Skyforge

» see sf.my.games as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

i missed skyforge. by 2015 i had already stopped opening new mmos. by then i was 31, working a real job in ankara, and the time math on yet another grind from level zero in a free-to-play game never closed for me. the only mmo memory i kept warm into my thirties was ultima online private servers from the 2003 window, which is a different kind of game from a 2015 themepark.

allods team in moscow built the game with some help from obsidian entertainment, the studio behind fallout new vegas. obsidian later clarified that their involvement was lighter than the launch marketing suggested. the game shipped on pc on 16 july 2015, then to ps4 on 11 april 2017, with xbox one and switch following in 2017 and 2021. publisher was my.com, which became my.games. metacritic landed at 52. rock paper shotgun called it one of the more pleasant free-to-play mmos they had played that year. nintendo life gave the switch port a three out of ten.

the pitch was that you started as a fragile immortal on the planet aelion, fought off alien invasions, and climbed a seventeen-class atlas. once you reached godhood there was a second progression layer where your power came from the size of your follower base. it ran for a decade without ever becoming a wow killer, and without ever becoming a complete embarrassment either. that middle tier is its own kind of mmo career.

~ the record ~

~ what it tried to be ~

two ideas held the game together. the seventeen-class atlas let you switch between paladin, gunner, cryomancer, alchemist and a dozen others on the same character, swapping mid-quest rather than rerolling. the divine layer kicked in after the long climb to godhood, where you spent followers and prestige to push past the regular ceiling.

the mix-and-match identity was the part the returning players liked. you could play half a dozen classes a week without leaving your main. the godhood layer was the part everyone screenshotted when they finally got there, and the part that capped how interesting the post-launch grind could stay.

~ the postmortem ~

sometime in 2024 my.games handed the publishing rights to innova / 4game in russia. the handoff did not go well. by spring 2025 it was clear that innova could not get the launcher and account migration to work, and the writing was on the wall for the western servers. innova posted the official shutdown notice on 31 july 2025 with payments stopping on 1 august. the pc servers went dark at the announced cutoff on 3 september 2025, and the playstation and xbox versions followed on 29 october.

the final patch handed out in-game currency to anyone still logged in, which is the polite version of the goodbye envelope. player accounts became inaccessible once the servers went down and the social media channels were disabled the same week. the 4game launcher and steam accounts stayed usable for other titles, which is the cleanest part of any mmo shutdown when the publisher has other games to keep open.

~ the long tail ~

skyforge sat in the middle tier of free-to-play mmos for a full decade without breaking out. that is its own kind of feat. the russian mmo studio scene built around allods team kept producing through the same window, and skyforge was the brand they shipped to the west most consistently. the cultural memory now is the seventeen-class atlas and the godhood layer, with the publisher handoff that consumed the western launch as the late footnote.

@}-->--

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

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »