Dawngate

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

~ the eulogy ~

In 2014 I was thirty and about a decade past the last time I cared what happened on a competitive map. My multiplayer years were the Turkish Ultima Online private server window in the early 2000s, back when the game you played depended on which server somebody in your city was hosting. The MOBA boom came after that door closed for me.

So Dawngate is a grave I write from the outside, which suits it, because Dawngate was a game most people only ever saw from the outside. It never released. Electronic Arts opened a studio called Waystone Games and put it on a multiplayer battle arena in 2013, when League of Legends was printing money and every publisher wanted the same thing.

Closed beta started on 24 May 2013 and the game stayed in beta for its entire life. Open beta arrived on 19 May 2014. Six months after that, EA canceled it.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it tried ~

The interesting thing about Dawngate is that it was not a clone. The genre in 2013 was full of games that copied League of Legends closely and hoped a different art style would carry them. Waystone went the other way and tried to fix the parts of the formula that everyone privately complained about.

Characters were called shapers rather than champions. The jungle held spirit wells that generated resources passively for whoever held the ground, which meant map control paid out continuously instead of only at objective timers. Loadouts gave each shaper role-specific bonuses, so one character could be built as a support in one match and something else in the next. The design press liked it. The people in the beta liked it a great deal, which is why the cancellation produced petitions rather than shrugs.

~ ninety days ~

EA announced the end on 4 November 2014. The wording was that the beta was not shaping up as hoped, which in publisher language means the retention numbers did not survive contact with a spreadsheet. Development stopped that day and the servers were given ninety more, running until early February 2015.

The refunds were the part worth recording. EA returned real money on every transaction made across the eighteen months of beta, which very few publishers had done and which is not what anybody expects from that company. It reads less like generosity than like a legal department closing a file cleanly on a product that had never officially launched. Either way the players got their money back, and then the game went off and stayed off.

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