Dragon's Prophet

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

~ the goodbye ~

Dragon's Prophet went live in Europe on 18 September 2013 and in North America five days later. It was made by Runewaker, a studio in Taiwan that had already shipped Runes of Magic, and it was free to play in the way that whole generation of imports was free to play. The selling point was in the name. Other fantasy games gave you a dragon when the story decided you had earned one. This one let you go out and catch them, hundreds of different kinds, and then keep them.

A caught dragon did real work. It fought alongside you and then carried you once the fighting stopped, and it leveled up as your character did, so the one you tamed early stayed worth flying. The combat was action-oriented rather than the tab-targeting most of its competition still used. For a free download in 2013 that was a genuinely attractive package, and the reviews mostly agreed that the package was where it stopped. IGN gave it 5.1 out of 10 and said it never managed to turn a good idea about catching dragons into a good MMORPG.

My own years in the genre had closed a decade earlier and in a different shape. Around 2003 to 2005 what was reachable from here was Ultima Online on private servers run by other Turkish players, places like Sylveria, where the economy and the rules were whatever the operator decided that month. Dragon's Prophet arrived in 2013 into a life with a job in it, and the download never happened. The audience for a free-to-play import at twenty-nine is thinner than the audience at nineteen, which is a fact about me and not a verdict on the game.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the catching ~

The taming loop is the part worth preserving. You found a dragon in the world and fought it down without finishing it, and then it was yours. What you got back was a creature with its own statistics and its own skills, which meant that two players at the same level could be carrying very different machines underneath them. There were hundreds of species scattered across the map, and the collecting instinct did a lot of work that the questing never had to.

It also explains why the game kept a small, stubborn audience long after the reviews had moved on. If the dragon you caught in your first month was still the dragon flying under you three years later, the account is not something you abandon casually. That audience is why the European servers kept their lights on for years after anybody was writing about the game.

~ the afterlife in europe ~

North America went first. Sony Online Entertainment had published it there, then was sold off and renamed Daybreak in early 2015, and the new owners closed the servers on Monday 16 November that year, twenty-six months in. The European operation outlived it by a wide margin. Infernum had launched it there and gamigo ended up holding it, and gamigo is a company that specializes in running other people's finished MMOs quietly for years.

In 2017 Runewaker and gamigo put out a sequel called Savage Hunt, launched so quietly that the usual coverage barely registered it. In 2019 the servers closed in Taiwan, the country where the thing had been built. Then on 12 May 2020 gamigo announced that the European Dragon's Prophet and Savage Hunt would both end, and on Friday 29 May 2020 they did, together, on the same afternoon.

dragonsprophet.com still answers today. The reply is 114 bytes long, one line of script that throws your browser at a registrar's parking page, and it is byte for byte the same shell four other dead companies in this graveyard are wearing.

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