtem’s feature patches with 1.8. You know, basically the opposite of what Crema boss Enrique Paños Montoya told fans last week, when he said that the team wouldn’t stop focusing on Temtem and that it would receive more updates and that the studio was still working on the game.
Yes, that’s really the kind of whiplash tone the whole thing takes. 1.7 will bring the end of microtransactions in the game, while 1.8 will allow players to select prior Tamer Passes to work toward the unlocks for and otherwise alleviate any sense of missing out on seasonal content. So it’s less like an MMO and more like a short-term live service game, in practice. It’s up to you if that makes all of the waffling better or worse.
