This morning, Gameforge announced that Swords of Legends Online will be shuttering, effective on June 30th. The MMO will be pulled from Gameforge's servers and sunset in the West, though it will continue in China.
In a blog post sent to MMORPG.com, Gameforge stated that the decision, which was discussed for "months" to shutter Swords of Legends Online was mutual between it and the developer in China, Wangyuan Shengtang Entertainment, citing a "fiercely competitive" MMORPG landscape.
"The MMO market is fiercely competitive, and despite our best efforts – including the release of the2.0 update, making the game free to play, as well as further content patches along the way – we’vefound that the player numbers in Swords of Legends Online simply aren’t strong enough to sustainthe game."
In anticipation of the shutdown, SOLO will be deactivating its in-game payment processing, making it so players cannot buy in-game currency during the last days of operation. Additionally, it'll be slashing the prices of its in-store items by 90% for players with currency left over in their accounts to spend before the servers ultimately come down at the end of the month.
For those hoping to migrate their accounts over to the Chinese version of SOLO, unfortunately, that won't be supported according to Gameforge. Citing significant differences between the two versions, as well as GDPR regulations, it's not possible to migrate the data.
As such, when Swords of Legends Online goes down later this month, that will be it unless another company decides to swoop in and revive the MMO in the future.
Swords of Legends Online launched in 2021 here in the West, and has struggled to gain a real footing among the myriad MMOs out there. Based on the highly popular Chinese series Gu Jian Tan Online, the MMO blended fantasy and mythological Chinese stories and locations.
It went free to play about a year after launch and debuted its 2.0 version in 2022, aimed at revitalizing the MMO's population. It had some rather cool classes, a blend of both action and tab-targeting combat that could appeal to both camps of MMO player as well. I especially loved the movement mechanics in Swords of Legends Online, though the unbearable lag did make playing the MMO especially difficult at times.
In the end, it seems Swords of Legends Online just couldn't capture the audience it was hoping for. After months of silence and just a dearth of updates to the game, SOLO's decision here makes some sense as it struggled to capture a large enough audience to make operations worth the cost in the end.
