Another MMO Cancelled 

making it single player with peer to peer coop before potentially abandoning it is a gigachad move in my books... i wish they would have done that with Rend

I feel so bad for this Dev. He's trying so hard to save his hard work and genuinely wants people to enjoy it

I think switching a dead MMO to a single-player with co-op mode is a brilliant move. More MMOs need to do this before pulling the plug

interviewee: "sorry i pace when i talk" asmon: "you're good, i do the same thing" i've never seen asmon out of his chair unless he's doing a one-off variety stream

imo mmo's going single player/coop is one of the best outcomes if the alternative is going away completely

You can tell this poor sod is anxious/nervous af with his pacing, you couldn't pay me enough to handle that kinda stress.

Good honest Dev, nothing to hide, just caught in a rough position.

Somewhat ironic considering Warframe's early struggles trying to survive without a Publisher and then trying to become one for someone else and failing them.

“So what are you gonna do now?” Drink. Lmao based dev. Never even heard of the game but I will definitely check it out now. He actually seems to care and I can’t imagine taking all that in and trying to have an off the cuff interview with Asmon live. Much respect.

As someone who saw game in EA just dissapear and never be playable again, I think it's good that they at least make in a single player game that people will be able to play forever instead of just the game dissapearing. Rest in peace Skysaga I miss you ;(

Big respect for a dev coming on stream to explain the teams side of the story. That's how you build trust and transparency.

Issue with MMOs is that the cost is insanely high and unless you are a AAA studio the risk is not worth the returns

Who tf is still paying for games that aren’t out yet?

in all fairness, steam is pretty clear that early access purchases may never get finished or even change at all.

Crowdfunding mmos is like replying to that Nigerian prince that needs $120 to send you 1 million

I did buy the 150$ founder pack for this. I'd rather it go single player with p2p than just shut down.

I wish WildStar devs had the Cojones to do this :(

Props to the guy for coming on and talking about it

Asmon: So whatre you gunna do now? Executive producer: Drink?

I don't think this was a bad move on the devs part. The options they had were quite simple. Put the servers down and let the game die forever, or work hard to change the game to a singleplayer/co-op so that the players that supported you still get to keep the game they paid for. I guarantee you most developers and most studios would have put the servers down and taken the money with them without a single thought about the players. This guy is trying his best for his players.

That Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning game was supposed to be an MMO but was turned into a singleplayer game instead. And it was a damn good one. But man, they scrwed up BIG time with their financialbullshit and collapsed the company. Or something like that.

They probably just dont have the money to do big refunds like that.

i payed $20 for it, played it maybe 3 hours and never touched it again. Im actually looking forward to it being a single player game instead

Hearing that this is gonna be a single player co op will all the founders stuff as in game loot at random makes me wanna play it more im buying it when it comes out

I completely expected this from the moment it launched. The game really didnt need to be an mmo

You would have to have a dent in your skull to think crowdfunding mmos is a good idea.

This is similar to what Nightingale is going through. They launched with some super scuffed networking and server structures, because they imagined a game with lots of multiplayer dungeon delving, but it made so many loading screens, they're rolling back their vision to something similar. They now hope everyone can load offline and play solo without needing to wait for servers, but still keep lots of the 4-8 man content they planned. People can still multiplayer, but needed a rebuild to be less online.

Steam can retroactively add content to a library based on a prior purchase (think bioshock remastered) .. for existing purchases they could always add founders / pre-order exclusive dlcs to include remedial content for early backers. I think it's doable. And i think thats what the gent was getting at

The game pulling a Kingdom's of Amalur and becoming an Outriders/Borderlands like, will honestly do it so much better. I'm all for this.

Don't give money to projects unless you can afford to lose that money.

it's honestly a good move by the dev, they are the first devs to not just shutdown the game, and actually made the game playable offline, very genuine imo. sad their playerbase are a bunch of crybabies.

After this conversation, I feel like any company that this guy works for should give him infinite amounts of money. That was some amazing PR! I think. I'd hire that guy in a heartbeat if I was in charge of recruitment for a community management team. Never heard of wayfinder but I'm definitely going to check it out. Pretty much solely because I'm hearing about this and this guy coming on and talking about it

I have ZERO pity for anyone who pre-orders anything.

Further proof why preorders are poison.

Ngl, this impromptu interview is what has made me check out the game on steam. Gonna wishlist it.

I wondered why that name sounded familiar, they were the company that did the single player league of legends RPG.

Single player is better than live service almost 98% of the time Helldivers is a rare rare diamond in the rough outlier of these stats

The fact that he went out of his way to make his case of the whole situation to a random streamer is a really transparent move. On top of that, he has to be extremely careful with what he says to avoid legal consequences. One hell of a minefield to navigate through talking on the top of his head. Not much room for corporate talk. I did some cross-referencing, and his resume checks out. I’ll hear what he has to say.

Its sucks for AS cause if this doesn’t land i cant see then staying open

The game studio didn't sell you the game, the publisher did. They can't give you money back they didn't recieve.

People that backed Fortnite in alpha be like "First time?"

Asmons editors worked fast AF to get this up. Nice work.

I'll probably play it if it's like a looter now that sounds fun. I do like the art style and the characters so I'll probably check it out again when it's ready

Okay, so we're not getting the mmorpg we've been waiting for. However, the game got completely reworked/overhauled by a team of 85 in the hope to still provide an rpg/open world/co-op game to the founders and the current investors/gamers, is still super awesome! If this publisher drama is true, and all things are transparent with the community, this game will be successful. I'm proud to hear that the devs are actually giving a fk.

Props to him for coming on and answering questions, and even more props to Airship for trying to take a live service game and make it single-player and peer-to-peer co-op. Here's hoping they succeed, glad we don't have another live service to bring gaming down.

It will always be true that the only games you will ever really own will be peer to peer or custom server open. Any live service or licensed software YOU DO NOT OWN. This is why self hosting and peer to peer will become the norm in the future in any sane and fair society. If we continue to purchase games with live services that aren't free, we will continue to promote this nonsense. 1994 Doom was peer to peer. Quake was self-hosted. We need to go back to that.

They had Day 1 bugs they said they fixed multiple times and they were never fix.

Honestly this sounds like this is turning into a better game. I'm down for this pivot.

I think people have MMOs all wrong. They use a lame formula. They need some new creative ideas.

It should have been a 4 player coop game since the beginning. 😞

I was waiting to buy this game, The Publisher, who is literally Digital Extremes, the creators of Warframe pulled out and it went downhill from there

tbh after i played this game pre-release, when it was nothing more than a broken and kinda clunky mess, hearing that they overhaul the whole thing and make it into a Singleplayer experience with opt in coop is something that made me more excited for it than i ever was since i played it back then. If they keep working on it, i could imagine this game to become a "No Mans Sky story", but that is something we will hopefully see in the future.

I payed for the 150 edition, it came out as a MMO style game, with all MMO games you pay your money you take your chance, it's annoying but oh well, just going to wait and see what we get now.

I genuinely thought the thumbnail was from Dauntless.

This is what should happen to live service games when they’re shutting down just make it peer to peer multiplayer and single player. Like Diablo 4 should get this treatment and adding more items to interact with in the main game when they sunset it.

If they instantly released the game as F2P and didnt have NASA PC reqiorements it would have been bigger than league.

Sucks for the backers, but it's probably a better idea to make a coop game than an mmo. Haven't seen any new good mmo in ages. More importantly, who the hell makes an mmo with NAMED CHARACTERS rather than races or classes or anything? That's a terrible character creation model for an mmo.

Stop buying games that are obviously going to have a 90% chance of sucking. At least stop buying them for 100+ dollars. And for people saying its a scam.... at least they are trying to keep something alive. If they dont the game just doesnt exist and you have nothing for the money you spent anymore. You take the risk when you pay for a product that it will not do well and will not be supported anymore. Just because they have to pivot to something else doesnt mean you deserve your money back. You know the risk when you purchase a game that is an online game and you took the risk. You just happened to lose on that risk.

So am I one of the few that think it would honestly be better as a peer to peer multiplayer game just overall and pricing and content could be altered towards that as opposed to an MMO with egregious pricing?

14:37 That's completely inaccurate

considering the MMO is failing i think that single player with peer to peer multiplayer sounds like more then most people get. I wish more MMO's would do this then they find they cannot sustain the servers.

19:10 "No one has really done this before" That is not true. Project Copernicus was a MMO that was created by 38 Studios founder Curt Schilling and writer R. A. Salvatore. It was later reworked in to becoming Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning.

19:40 , when asmon asked what was next, did he answer "drink"?

15:54 there is no thinking on their part. Steam just accepts it when you explain the situation to them. There's a whole Reddit thing of the entire situation that you send them and it accepts most of the time

if its not on your system. you do not own it. thats just the way live service stuff like a mmo works. the fact that people are even getting compensated in the new single player game is more than generous. theres prob thousands of early access games that are no longer playable and has long been abandoned.

Digital Extremes, not Airship Syndicate, should be liable for the refunds, and Steam should push hard for the players to get refunds and charge DE for every penny. The crew at AS is basically salvaging whatever they can for a project they spent five years of their lives working on, only to be tossed to the curb by DE. Here is hoping that AS didn't sign some ridiculous contract with DE that leaves DE without any liabilities. 🍻

I recall the events surrounding Curt Schilling and his studio which was developing Kingdom's of Amalur. That title was originally intended to be an MMO, yet it ultimately became a single-player game, released much too late and at great cost considering the resources invested in it. Occasionally, once the dominoes begin to topple, there's no halting their descent.

no more mmo's unless they are a year in strong, with a solid fanbase. period

Asmon usually has some damn good questions for these. Especially toward physicians.

OUCH METER 📈

Was waiting (hoping) for it to be F2P but will try it out in June as it seems interesting and to show support

people saying the dev is in the right are just wrong, you cant advertise a game as mmo, sell founderpacks for 150 dollars then change it to singleplayer, not give a refund, then give items worth nothing in a game you didnt buy.

I just dont have faith in any MMO game being released now.

dam Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning I played the shit out of that game, had no idea it was suppose to be an mmo

It was a cool game but it was gimped by mmo stuff in the game awful instance based maps where you would either get no one doing wb or it dies so quick you miss it and it's gone for hours

Sounds like it will become something similar to Remnant with it's coop

Digital extremes have been farming money from warframe for over 10 years there never going to change that.

I liked my own like

I might play it again now it's going single player. Group finding was a pain.

I heard very little about Wayfinder when it came out, but when I heard that they were going away from a live service model, I was imediately very interested and I would love to try it out.

Digital Extremes screwed them over. I think Airship Syndicate might close down. This is so sad as they are made up from people from Gunfire Games who are actually the old devs from Vigil Games that made Darksiders back in the THQ days.

You can tell he's trying to explain the business reasons for the pivot, and he mentioned that the online function might return. It seems they've shifted to a single-player with co-op to simplify management, and if the game attracts a healthy number of players, then they will add more content. The game's fate whether it dies or thrives is in the hands of the player base. It's a tough position to be in, but I'm glad they're attempting to deliver a product rather than letting it fail.

Keeping the money of customers who paid for an mmo and received a coop game is probably fraud. Also, shutting down a game in alpha/beta and keeping the money from pre-orders is also fraud because alpha and beta is not what youre purchasing when you buy a game on steam. If that was true companies could charge you for alpha access, beta access, and then charge for the game after release. Not sure this is a good path to go down.

15:00 he doesn't need to push the button steam does and steam has already done it for lots of people. He's not involved steamers

Listen, the creative process changes the end design regularly. This is why you don't pay people before the product is done, and if you do, YOU accept the risk.

Damn that's unfortunate it definitely had potential I really liked how it looked.

Ngl im kinda hyped to try it now with some friends. I just dont get the dungeons I guess you can solo them if you play alone? Otherwise im kinda interested to see what its like now.

13:12 The correct answer is yes. I'm working with steam with anyone who is requesting a refund "I didnt take the money" so then who has the money?? Anyways, all you have to do is just contact team steam support and tell him the situation of digital extreme leave -in and the baeden switch of MMO to single player and they will refund you.

"Wayfinder Training Force here" I had 1600 hours put in and had over $100 of in game currency sitting on my account

I have never once donated to crowdfunding. If a game comes out, it was meant to be, and if it doesn't come out, it wasn't meant to be. It is what it is.

Man I feel for the guy that [19:43] "drink" was truly honest, I cant even imagine what's going on they have to figure out how to publish on their own.

Mybe it can be like No Man Sky and as time goes on they can add elements to move closer to what it was

So glad I never bought into that game. Valheim just dropped Ashlands and if you haven't gotten into that material I suggest you buckle up as it's harder than jumping into the swamp for the first time.

People just smell blood in the water and want to see if they can get money out of it. It's honestly a good thing they're doing the work to making it single player and preserve the game for the archives. If these same people also complain about games being shut down for good or being taken off the internet or just being deleted in general with the new "you don't own it" craze, then its hypocritical. 99% of Kickstarters don't end up being what was advertise, there is a huge precedence for this. There's even warnings from Kickstarter itself. It could have gone the way of the game Crowfall where it just shut down after being bought. Heck, a lot wanted Wildstar to do it. Not to mention the cheers when City of Heroes finally sold the code to fans so they could run their own server as well, which is great.

Asmon - given you're talking about MMOs etc I'd be interested to see your thoughts on the Palia launch/maybe see you dive in!

This is honestly a huge win under these circumstances. I mean just look at the other video asmon had put out about games getting abandoned and no longer being around. This is exactly what people wanted instead of games shutting down and never being playable again. Its a shitty situation that they had no control of and hopefuly it turns out great so more mmo / always online games do this if they shut down.

If anyone is worried about the disparity between this announcement and we DE closed their publishing wing, just remember US court let alone international court is fucking slow. The Microsoft ActiBlizz acquisition took years to go through. As was under NDA for a lot of this time until they got the rights back for what they worked on. DE could have fucked everyone by just killing Wayfinder and keeping the IP, assets, art, code, etc. This unfortunately was the best outcome in a situation where DE fucked up. Just remember he even hinted at this, DE was to provide the servers and login stuff while the devs did the game. The server issues at launch was more likely the fault of DE not AS.

This game was barely an MMO before. I don't really understand why there is so much drama around removing the live service aspects. The game seemed to mostly be focused around running dungeons with random, and the open world segments were just there to see people walking around more than any kind of interacting. Would anyone have considered Warframe an MMO years ago?

Tbh ive never heard of this, but now that its not an mmo looking at the enemies and art i may get this if it does end up going for sale

I really like what Airship has put out previously with the Darksiders side of things and I still play DEs Warframe religiously, but when this was announced I was VERY skeptical.