Master X Master

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

~ the eulogy ~

MOBAs arrived after my hours ran out. What I actually played in Turkish internet cafes between 2002 and 2005 was the LAN shooter, Counter-Strike down a row of machines with everyone yelling at everyone, and by the time the genre that replaced it owned those rooms I was working for a living. MXM shipped in 2017 and wanted an evening I no longer had spare.

NCsoft had been building it for a long time. Studio MXM ran a closed beta in Korea in October 2014 and an open one in May 2015, and the Western release did not arrive until 21 June 2017, by which point League of Legends was eight years old and Dota 2 was four. Into that the game brought one genuine idea: you took two masters into a match instead of one and swapped between them in the middle of a fight, so a bad matchup was something you could tag out of rather than lose to.

There was more underneath it than the genre usually bothered with. Co-op missions ran alongside the competitive modes, with boss fights for groups of up to four, which meant the game had something to offer a person who did not want to be shouted at by strangers. Titan mode let teams summon creatures to walk into the enemy base for them. Metacritic settled at 76 and the reviews mostly praised the swap mechanic and the presence of an actual PvE game inside a MOBA.

~ the dossier ~

~ the swap ~

The roster was an NCsoft crossover, which in 2017 meant the company's own history was standing on the character select screen. Rytlock came out of Guild Wars 2. Jinsoyun came out of Blade & Soul. Lineage and WildStar contributed faces of their own. Borrowing from WildStar in particular reads differently now, because WildStar itself shut down on 28 November 2018, ten months after the game that had been using it as marketing material.

~ the funny part ~

NCsoft announced the end on 16 November 2017, five months into the Western release, and gave everyone 500,000 X-Coin so that the whole game unlocked for free. Every mode stayed open at all times. Anything bought between 30 August and the announcement was refunded in full. For the last ten weeks MXM was the generous, complete, unmonetized version of itself that it had never been allowed to be while it was trying to survive.

The published reason has two halves and the second one is the honest half. The public line was that the game had offered new ideas but failed to connect with players. The other line, in the same notice, was that it came down to a matter of business and that several options had been explored without any of them being sustainable. mxm.ncsoft.com does not resolve today.

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