I’m not saying anything controversial here when I say that the ArcheAge franchise has devolved into a mess these last few years. Here in the west, the game was kicked around between publishers, mangled with an overmonetized classic version, and then killed off, which people might have accepted had ArcheAge 2 actually made any of its original timelines (and hadn’t been heavily scaled back in its ArcheAge Chronicles era) and Jake Song hadn’t been pushed out of his company. Now, the western ArcheAge playerbase is occupying itself nursing grudges and hanging out in rogue servers instead of boosting XL Games in the run up to its next big thing.
But not the Chinese playerbase, which is apparently now getting a reboot of the OG game.
That news first broke over on Chinese games website 17173; apparently, the game is called ArcheAge Returns, it’s being developed XL Games and Chuangtian Interactive Entertainment, and PC signups opened this week. It’ll use the OG Chinese map and basically all of the gameplay but enhanced with new graphics and fixes for the “unresolved issues” in game design and server load – in other words, it’s a reboot rather than just a way to turn the old servers back on without any touch-ups.
Of course, it’s hard to get excited about a game we can’t play, and there’s not even a hint that XL Games is securing a global partner to do the same thing here. Enjoy those rogue servers.
