Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning
- Release Date: September 18, 2008
- Discontinued: December 18, 2013
Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning was an MMORPG based on the Warhammer series developed by Mythic Entertainment and published by EA. It sold over a million copies and peaked at 800,000 subscribers.
The game utilized the “Realm vs. Realm” technique from Dark Age of Camelot and pitted three races against each other. It featured various forms of PvP.
In 2013, the Warhammer license expired. Although Mythic was working on a new Warhammer title and intended to switch Age of Reckoning to a Free2Play model, they decided against an extension.
Thus, in December 2013, the MMORPG Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning died.
Darkfall
- Release Date: February 26, 2009
- Discontinued: November 15, 2012
Darkfall was a sandbox MMORPG by Aventurine and the publisher Audiovisual Enterprises. It offered a very strategic gameplay with unrestricted PvP, including full loot. Upon death, you lost your entire inventory, making it geared more towards hardcore fans.
It was purely based on player skill, as the game did not feature a class and level system. Instead, blocking and dodging were the focus.
Development of the MMORPG began in 2001. The first beta tests began in 2005, but the release was still several years away.
On July 2, 2012, a patch was introduced that removed the purchase cost for the game and reduced the subscription model from $15 to $9.95 per month. But even that could not save Darkfall.
Meanwhile, the game has returned under the name “Darkfall: A New Dawn”. However, many systems have changed:
Tera
- Release Date: January 25, 2011
- Discontinued: June 22, 2022
In TERA, you created a hero with whom you could complete many quests and defeat enemies. There were 13 different classes to choose from.
Game highlights included the varied dungeons and the action combat system. In 2012, when the game launched in the West, the action-packed battles were a major highlight, and they aged well by the time of its discontinuation. Especially the active dodging and the constant movement were fun.
However, TERA did not come without criticism. Especially its monetization and the lack of consistency in the world were criticized. There are the craziest costumes as well as flying carpets or police cars as mounts.
TERA did not perform poorly in the West before its discontinuation, but the Korean developer Bluehole decided not to produce new content. The Western publisher Gameforge then decided to discontinue the MMORPG, even though an update with new dungeons and a season pass had been released in February 2022.
Battlestar Galactica Online
- Release Date: February 8, 2011
- Discontinued: January 31, 2019
In the browser MMORPG, players could fight as humans or Cylons for almost 8 years and take their spaceships into battle against each other.
The game was developed by Bigpoint Games, was free-to-play, and loosely based on the story of the TV series Battlestar Galactica. Nevertheless, it drew much attention at the outset and shortly after release had more than two million registered users.
Despite the strong interest at launch, Battlestar Galactica Online was unable to retain players for the long term. The game was also accused of having noticeable pay-to-win elements.
Furthermore, development was noticeably scaled back by 2018, leading to its discontinuation in 2019.
Hello Kitty Online
- Release Date: September 25, 2009
- Discontinued: August 2017
Hello Kitty Online from Sanrio Digital and Typhoon Games was an MMORPG in which you stepped into the role of a hero who assisted Hello Kitty and her friends in various challenges.
The combat in the game was rather secondary; it was more about collecting and crafting items.
For the first beta of the game, over 50,000 people signed up. Over time, the developers held several charity events to raise money for charitable causes.
Already in 2012, the development of Hello Kitty Online was discontinued. However, the game still ran until August 2017.
In 2015, there was a hack that exposed the data of 3.3 million accounts, including names, birthdates, email addresses, and passwords.
Marvel Heroes
- Release Date: June 4, 2013
- Discontinued: November 27, 2017
The action RPG Marvel Heroes by Diablo developer David Brevik was a major flop at launch, but was developed with great passion afterward and eventually became a success.
In the free-to-play game, you could take on the role of one of 21 (later 63) characters. There you fought alongside and against more than 100 well-known figures from the Marvel universe.
The raids introduced in the 2015 relaunch were particularly special. Such things were rare in action RPGs and allowed for collaboration with 9 more friends.
In 2016, Brevik left the studio Gazillion Entertainment to develop more on his own. From that point, things went downhill for the MMO. The console versions delayed new content and were incomplete.
Player numbers plummeted, leading to the discontinuation in November 2017.
