Nexon was (and remains) infamous for not-so-consumer-friendly F2P practices, including making slow EXP grinds to push for EXP boosters. Probably because I was playing much more avidly and the revamp included a new starter zone with new dungeons I had never seen before (a welcome change in retrospect, because they’re much more varied now than they used to be), but more importantly, the level curve was much faster. Which I wish they had.Īnd yet within a few days, I was no longer bothered by my lost progress as it only took that long to catch up to what had previously taken me weeks. Nexon flipped the off switch, supposedly for good, so they didn’t have any reason to keep the data around other than for preservation’s sake. Although, Neople couldn’t do much to fix that anyway. When DFO relaunched, nobody’s original accounts were intact. Even after dying - or more accurately, because of what it did in the process of coming back from the dead - Dungeon Fighter Online is still my favorite MMO to this day.ĭespite my enthusiasm for the news, there was one glaring problem. Maybe the closest thing we’ve had since would be a long-abandoned game like No Man’s Sky rocketing in players after its recent mega-patch, but that game was still technically playable before then. We’ve seen a handful of close shaves for many an MMO ( Final Fantasy XIV’s 1.0 days spring to mind), but for one to be shut down and brought back years later is almost unheard of.

Nexon didn’t try to salvage it.Īnd yet two years later DFO’s original developer, Neople, brought it upon themselves to localize their game all over again.

The servers were becoming too costly for their income. Global players dropped it and lost interest. Global publisher Nexon’s servers were not only very far behind the original version, their updates were becoming slower and slower. A devastating blow to me, given DFO was my favorite MMO. Conversely, the lack of such updates is usually their death knell.įive years ago, Dungeon Fighter Online’s global servers suffered that death. The livelihood of MMOs will ebb and flow with the quality of their updates, such as how Battle for Azeroth set new records for World of Warcraft. That’s one reason why I have so much fascination and interest in the genre, but also what makes them risky to get attached to. It’s a simple fact that any game which constantly consumes resources needs to constantly change to keep its players interested. An MMO needs to iterate upon itself to survive.

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