Rusty Hearts

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

~ the obit ~

Four countries got Rusty Hearts and each one buried it on its own schedule. Stairway Games in South Korea built the thing: a cel-shaded action dungeon crawler where you picked one of a small cast, learned a combo, and beat your way down a corridor of monsters in a gothic European town called Bramunez. The face of it was Frantz, a half-vampire who fought with a sword and dark magic, alongside Angela, a witch who threw elements around. Anime styling over twitch combat, with arena PvP on the side.

It opened in Korea on 11 May 2011 under Windysoft, after an open beta that April. Perfect World Entertainment took North America and launched on 20 September 2011, on Steam as well as its own client, after two closed beta phases that summer. Sega published it in Japan from 13 December 2012. Xunlei took China from 8 August 2013. For about eight months in 2013 all four were live at the same time, which was as big as this game ever got.

Licensing one Korean game out to four regional publishers was standard practice and it has a specific consequence at the end. There is no single shutdown announcement to point at, because nobody was in a position to make one.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ four flags, four burials ~

Japan closed first, on 27 March 2014, fifteen months after launching. North America followed that summer: Perfect World announced on 29 July 2014 that the game would end on 15 September, which gave players seven weeks. China lasted until 12 January 2015 before Xunlei confirmed it was going.

Korea, the original, outlived all three. Windysoft posted the closure notice on 4 January 2016, ran the servers until 5 February, and took the homepage down on the 12th. Delisted Games records the January notice as the date the Korean version "was not confirmed to be defunct until", which is the one figure most English-language accounts carry. The Korean record has the actual end a month later, and that is the date on this stone.

~ the letter Perfect World sent ~

The North American goodbye is the only one written for an audience rather than filed as a notice, and it reads like a company that knew the game deserved better than its numbers. "After three wonderful years, Rusty Hearts is officially coming to an end on September 15, 2014," it opens, then thanks people for "perfecting combos, endless Christmas in Bramunez, and the constant beatdowns".

The practical part was more generous than the genre standard. Downloads stopped the same day and no further currency could be bought, but anyone active in the previous thirty days got six months of purchased Zen credited back into their Arc wallet, transferable into any other Perfect World title. Codes for Neverwinter and two other titles in the catalog went out by email. The company was not refunding money so much as moving the customer, which is what a publisher with a catalog can do and a single-game studio cannot.

~ what came after ~

Private servers started appearing almost immediately, which happens to games whose combat people miss rather than games whose worlds people miss. The most complete of them, Rusty Hearts: Revolution, opened its beta on 8 February 2020 and advertises every feature present in the final client, four years to the week after Korea switched off.

This one passed me entirely. In 2011 I was twenty seven and the Korean free-to-play action MMO was a genre I knew existed the way you know a shelf in a shop you do not go to. Turkey had its own relationship with Korean imports through internet cafes, but by the early 2010s I had been out of that room for years and the games I heard about were the ones friends were already playing. Nobody I knew was playing this one.

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