Exteel

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

~ the last words ~

2007 through 2010 is the stretch where I had TTNet broadband at home and time to spend on it. None of that time went into a mech.

Exteel was NCsoft's swing at a free-to-play third-person shooter for a Western audience, and it launched in Korea and North America on the same day, 4 December 2007. You played a mercenary piloting a customizable machine called a Mechanaught, on a planet with a backstory that was posted to a games site in 2008 and read by approximately nobody.

It ran on a modified Unreal Engine 2 at a point when everyone else had moved to 3. Inon Zur wrote the music, which is a strange credit to find on a game this obscure. The modes were the ones you would guess, plus a wave-defense mode called Last Stand where up to eight players held their positions against computer-controlled drones.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

The interesting part of Exteel is not the shooting. It is the store. The download was free, and then everything you bolted onto your mech was bought either with credits you earned or with NCcoins you bought with money. Almost none of it was actually yours.

Parts came with a durability counter or a time limit. Durability drained while you played, and drained faster on the expensive parts, so the better your gear the faster it dissolved under you. The time-limited items ran on a flat seven or thirty days from the moment of purchase, counting down whether or not you ever logged in again. You could pay for a weapon and come back a month later to an empty rack. Repair points were the only thing in the game that did not expire.

~ the fall ~

In December 2009 NCsoft terminated the license for Exteel in southeast Asia. The operator there, IAM-Interactive, took down its forum and its site and left behind a notice telling players to use up their remaining coins within thirty days. The servers were already offline when the notice went up, so there was nothing left to spend them on.

That is the detail worth keeping from all of this. A currency with a use-by date, printed after the thing it bought had already stopped existing.

~ what got buried with it ~

Everything else went off on 1 September 2010. The reasons recorded for it are a revenue line that never stabilized and a parent company in no mood to carry anything: two months earlier an Austin district court had awarded Richard Garriott twenty-eight million dollars against NCsoft over the way it handled his departure in 2008. An appeals court upheld that verdict in 2011.

Garriott's own NCsoft game, Tabula Rasa, had been shut down in February 2009. Auto Assault went in 2007. Exteel made three of the company's online games closed inside four years, and the only one of the three that had been free to play.

Mech games are a niche that people keep wanting to be larger than it is. Exteel is decent evidence that renting somebody a mech by the day is not how you make it larger.

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