Face of Mankind

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

~ the obituary ~

i spent my mmo years on ultima online private servers, not in a science-fiction shooter. face of mankind sat in the same broad neighborhood as the games i loved, persistent worlds run by their own players, but it was a different genre and it never reached the turkish shards i played on.

it was made by a german studio called duplex systems, published at first by ojom, and it went live on march 27, 2006 after a long beta. the pitch was unusual for its time. instead of grinding monsters, you joined one of several factions in a future solar system and the world's politics were left almost entirely to the players. people ran departments and staged coups against each other. it read more like a persistent political simulation wearing an fps.

it was always small. the publisher ojom dropped support in late 2007, the developer kept it alive, and it passed to a company called nexeon technologies that relaunched it free-to-play in 2008. a kickstarter in 2013 funded a revival subtitled fall of the dominion. but the engine was old, the population was thin, and in late august and early september 2015 both the original and the revival went dark within days of each other.

the ugly epilogue came after. the revival that fans had paid to build simply vanished in 2016, taking more than sixty thousand dollars in backer money with it and leaving no working game behind. a world that had run for nearly a decade on the trust of a small, committed community ended by breaking exactly that trust.

~ the case file ~

~ what it got right ~

face of mankind understood something most mmos of its era did not, that the most interesting content in a persistent world is other people with real power over each other. handing law and government to players produced drama no scripted quest could. games that came much later, built entirely around player-run economies and politics, were chasing the same thing face of mankind was doing in 2006 on almost no budget.

~ the day it died ~

the shutdown itself was quiet, two closures a few days apart in the late summer of 2015, the kind of ending a niche mmo usually gets. what people remember instead is the crowdfunded revival that took their money and disappeared the next year. for a game whose whole appeal was trusting other players, that was a bitter way to be remembered.

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