The Rise And Fall of ArcheAge | Asmongold Reacts 

Archeage open beta was one of my favorite mmo experiences. I was absolutely in love with the game. Once they released and opened the cashshop, it instantly died in my mind. It was the saddest thing.

I feel bad for whoever didn't experience archeage during those first 4 months or so, before those p2w items came and that whole new continent drop. Peak MMO experience.

Man, when Archeage just came out, I thought they had some very good ideas. But then, it turned around really fast.

ArcheAge combat to this day is still some of the most fluid and fun combat I've experienced in an MMO. It did a very good job between action and tab targeting. The naval combat for its time was pretty decent. Experiencing the server first kraken kill and the battle for the first guild castle land was one of the most memorable experiences I've had in any MMO. If they didn't make this game soooo pay-to-win, and their PvE end-game dungeons weren't so scuffed, this game could of been amazing. I really hope Ashes of Creation builds on the great parts of ArcheAge, and innovates on better and new ideas.

Got into Archeage heavily at EU Launch. Swiped a LOT. Managed a 300+ guild. Became a Castle Lord at the Launch of Auroria. What they did to this game is an absolute CRIME. This MMO was legitimately the best MMORPG i have ever played. Doing trade runs with 100 people. Sailing the seas with someone on a spyglass attempting to spot enemy guild ships in case they try to rob us. Some of the best World PVP i've ever been involved with. Instead of nurturing and helping the game grow, they put P2W feature after P2W feature in. Didnt ban or remove gear from exploiters. Loot box mechanics, energy systems, almost every part of the game was monetized. But the game had so many incredible systems. Real world housing, justice system (going to court and getting a jury of players for attacking same faction or stealing), farming and illegal farms, world bosses... I could go on. Will never forget this game, and the effect it had on me at the time i played it, and the awesome people i played it with back in 2014. Xinneth - Orchidna EU

ArcheAge is the best MMO ever created + the soundtrack is one of the greatest in the world. This amazing game was destroyed by f***** greed only. R.I.P ArcheAge but my amazing memories from this game will never die

Most people here focused on AA being really good PvP and PvPvE and all that. My favourite thing was the focus on packs, cargo transportations and all the gameplay it came with it. From Safe, relaxing trade routes, to dangerous high tension trade routes in PvP enabled areas. Going with a Ship full of packs to the middle island was epic! And then the hole owning a farm / property in the game. Not just for show, but as a way to produce resources for packs, or achemy or crafting. And owning vehicles to transport resources around. Archeage had really good and well integrated economic systems.

I think my ADHD saved me, because I managed to get into, get fun out of, and then get bored of Archeage just in the timeframe before it started to go downhill. One of my best memories was that I wanted to be special by having one of the other faction's starting mounts, so as soon I was able to (level 5 or so) I bought a cheapass rowboat and paddled across the ocean, avoiding all aquatic mobs that would all one-shot me and then sneak around on the enemy continent, again avoiding all mobs, enemy players and automated guards until I managed to stealth across a continent to the enemy vendor who sold me the mount. 'twas a fun experience. Also using the glider to find good out-of-map spots to build rogue tree farms (or raid those of other players) was hilarious.

Should be a new rule , whenever a pay2win game gets released , included in your bundle is one free swift kick in the nutsack by a developer of that game.

I played this game back in Alpha state, it was the best MMORPG exprience I've ever had to this day after WoW

Oh, i remember this game. When i was little, i played this game and got on some high-level dudes ship. After sailing for a while, they dropped in on some island and then, after a few minutes, they left me there, on an island surrounded by an ocean with sharks. So, yeah, my experience was great.

The guy who did the video used compressed 480p stream quality recording. The game doesn't look bad at all, mind you it was made in cryengine.

The company running Archage, Gamigo, did the same thing to Defiance and Defiance 2050, which lead to their closings also.

Rip archeage, one of the few mmo's that meets my stringent requirements for boat ownership

I remember that they had a security breach and someone gained access to my account. I made a ticket about it saying that all of my stuff is gone, they banned my account. Weeks later they replied saying that I should make a new ticket from my original account which was impossible since the account was banned everywhere. Haven't heard from them afterwards. Years later I received a message saying that I got unbanned. Wow thanks, great support. Lost my house due to this bs ban so I never came back.

Ooof this gives me flashbacks to when they shut down Tera. I'll never forget the memories and friends I made in that mmo. Good times.

"Why wouldn't you just play wow, runescape, etc?" Because ArcheAge is one of very few PvP or PvPvE based MMORPGs, and also had the best tab target combat, and pretty much, TO THIS DAY, the only optimized MMO that can handle 200 vs 200 +++ battles and run at 60 frames without a sweat.

For anyone looking to play the old version of Archeage (without the catch-up mechanics) there is a private server called Archeage Classic

They're shutting down because they're making Arche Age 2, it was rumored to be all about block chain and NFT's. Sounds like a failure even before launch. I am being informed that it was ArcheWorld that had NFT's and Blockchain. What I wrote is based on speculations from the likes of MMOByte and other YT content creators.

I was playing the game on launch when it came out and later managed to be a leader of one of the biggest guilds on my server. It was an amazing experience building first big ship on the server and the long boat to carry the massive trading journeys. It was really fun to grow all the nice crops and trade them, the game economy was based on the labor that you spent growing stuff and also one of the most important things was a "lightning struck log" which was needed to create a cart, but to get the log it was just a random, very low chance of getting one from having the tree struck by the lightning. So If you just planted the trees on your farm it was not effective due to small space and limited amount of trees. But.. you could plant things outside of your private plot, but then i was not protected and everyone could destroy it or steal it... SO we were finding secret spots on the map that were almost out of bound, and were extremely hard to get to, and we were planting hundreds and hundreds of trees there. Trees grew like 2 or 3 real time days, and as they matured they had a chance to be struck by the lightning. So we had to guard the trees against enemies, constantly scouting the location, fighting other people in PVP to protect our forest. It was amazing fun. BUT then the developers put a labor potion into the shop, so you could do more work, and THEY HAVE PUT A TREE THAT WOULD GROW IN 2 REAL TIME HOURS AND HAVE LIKE 20% OR MORE TO BE STRUCK BY THE LIGHTNING. That crashed the whole economy and the system, and everyone (200 people or so from my guild) stopped playing after that went live. P2W destroyed the game with potential and killed all the fun we had.

I loved Archeage. Factions, Life skills, good PVE for the most part. You can be just a merchant(run packs) and just be as fairly progressed as someone who PvPs. Its a good mix of PvPvE and a lot of stuff to do when you want to take a break from PvP/PvE. I mained on fishing and only engaged in PvP for dailies/weeklies and still had fun.

As much as I love BG3 and want more, I agree it's probably for the best for Larian to move onto other things. Alex Hirsch, the creator of Gravity Falls, fought against Disney about continuing the series because he felt the series was done and, let's be honest, if they continued it they would inevitably ruin it. Almost every show, and sometimes even game series, that go for too long runs out of steam eventually, either becoming complete trash or just not as good as it used to be. Some series can avoid this but that's usually ones where you're not following the same character throughout or, if it is the same character, it's a different iteration of them like LoZ or Mario games. RE made a comeback but I'm not too sure how the 9th or 13th game is gonna pan out. As much as I want to play more BG3, I respect Larian's choice to wash their hands of it, it shows they mean it when they say they make games because they want to and they have a story to tell, not just because a company told them to for money.

The only thing I could be sure about is that, AA is the best MMORPG game for over the past 30years, and I don't think there will be any games can surpass AA in future 10years. The gliding system, massive PVP and PVE , robbing, jail and judge system, pirate third party, those boats, ship and sea PVP, the flexibility to plant, climb up a mountain, housing, flaring. Those are crazy features that would always retain in my memories. Thank you AA, the peak of MMO

The rise and fall of hair

Archeage has the snappiest, best pvp combat still even today I feel, and there are tons more to do in the game compared to games like WoW or GW2 or FF14. That's why I would still play it today. Sending out 8 large ships to take out the central island... was a good memory.

If it's the game i'm recalling with trade routes... the main issue for me was infinite teleporting bots that devalued the entire trade pack mechanic.

That initial relaunch of ArcheAge Unchained was some of the most quality MMO experience one could have. The pros and cons are the exact same thing. Racing to "max" level to maintain a decent gear score, so you could compete in all of the fun and important world PvP events, was absolutely unmatched. But the game functions like a second job. You can play it peacefully and not get caught up in all of that, but you essentially gut your ability to take part in anything remotely competitive. And competitive isn't a choice, it is the bread and butter of most of the game's content. I was pretty satisfied grabbing a piece of land, paying my house tax, doing stealthy care package sales across borders and focusing on hit & run sabotage gameplay in the end. But man, this game is something special while also being absolutely brutal. Those with no time or responsibilities (or streamers) have it the best. You had to be there during the first 3 months.

It's been like 18 years give or take since the text based rpg Elvenworlds shut down and I'm still sad about it. There's almost no images even left of it, and my search for it led me to a book series or something that I'm almost sure is unrelated to it. Sometimes good things just disappear.

Met my wife on this game, was lord of a castle in aurora, run all the bosses and server events and loved it from release day and around 4 years after release. Game got boring with few updates and the ones that did come out didn't give anything for most players. Saw all my friends and guildies leaving due to boredom or broken gear due to bad upgrade system and I quit. Arcane Mayhem was known to anyone that played back then and I wish it could have kept going. The game may die but the memories live on

I had fun times in Archeage but it never felt a game that you would get too stuck in as the progression system wasn't for me. Funniest was sneaking in to other factions place and get your supplies and run out :D

To be fair, the game was awesome, but the systems were bound to create hate. The regrading (upgrading gear), gemming, tempering (increasing base stats), and many other systems were insane gacha mechanics with insane low chances of succeeding and a very high chance at breaking.

I never got into archeage. i thought it was neat you can buy your own sailing ship but just couldnt do the grind at all. I expect older MMOs like D&D online to eventually fall, because of the outdated pricing model and age.

I've had a steam account since 2010. Never once can i recall any popup. To purchace any game.

asmon has a lot of wild takes but saying archeage looks worse than wow is up there.

21:52 myeah, the fable series and the dragon age series are both examples with amazing first games and then it being milked to death over the course of the next 2 games

Never had the chance to play it. Was too busy with GW.

I think p2w is an easy answer for people to give. But as someone who actually played the game, and also started over in some of the fresh start servers, the game has structural problems. You can play 4-6 hours a day and still get so far behind that it will take you a long time to catch up in terms of power, since there is a massive difference even between 8k gearscore and 10k, where you can get one-tapped constantly. This of-course also is terrible for new players that would have to suffer for months before they can catch up to do anything in pvp. Missing dailies/weeklies would set you back as well, especially with the new hiram quests since you need the mats to progress and missing a quest will mean you are not catching up until late endgame The game itself is amazing, pvp is very fun if you can keep up with the top players (non other game has come close imo). p2w is not the only reason it failed (p2w seems mostly an issue when it first came out of alpha/beta). My biggest issue would be the progression/labor system, while labor system could have worked its horrible that you need ton of alt character just to keep up with people who can spend 12+ hours a day in the game, farming on alts, running packs etc. and using labor on gear on the main

The joke was on me for this game. I bought the 150$ founders pack back in the day :(. streamer guilds were hell back then. you could barely do anything without getting ganked.

The time I spent playing the Archeage alpha back when it was still using the 1.0 version of the game was easily one of my most memorable gaming experiences. This was when the cash shop wasn't even in the game yet and it was a great experience. There are so many underdog MMOs which got fucked up by bad decisions or just never really made it big. Archeage and Star Wars Galaxies are two MMOs which were so ahead of their time they did things we'ves still not seen in any MMO since.

Used to run a top guild on my server. 2 things killed Archeage. Rumbling boxes and the hauler wagons. They made a 100% safe land hauler that made about 60% of the money of a trade boat but it required very rare materials that were very RNG in getting to craft. Then they released a cash shop box that gave you the rare item needed. So people bought the boxes, made the haulers, and everyone shifted to just doing land hauling with trade packs to make money. This killed all PvP and ocean sailing because people would rather do 100% safe routes with no risk in losing anything vs attempt to PvP or join a guild to do trade runs on the ocean so a lot of people/guilds quit because their was no content anymore as PvP was a large portion of the content. We used to sail around for hours and maybe find 2 people after the boxes came out. Before that we would play 14 hrs a day and fight almost the whole time.

was the best mmorpg i ever play.... RIP but nooo he do p2w box and more....

The most "tame" p2w aspect in Archeage basically was. Get 2 chars to get double of stamina to do stuff, because anything that was money related in this game, required that. Your main char would do the content + jobs to gain gold to be able to upgrade gear to not get completely destroyed in 0.1 seconds and instead you would get your ass clapped in 0.5. Your 2nd character would just craft cargo to sell to npcs and funnel all the gold into your main. So basically if you had just 1 account you had a disadvantage, because the most tryhard people I knew at the time could have 3-4 characters to be able to make so much more gold than the normal player and get ahead on gear. Also the real reason why unchained died after 6 months is because the game was a 28h daily job, with no real content to do. You had a lot of timed/faction events you had to do daily to be competitive, and since pvp is a really important part of the game, you were forced to do it to not fall behind. I found it fun at first, but even I got burned out after a while.

16:52 yeah I agree. That takes one of the biggest parts to that issue

2:30 although they give you option to pay for more energy (HSR) most gacha don’t really count on you paying to play.. they count more on you having to log in daily to farm or weekly for ghe bosses. They want you to give you a reason to play continuously

Man I miss a game like archeage. The pvp beef not only against the enemy faction but also YOUR OWN faction was hilarious. People getting mad and probably you getting butthurt aswell from getting your cargo getting stolen by some tryhard camping at 3 am was so exciting. This is the only game were they made fishing of all things a dangerous job because you had to fish with fishing gear and you were totally open to get stabbed in the back by anyone.

archeage > wow waiting for Archeage 2

No one plays the actual release game and hasn't in years. Everyone plays ArcheRage.

I don’t understand why ArcheAge is being dissed as having crappy graphics. Archeage is beautiful. It’s one of the most beautiful open world mmos I have ever played. The graphics are amazing. What has crappy graphics is Ark Survival, which tons of people are playing. Atlas and every other survival game has the same exact degraded graphics as well. World of Warcraft doesn’t have great graphics either. It’s very cartoony, like Wizard 101. Other games are not on par with Archeage and it was made in Cryengine.

I played this game from beta until the thunderstruck trees, and it was the best experience I have ever had in a videogame, and probably the best experience I will ever have in a videogame. There has never been a better example of an amazing concept ruined by greedy cash shop features. Before the cash shop got out of hand, there was no better MMO than Archeage.

I'm early af

I really liked the class system. I remember playing this on day 1 and watching a boat attaching itself to the blimp with the harpoon being dragged around the continent really made my day.

All the Trion games fell off or died years ago, when Gamigo bought them out, most of their games were either put in maintenance mode or shut down. Archeage and Trove I think were the only ones getting some updates. I was a huge fan of Rift and I'm honestly surprised they haven't shut down those servers, they havent had a major update in many years and the last expansion was released in 2017

here we go again, reacting to a game he did not even play and having a strong opinion about it.

Something that gets missed a lot in topics like this are the actual expenses that companies are incurring. $50 million is a lot of money, but spending $60 to make that game turns it into a flop. This is even worse for a subscription-based game where maintenance costs are an ongoing drain if you can't break even. It really ties into what Asmon talked about previously that game companies will have to focus on making smaller games with less time investment as opposed to spending X amount of time just to make a terrible game. And companies should be more invested in player satisfaction and retention. Too many games suffer from too much focus on making up expenses.

wait since when did you stop with the outro?

Sub model games to me have usually been the best pure games to play. I played Everquest 1999 to 2003 (Sony/EOE) for years, what a fantastic experience and one of the first large MMOs, I loved being able to log in with my character and continuing my game play with my guilds. Same with WoW for awhile, (I didn't get into WOW big time) and Dark Age of Camelot with 5 man group roaming 3 different realms. All were sub models and we played for at least 2 years at 10-15bucks a month sub model. But that's it..they were forced to give us FINISHED games that were fun to play that kept us playing. I am getting older now so I'm probably aging out of serious gaming but I still look for something to get into..DAOC was the last real mmo I played. I don't know why studios stopped making large mmo sub models in the rpg type games. But the shooters took off for a long time and that was never my thing.

I had so much fun with this game when it first came out. Loved exploring the map and being able to go anywhere and find thunderstruck trees in hidden areas that people tried to plant stuff in. Loved the fishing and naval part. I used to explore the bottom of the ocean and collect all the fish that fell down there when people were killed and then turn it in for cash. Our guild use to always have clan battles against Stephens clan (the dude making Ashes of Creation).

6:10 Epic Games has notifications in the task bar that you can turn off in the settings Steam has popups when you launch the Store

I still remember archeage having two subscriptions and full shop of p2w items in a month after launch. Subsriptions were cheap, but they were adding more more and more.

This is one of my most played mmos, simply because i really really liked the mount system (taming random ass mobs and getting to keep them) then i took around a 1 year break, as you do sometimes and when i got back, my 150 hour account is gone. seems they moved and i missed it by month...

the only old school mmo i still play to this day is star wars the old republic still love it every time i play

I will never forget that awesome cinematic

1$ = 1 hours is crazy for anything but RPGs or some open world games. I definitely don't want a 60-70 hours Uncharted game

The out of the box microtransactions is the reason I didn't buy Dragon's Dogma, but bought No Rest for the Wicked.

I don't minds pop-up ads , it's good for knowing what to look up on pirates bay.

One of many MMOs that launched with a bait and switch model. Amazing and promising open beta followed by actual launch with cash shops and pay walls.

This really breaks my heart man... I was a casual player since 2015 and spent most of my time on Aranzeb NA server. You could choose lots of different mechanics and play styles and go for farming and housing, crafting, or pvp. While it was heavily p2w you could get by entirely free to play and lots of work was put into this game and it's content over the years. I was there through all the drama, mergers. Trion, Gamigo and the final years of Kakao. There was clearly lots of mismanagement and stuff behind the scenes that most will never know and what happened was a shame. I hope everyone lands on their feet somewhere. I myself will be in the Arche Rage private server.

You can still play old version of Archeage but it is in private server called Archeage Classic.

Played it the first few months of release, or beta release. Was having so much fun. Then the expansion came and i never looked back.

My brother to this day says archeage ruined a year of his life. Bro missed an entire vacation because he was playing. What a fun time back in the day

I loved archeage, Used to be in the guild Steven from Ashes of creation lead, The White Order. It was a blast the game was so good for PVP and the world bossing was next level trying to down the boss while trying to fight off other players was elite.

This was the best representing of sword art online and sandbox open world pvp with naval combat, y axis was insane too.

Awee I played Archeage Unchained for a hot minute and I enjoyed it sooo much. Having your own land that you could decorate that wasnt instanced was so fun and my guy at the time loved the ships and heavy water battle content. It was such a blast. Sad to see it go, hope someone makes something like it but does it better this time

Final Fantasy 11 and 14 used to be so much worse just to log back in. I own like three copies of FF14 but never remember which one is actually linked to my steam account - so I end up having to sort through which Product Key'd account will actually play. Then with FF11, we used to have to go through the launcher they had and oh god - what an experience. Sometimes I like to torture myself by trying to get ff11 to work, play till level 10 then delete. Maybe im a masochist, I duno

6:20 You can also turn off all pop-ups in Steam. You can't in a lot of these other launchers

i remember the beta for this game, i dont know how i got my hands onto this. It started increadibly good but i dont remember too much about it. i remember i had to stop playing it because of some issues with my computer but i dont remember to much about the game itself

Dude the castle sieges in Auroria were so much fun. I feel so bad for people who don't know what Archeage was and truly how creative it was when it came out.

Hell, even Guild Wars 1 has servers still up, and it came out the year after WoW. 10k players still. The Ashes of Creation founder packs mention 6 months of playtime included, so I think that they indeed are going subscription

its ok imo to have things limited pair week, like a raid in wow (if it didn't change since years), but, it becomes problematic for players as soon as you add a store item that alow you to bypass that

Archeage burned me twice. I wont make that mistake again with Archeage 2

I remember when this game came out. Me and my friends created a guild called the Nuian Seals. We would board players boats who were fishing and kill them and take their fish. We glitched out the tank from the pvp game mode and created a toll both by a major road that was unavoidable for tractor traders. It was a golden age of gaming. RIP

Gamigo has literally always been any mmo’s death sentence the moment they take over the game dies within a month or two

The thing is, even if game is F2P, they still try to sell subscription in some VIP option ingame that give you extra - most of the time - qol features. So for them its double win, triple if like D4 they have BOX price, IS and BP

I was in Steven's guild during one of my stints playing Archeage. Such a fun game and good times with his guild. This was before Ashes was really public or at least well known and I remember he would sometimes drop concept art and stuff in discord and ask us for our opinions on it. Due to the nature of how P2W Archeage was, even before I knew he was developing his own MMO, I could tell he had deep pockets haha. He was one of, if not the most geared person on the server. But yeah, great game. Sad to see it fail so horribly. It had so much potential back in the day.

Archeage had so many more cool things about it than just its looks. Diversity of classes, criminal system, player trials, sailing, naval combat, farming, etc etc. is what made it great, it gave you more things than just queing up for dungeons or pvp like wow.

i remember they brought out the crystal trees and i just insta stopped :P

I remember getting the orange donkey called Carrot to carry my trade packs and meeting up with a guild that transported me to the other side of the world to maximise my reward. We got attacked on the way by several ships trying to steal our trade packs, but we managed to fight them off. It was such a fun game. I spent a lot of time building and decorating my house. I took my massive ship out to fish in the ocean, and it was incredibly chill. Such a cool game. Shame they fcked it up.

I'd argue the hacking and mis-management problem was worse than the monetisation for AA. The expansion launch was especially funny in a very sad and bad way for the players. This just feels like a way to talk about greedy video game companies, which Trion was, but the specific case of Arch Age is so much more than just predatory monetisation.

I totally agree with the launchers. I don't use the Blizzard launcher because it kept putting up adverts for games I didn't care about.

i loved archeage on launch , had the most fun experiences, honestly was amazing

Pirates in this game still one of the best from all what I try to

so steam has one pop up when you open epic has pop up all the time i even close it because i have seen video where epic puts a load on your pc just being opened

i loved the sport fishing in archeage omgggg the water stuff was so much fun Q_Q

Habro wants a BG4 its just not going to be by Larian, which is gonna be interesting to watch unfold haha

7:28 can someone tell me what that messed up looking pepe in the suit is called? It cracks me up everytime i see it.

my biggest complaint about dd2 is that it was to easy im doing a 2nd play through intentionally making it harder for my self and its a lot more fun

The only time i see a pop-up from steam is when i shut it down completely and restart, then there is one and that's it.

This game without labor and p2w is an insane game. Add some rules here and there to make it so that afking for a certain amount of time will liberate your housing area (you don't lose your stuff just put it in inventory). keep the luck based system for weapons but only for legendary and mythic.

Played this in the early days... RIP.

Archeage was actually a phenomenal game. I absolutely LOVED playing it and have a ton of good memories that I still talk about to this day. What killed it was pure greed. I remember when the devs added the rumbling archeum sapling to the cash shop and half the playerbase quit overnight. This should be a case study as to why good games fail.