The 18-year-old MMORPG 4Story has now received a sort of reboot on Steam. 4Story: The Original, however, could hardly have had a worse launch. Many players are particularly bothered by one thing.
What is 4Story: The Original? Already in October 2020, MeinMMO reported that developer Zemi Interactive wanted to release a reboot for the MMORPG classic 4Story. At that time, the game was to be called ‘4Story: Three Kingdoms & One Hero’.
On June 11, 2025, the official release finally followed on Steam, but under the new name ‘4Story: The Original’. The ‘Three Kingdoms & One Hero’ was degraded to a subtitle. Regardless of the name, you can expect a classic MMORPG experience in the world of Iberia – with quests, dungeons, and faction wars for castles and regions.
The MeinMMO community has chosen the best MMORPGs of all time:
Reboot to Forget
How does the community rate the launch? Since the launch, 398 reviews have accumulated on Steam, which are only 21 percent positive – sufficient for a ‘Mostly Negative’. At launch, only 1,040 Steam users were online at the same time. Currently, the game peaks at just over 700 players (via steamdb.info).
Many of the reviews apparently come from fans who say they played the original from 2008 with great passion for years. The criticism of the reboot primarily revolves around monetization, but also the high number of critical bugs, the lack of anti-cheat, and the currently inadequate customer support from the developers.
- Roxxl complains on Steam: ‘Instead of investing in content, the focus of the operators is obviously only on monetization. The item shop is overly present, Pay2Win is firmly entrenched, and many events seem more like sales promotions than real game content. There is hardly any help for new players, and for veterans, there is no incentive to stay, except perhaps nostalgia.’
- Iverian Riessfield states in his review on Steam that he has lost many hours of progress: ‘I’ve played 9 hours so far. Yesterday: Passed the first instance and reached level 22. Today: Do you want to create your first character? That’s too much. Cheaters and minor bugs are tolerable, but resetting progress is unacceptable.’
- Joaquinn writes on Steam: ‘This server was only created to make money. There is no support, no GM, the developers do not care about negative reviews, they only want the money, and to top it off, the game is full of hackers.’
Why a reboot for 4Story? The original from Zemi Interactive and Gameforge from 2008 has so many fans that it achieved a strong 7th place in our vote for the best MMORPGs of all time. The servers are still accessible via de.4story.gameforge.com, are maintained, and provided with small updates and events.
The free-to-play alternative to WoW and Co. that many players found exciting back then has, of course, aged significantly and has not received as many modernizations as the much older World of Warcraft.
The idea of a reboot could have worked if the developers had managed to frame the strengths of the original in a modernized context while addressing some weaknesses. Zemi Interactive, however, seems not to have done just that. Instead, it appears as if they want to extract some revenue from the brand with as little effort as possible.
Our recommendation: Save yourself the download and don’t invest any money in 4Story: The Original. You’ll likely regret it. Instead, reinstall the old version if you want nostalgia. Or play directly one of the 10 best-rated MMORPGs on Steam.
