That being said, it’s still a pile of horseapples. Long story short, Smilegate (South Korean publisher who funded the game) pulled all the money (and IP) away in September, 2017, leaving Radiant Worlds (actual developer from UK) out to dry.
Some speculate that Smilegate intends to ship SkySaga for SK market themselves. Others point out that developing SkySaga for 4 years may count as an “Early access hell”, and Smilegate decided to cut the losses.
Still makes me wonder. Developing MMORPG is a huge task. Hell, developing WoW took at least 3 years, and Blizzard was way bigger than Radiant Worlds even then. Plus, considering RW finished their Open Alpha mid-summer and were preparing to shift for Beta stage, cancelling seemed especially out of place. They were getting to the really good part, too, with adding wiring and technology (think Minecraft) to the game.
All and all, I’m glad Rebellion bought Radiant Worlds in January. While Rebellion is mostly known for Sniper Elite series which has nothing in common with SkySaga (not to mention completely uninteresting for me), at least those cool people kept their jobs. I’m also glad I spent two months in Alpha 7, even if that meant using proxy every time I logged in. SkySaga was probably the biggest inspiration for my small lantern mod. Maybe @Allie can take some inspiration from what’s left of it, too.
At the end of the day, I can all but hope that Stonehearth from RD won’t share the same fate.
Creativerse IMHO has its own problems. For starters, the UI and gameplay is more clunky (SkySaga was really smooth and thought out in that department). Also, Creativerse has no 3rd-person view and is more of a Minecraft-like sandbox with no real goal, while SkySaga was a proper voxel MMORPG, with dungeons, quests and collectibles (of course, it also had all the construction freedom). Also, while the core game is free, some blocks are provided exclusively for money, while in SkySaga monetization model was based on selling “blind bags” of weapons, armor, recipes and islands to build on, but you could get it all for free with some effort.
I’m going to keep Boundless (and probably Stellar Overload) on my radar, but both games actually are in Early Access Hell, being under development for several years, and only recently started showing some progress. Steam dates are misguiding since both Boundless and Stellar Overload were renamed and re-added to Steam after several years of being in development, resetting their “release dates”. Between the three of them, SkySaga was the most polished and close to release.
Yes, it was free. The client could be downloaded from their site, I still have an Alpha 9 version on my HDD. The model chosen for the game was F2P, basic functionality was free, but there were certain drops (“ambers”, like locked chests in other F2P games) that you could get from dungeons or PVP challenges - armor, weapons, decorations for your house, recipes to craft them, or even an island to build on. But for additional “donate currency” you could buy more “ambers” in the hopes that unlocking them would give you the things you need faster.
During Early Alphas this “donate currency” was, for testing purposes, also free - you got some at the end of each week.
No, SkySaga wasn’t on Steam. MMOs tend to have their own sites (especially during testing phases), and SkySaga was no exception in that case. It had its own domain and forum on www.skysaga.com (it is currently replaced with a note of “putting on hold” after the whole thing).
Not really. I was reluctant to accept this but its true. Some big mmorpgs are coming with steam now like Tree of Savior, BDO, Bless Online. From this gender (close enough) I can tell Tale of Toast.
Its sad and good at same time, especially F2P ones. People are really enjoying Steam like sites/apps platforms like nuveem, humble bundle, gog, etc.
