Infinite Crisis

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

~ the eulogy ~

Warner Bros. had the DC catalog and a studio that knew how to run persistent worlds, and in 2013 it pointed both at the genre everyone in publishing wanted a piece of. Infinite Crisis was Turbine's five-on-five arena game, built on the Infinite Crisis storyline where the DC multiverse collapses into itself, which is a convenient excuse to put four different Batmen on the same roster. Open beta started on 14 March 2014.

The full release came on 26 March 2015, on Steam, into a market where Riot had last publicly counted 67 million monthly League of Legends players and Dota 2 owned most of the remaining oxygen. Sixty-eight days later, on 2 June, Warner Bros announced that development had stopped immediately. The servers stayed up for another ten weeks so people could spend what they had, and went off on 14 August. Purchasers of the Starter and Elite packs were refunded.

By 2015 the Turkish internet cafes I had stopped going to a decade earlier were running League of Legends on every machine, and Riot had put a dedicated Turkish server in the country in 2012. A DC-branded competitor arriving on Steam in English three years after that had nowhere to land here, and roughly nowhere to land anywhere.

~ the dossier ~

~ the maps fought back ~

The design idea worth remembering is that Infinite Crisis made the terrain a participant. Its maps carried catastrophic events that fired mid-match and changed the board underneath both teams, and Coast City had a Doomsday Device that activated and spawned a neutral guardian nobody owned. In a genre where the map is normally a fixed grid you memorize once and never think about again, this was a genuine idea.

The roster did the same trick with the source material. Instead of forty different characters it ran forty different versions of about a dozen, so Gaslight Batman could stand in a lane opposite Nightmare Superman. For a comics reader this was the whole appeal. For anyone else the character select screen looked like it had a rendering fault.

~ one hundred and forty one days ~

The number is the story. Turbine had been in beta for over a year, which means the launch was not a soft opening that failed to catch on, it was the end of a long runway that Warner Bros had already been watching. The MCV report at the time was plain about the reason: not enough of the player base was paying to make the game sustainable.

2014 and 2015 were the years the MOBA gold rush finished. Electronic Arts closed Dawngate in the same stretch, Blizzard's entry survived on the strength of the characters and nothing else, and Epic's Paragon would repeat the whole arc a couple of years later with a bigger budget. Every one of these games was competent. None of them had a reason for anyone to leave the game they already had four hundred hours in.

~ what turbine did next ~

Turbine had been Warner Bros property since 2010 and Infinite Crisis was the studio's attempt to matter outside the MMO business it had built its name on. It did not work, and the company shrank fast afterward. In 2016 Warner Bros cut most of the studio and let The Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons & Dragons Online go to a new outfit called Standing Stone Games. Turbine kept the name for a while as a mobile shop and then stopped being used at all.

The game itself is unusually gone. No private server ever came up and no community relaunch was ever attempted, because Warner holds the DC license and the client was worth nothing without the servers behind it. What survives is a fan wiki and a Steam page for a product you cannot buy.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »