IL: Ignis Lore (아이엘)

» see il.gpotato.kr as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Project IL was the third thing NFlavor built. The Korean studio had already shipped Rappelz and Street Gears, and the game press of the period described IL as a MORPG that borrowed from console role-playing games and from trading card games at the same time, with skills distributed across collectible creatures instead of sitting on the player character. Closed beta opened on 27 March 2009 and commercial service began in May 2010, on gPotato, the portal Gala Lab ran at home in Korea.

Eighteen months later it was gone. A notice posted to il.gpotato.kr on 6 October 2011 used the word 중단, suspension, and told players in so many words that the game was not ending. On 4 November 2011 the servers went off and the character database was deleted with them.

Three months after that the same company opened the same world on the same portal under a different name. Eternal Blade went into open beta at the end of 2011 and into official service on gPotato Korea on 16 February 2012. Gala Lab presented it as a full renewal rather than a restart, and the Korean coverage took the point: the game had thrown away its old name along with everything else.

~ the record ~

~ the word they used ~

The gap between the 6 October notice and the 4 November shutdown is where this grave actually lives. A suspension implies the thing comes back, and in a narrow technical sense it did. What did not come back was the account anyone had been playing on. Deleting the database on the way out means that eighteen months of a player's time stopped existing on the same day the servers did.

Operators reach for the softer word for understandable reasons. It keeps a refund conversation from starting and it leaves room to change the plan later. It also means the announcement is not a reliable record of what happened, which is why the date worth filing here is the 4 November one.

Eternal Blade ran a little over two years and ended on 30 June 2014. That second date is the one most English-language shutdown lists carry, which is exactly how the first one gets lost. The earlier game is the one whose save data was erased.

il.gpotato.kr does not answer today. The parent portal gpotato.kr still serves a page.

~ a note from outside korea ~

IL never left Korea in any form I can find. NFlavor's earlier game Rappelz did travel, and gPotato's international arm is how a lot of players outside Korea met the publisher at all, but this one stayed on the domestic portal behind a Korean account requirement. That is a hard wall from Turkey and it was a hard wall from most places.

So everything here comes from Korean game press and from the operator's own notice board, which is a different kind of knowledge than having logged in. The one thing I can say with confidence from this distance is that a shutdown notice promising a return, four weeks before a database wipe, is worth reading twice.

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