ArchLord

» see archlord.webzen.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Every server had exactly one ArchLord. You got the title by fighting for it and you held it for four weeks. While you held it you had a castle, and you could change the weather over everybody else's heads. There was a dragon mount that came with the job and nobody else could ride it. Then the four weeks ran out and somebody came to take it off you. In a genre that mostly measured status in gear, having one seat at the top of an entire shard was a genuinely good design, and it is the only thing about ArchLord that anyone still repeats.

NHN built it in South Korea and launched it there in March 2005. Codemasters Online Gaming took the West and put it out on 3 October 2006 in North America and three days later in Europe, boxed, with a subscription. The press did not like it. The reviews landed on it as competent and derivative, which for a 2006 MMO arriving after World of Warcraft was a death sentence with a delay on it. In August 2007 it went free to play alongside the first of its episodic expansions, Season of Siege, and a second, Spirits Awakening, followed in August 2008.

In October 2006 I was a university student in Ankara with TTNet broadband, which is precisely the customer Codemasters was aiming its European boxes at. I never played it. By the time it was free I had stopped reading about it, and the Turkish forums I was on were arguing about hardware rather than about which Korean MMO had just arrived in English.

~ the chronicle ~

~ two publishers ~

Codemasters' license came up for renewal in 2009 and the talks with NHN went nowhere. The Western servers went off on the morning of Friday 2 October 2009, UK time, and Webzen brought them back on the 3rd with the character data carried across. From that point Webzen ran the game globally instead of in the countries Codemasters had not held, and shipped the seventh expansion, Heaven & Hell, to mark it.

A handover like that is usually where a game quietly starts dying, and this one had another four years in it. Webzen also tried a spin-off: in November 2011 it announced Archlord X with NHN, a PvP-focused game set between the original and the planned sequel. It reached closed beta at the end of that month and was never released.

~ the promise ~

Webzen announced the closure on 6 December 2013. Client downloads and the cash shop went on the 11th, replaced by a 400% experience and drop event that ran until the end, and the servers were switched off on 1 January 2014. The notice is worth quoting because of what it promises:

"Please rest assured that this is merely a short break for those who inhabited the world of Archlord. We will be back in the near future with Archlord 2 to provide you further adventures!"

Archlord 2 arrived in 2014, built by somebody other than the studio that made the first one. Webzen announced its closure in September 2015 and switched it off on 24 November 2015, having run it for about sixteen months.

~ the address ~

archlord.webzen.com still answers in 2026. It does not serve an error and it does not serve a memorial. It drops you on webzen.com, in front of whatever the publisher is selling this year, which is the standard fate of a dead game whose publisher is still trading: the router catches the corpse's path and hands you the living catalog instead.

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