아발론 온라인 (Avalon Online)

» see avalon.wemade.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Movon, a Seoul hardware and wireless company that also made games, built it and ran the first closed test itself in December 2007. Wemade signed as publisher the following March and opened the service properly on 20 March 2009, a week earlier than announced. What it was selling was not subtle, and the trade coverage made no attempt to dress it up.

The genre label is where this one gets interesting, because the label arrived late. Wemade never once called this an AOS while it was alive. Across the Wemade-era coverage from 2008 to 2011 the words used are 배틀RPG, battle RPG, then 신개념 MMORTS, then plain 온라인 RTS, and as late as September 2011 a Wemade vice-president was describing the China push in terms of the RTS market. The only piece of coverage that uses the word AOS about this game is its obituary, where GameMeca headlined it 국산 AOS 1호, the first home-grown AOS. The category it is now remembered for leading is one nobody filed it under until it was dead.

That matters for the claim itself, which is otherwise sound. Cyphers opened in June 2011, Chaos Online that November, and League of Legends reached Korea on 12 December 2011. Avalon had been in open service since March 2009, which puts it more than two years ahead of every domestic rival. It also puts it three weeks ahead of League of Legends' own closed beta and seven months ahead of Riot's North American launch.

~ the record ~

~ chaos without the box ~

Chaos was a Warcraft III custom map, and in Korea in the late 2000s it was enormous. Playing it meant owning Warcraft III, and GameMeca's December 2007 preview put the pitch in the headline: 니들이 카오스를 알어? Do you people even know Chaos? The body is blunter than any marketing would have been, saying that the RTS strategy layer forming the game's skeleton was 완벽하게 identical to Chaos. The product was Chaos without the fifty-thousand-won box.

Accusations followed it through the beta period. A 2008 review set Avalon's hero Ignis beside Chaos's Agni and noted the plagiarism talk the tests had attracted. What Avalon added was the things a custom map structurally could not have: a tutorial, shop hotkeys in place of the courier unit, a recipe guide, a clickable in-chat glossary for the jargon, and server-side matchmaking by level instead of a room list. Reviewers who liked all of that still complained you could go outside and smoke a cigarette before a match filled.

~ the house that leveled up ~

The signature system was 가문, a house. You created one once, the name could never be changed, it collected every hero on your account, and it gained levels. Those levels bought skills that raised the base statistics of the heroes underneath it. A player with an older house walked into a match measurably stronger than the person opposite, before either of them had bought an item.

Set that against the thing the genre next door was about to prove, which is that a lane game lives or dies on whether both sides start equal. The decline diagnosis in the Korean press is consistent on this point: balance complaints and cash items are named in every account of why players left, and one long player post-mortem claims Wemade held off on selling power for about a year and then sold it anyway, with the Season 2 revision rolling the items back too late to matter.

~ seven months after riot arrived ~

Wemade published the notice on 9 July 2012, two hundred and ten days after League of Legends opened in Korea. The cash shop shut on the 11th, the service ended on 6 August, and the compensation window closed a week after that, with unused purchases paid back in WeCash. The company's farewell line admitted it had caused a lot of inconvenience and had not delivered the satisfaction it had wanted to.

Two details from the archive say more about the ending than the notice does. The official press page, captured in April 2012, has as its newest item a release dated 27 October 2010, so Wemade's own newsroom for this game had been silent for eighteen months before the shutdown. And the notice board from that same capture shows routine maintenance posts drawing between forty and a hundred and eighteen views each. Wemade's notice described the game as having run 만 4년, a full four years, which is only true if you count from the 2008 closed test. The live service was three years and four months.

~ the rematch ~

A company called MI brought it back on 3 April 2014 at a near-identical address, with an extra letter in the domain, and branded it AVALON REMATCH. A Season 3 update landed that July, another on 20 August 2014, and then nothing at all. Sixteen months of weekly maintenance notices followed, which is the shape a game makes when it is being kept powered rather than developed.

The second closing notice is dated 18 December 2015, and this one does survive first-party. It ends the game at 22:00 on Monday 28 December, switches the website off a month later, and gives the reason as 내부 사정, internal circumstances. It also opens by saying the game had started in 2010 as Korea's first AOS, getting its own birth year wrong by a year and using the genre word that nobody had applied to it while Wemade was running it. Movon, meanwhile, is still trading. It builds driver-monitoring cameras and automotive radar now, and its corporate history page does not mention games at all.

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