Order & Chaos 2: Redemption

» see orderandchaos2.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

I played Ultima Online on Turkish private servers as a student and never once considered doing that on a telephone. Order & Chaos 2: Redemption was built for the people who did consider it. Gameloft's Beijing studio shipped it on 17 September 2015 as the sequel to 2011's Order & Chaos Online, on iOS and Android with Windows and Windows Phone builds alongside, and the pitch was a World of Warcraft you carried in a pocket.

For the platform it was a serious build. Five races and five classes, with a character creator that let you change hair and facial detail. The camera switched between first and third person and took pinch to zoom, and movement ran off a virtual stick in the bottom left corner with combat mapped to on-screen buttons. There were two possible starting points, Mariner's Landing and Cliffside, and which one you picked changed how the story opened. The European press reviewed it properly, with Jeuxvideo.com and Multiplayer.it writing it up and Pocket Gamer running a multi-part review diary instead of a single verdict.

It ran for seven years, which for a mobile MMORPG is a long career. Gameloft posted notice in late January 2023, roughly four weeks before the end, and on 16 February 2023 both Order & Chaos games closed on every platform simultaneously. The site at orderandchaos2.com now bounces to the Gameloft homepage.

~ the dossier ~

~ the windows phone build ~

The detail worth keeping is that this game shipped for Windows Phone and kept a Windows build for years. Essentially no other MMORPG did. Microsoft's phone platform was already losing when the game launched and was fully dead by 2019, four years before Gameloft closed the servers, which left the Windows version in the strange position of outliving its own operating system. There is a change.org petition asking Gameloft to update the Windows release, and it was still collecting signatures after the game had been switched off.

~ both at once ~

Closing a sequel and its predecessor on the same date says the decision was made about a product line rather than about two games. Order & Chaos Online had been running since 27 April 2011, with Android in 2012 and Windows Phone in July 2013, and it had the bigger history. The sequel had the better client. Neither of those mattered to the one line item they shared.

Gameloft is a Paris company whose output reached Turkey mostly through carrier portals and preinstalled demos back in the Java phone years, and by 2015 that distribution had moved into the app stores along with everyone else's. A phone MMO asking for a raid group was never going to find me at 31. It found enough other people to stay up for seven years, and those people now hold a client with nothing to connect to.

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