Ghost in the Shell: First Assault Online

» see firstassaultonline.nexon.net as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Nexon put Ghost in the Shell into Steam Early Access on 14 December 2015 as a free-to-play first-person shooter, developed by Neople, the Korean studio behind Dungeon Fighter Online. The source material was the Stand Alone Complex television continuity rather than the 1995 film, so you got Section 9 characters and cyberbrain hacking as a mechanic you could actually use on another player.

It left Early Access on 28 July 2016. The shooter underneath was competent and conventional, a class-based team game where most of the licensed material sat in the character models and the mission framing, and that is roughly how the coverage received it. People liked the shooting and said there was not enough around it.

On 9 August 2017 Nexon announced the Japanese service would end on 29 November. Twelve days later, on 21 August, Nexon and Neople announced that North America, South America, Europe and Oceania would close on 6 December 2017 at 10am Pacific. The team's statement was unusually direct about it: "we decided that continued development wasn't going to help the game become what we all hoped it could become."

By the time First Assault existed I had stopped installing free-to-play shooters, and the window it occupied, late 2015 into 2017, is a stretch of gaming I followed through patch notes rather than through playing. The property is the part I know. Ghost in the Shell reached people here as the 1995 film long before any of this, and Stand Alone Complex is a different thing with a different audience, so a game drawing specifically on the television continuity was never going to come looking for me.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

Early Access in December 2015 and a full release in July 2016 gave it about seventeen months of real operation. Reviews through that period were mixed in a consistent way: praise for the gunplay and the art direction, complaints about thin content and a grind sitting between you and the unlocks.

Neople's other game is the context that makes the bet look reasonable. Dungeon Fighter Online is one of the highest-grossing video games ever made, almost entirely in China and Korea, and a studio with that behind it taking a licensed shooter at a Western audience was not an obviously bad idea on paper.

~ the renewal ~

In July 2017 the game received an update called Renewal. It restricted which weapons each character could carry, converting a loadout system players had already spent time and money inside into a set of fixed classes. The players who were left did not accept it, concurrent numbers dropped, and the first shutdown announcement arrived about four weeks later.

Players also pointed at the license. The Ghost in the Shell rights had to be renewed periodically and renewals are not cheap, so a shooter with falling revenue carrying a licensing bill becomes a short conversation inside a publisher. That part is inference from the forums rather than anything Nexon said out loud, and Nexon's own statement stayed firmly on the product.

~ what got buried with it ~

A Change.org petition asked Nexon to sell the game to somebody who would keep it running, which is what happens when a shutdown notice lands on people who are still playing. It went nowhere, which is the normal outcome for that kind of petition.

The client itself survives. A copy of the Neople game client sits on the Internet Archive, so the files are preserved and unplayable at the same time, because the servers were the game.

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