Gundam Evolution

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

~ the obit ~

Gundam is four decades of television and model kits, and almost none of it came through Turkish channels while I was young enough to have watched. I know the silhouette. I could not tell you which war any of it is about.

So this one is written from the outside twice over, once for the franchise and once for the genre. Bandai Namco Online revealed the game in July 2021 by opening applications for a closed beta, and put it on Windows on 21 September 2022. Consoles followed on 30 November. It was free, six players against six. Every character was a mobile suit lifted out of the back catalog with an ability kit bolted onto it.

The modes were the hero-shooter standard, with one called Destruction built around a weapon that one team was arming while the other tried to stop it. Metacritic settled at 72 across nine reviews. Digital Trends called it a genuine Overwatch 2 contender and meant that as praise, which is about the highest ceiling available to a game arriving second into a genre where the incumbent is also free.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the roster ~

The casting is the part that worked. A hero shooter needs characters you can read at distance and abilities you can name out loud, and Gundam has been manufacturing exactly that since 1979. The mobile suits turned up with forty years of design work already finished behind them and an audience that could identify half of them from a shoulder.

What the franchise could not supply was a reason to leave the game you already have installed. Hero shooters are close to winner-takes-most. People keep one, maybe two. Everything else gets a weekend.

~ the actual end ~

On 19 July 2023, ten months after the PC launch, executive producer Kazuya Maruyama posted the notice. The wording was flat and it did not blame anybody. The team had wanted to make an authentic Gundam shooter that worked globally, and it had concluded it was no longer possible to provide a service that satisfied its players.

The schedule attached to that notice is the part worth reading. Sales of EVO Coins stopped well before the end, and coins already bought stayed usable until the last day. There were no refunds on anything anybody had already paid for. To soften it, the team promised more chances to earn the free currency through login bonuses and events, so the units nobody could buy any more could still be unlocked in the four months the game had left.

Service ended at five in the afternoon Pacific time on 29 November 2023. Fourteen months on PC. The console version, which arrived in November 2022, managed twelve.

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