Nexon Has Canceled Peria Chronicles

Yes, you read the title correctly. After almost 8 years of waiting, and over $8 million dollars invested into the game.. Nexon have officially confirmed that the Anime MMO we’ve all been waiting for.. is canceled. For good.
As in, there is no hope for the game. Whatsoever.
This news comes in the unusual wake of Nexon’s cancelation of their attendance at G-Star 2019.
G-Star being the largest gaming convention in South Korea – one which Nexon is usually one of, if not the largest gaming company to attend.

According to reports, the cancellation of the game is due to various testing phases and feedback supplied where Nexon believed that they “could not satisfy the user” – and instead of investing further money into the game.. they opted to just quit.
Peria Chronicles has been one of the most actively anticipated Anime MMOs, and more directly, MMORPGs for the last several years.
There have been websites devoted to spreading any and all news pertaining to the release of the game, communities established to discuss, share and ultimately wait for the game’s launch and.. Well I honestly feel bad for them now.

Nexon did hold beta tests in South Korea this year and people were generally disappointed in what they’d experienced.
When Peria Chronicles was announced, it was announced as a fast-paced action MMO set in a massive sandbox world with the freedom to create dungeons, towns and entire worlds from the ground up.
In reality, what we actually ended up with in the beta was a tab-target MMO and no creation tools at all – completely against what players were expecting.
The combat ended up being slow, clunky and relied too much on your minions to do the majority of work for you.
While we knew that minions would have some form of importance in combat nobody knew that they would be the primary form of using skills.
But there’s no point in really going too much into detail with what disappointed players – the fact is that the beta itself underwhelmed both players, and the team that was developing it, Neople.

This cancellation is larger than Peria Chronicles, though. It affects the entire Nexon corporation as a whole.
Earlier this month Nexon announced the closure of both the North American Nexon M mobile game subsidiary and Nexon’s Division Partners Office.
I was flown out to the Nexon M office in California earlier this year to participate in a pre-launch event for their Alliance x Empire mobile MMO and there were a lot of good people there.
I had the opportunity to meet quite a few of the team members working out of the office and knowing that Nexon has thrown them under the bus with almost no warning whatsoever is very alarming.
All these developers – with years of experience both developing games and working under Nexon are going to be left without employment.
The reasoning? Nexon is merging all of their mobile, PC and console teams into one single unit – cutting costs and also the team size by quite a sizable margin.
Then, last week Nexon announced that they would be dropping several other projects, along with the teams associated with them.
An example of this is Project G – an Unreal Engine 4 powered game in development with a team of over 80 employees. Which are now “dropped.”
Currently operating games are also seeing employees “dropped” but they don’t see the decrease in overall staff members as an issue as the games will continue running like normal.

The entire Nexon situation is very concerning. Both for North American subsidiaries and South Korean teams working within Nexon itself.

While I’m disappointed – very, very disappointed in Nexon for canceling the game after such a long period of time, stringing us along with little bits of information here and there.. I’m more disappointed in how they’re treating their own employees.
I would be terrified in their position – my job – which I’ve been enjoying for years – just.. up in the air. At the whim of a developer that can’t get their shit together. Excuse the language.

Peria Chronicles looked like it would be an amazing game. It was supposed to offer us a lot: Open-world exploration, user-created environments and content that would provide endless entertainment for players.
A unique new form of combat that utilized fast-paced action and an interesting summon system, unrivaled character creation and customization for an Anime MMO.
The ability to craft our very own world from the ground up.
But I guess, ultimately, this was just too ambitious of a task to undertake. Or at the very least, in the state that Nexon is in, the teams working on it were just too large of an investment to keep going.
Which makes sense, really. It’s sad but from a financial standpoint, I understand canceling the game. 8 years and $8 million dollars were invested into the game and nobody liked the result.
Thankfully we still have a couple Anime-related projects to look forward to: Blue Protocol, Project BBQ.. wait, nevermind. Project BBQ is developed by Neople, the same people working on Peria Chronicles – a Nexon subsidiary.
So Project BBQ is done by Nexon.. which are currently canceling “in-production MMOs” left right and center. Okay, so maybe Project BBQ is looking a little.. uncertain right now as well.
But at least we have Blue Protocol to look forward to.. granted we get it outside of Japan. Man, things are looking grim!