Chronicles of Spellborn shutting down

By Wesley Yin-Poole Published 10 August, 2010

At the end of the month.

Playdom will close massively multiplayer game The Chronicles of Spellborn at the end of the month, according to a report.

Online games company Playdom only recently acquired the publishing rights to the game from Acclaim.

MMORPG.com reports on an email sent from a Playdom representative to blog Games.com.

No explanation was offered. We're trying for comment now.

The Chronicles of Spellborn was re-developed as a free-to-play game supported by micro-transactions last year. US and UK publisher Acclaim made the announcement, but Frogster, the publisher for most of mainland Europe, was also involved.

Rob Fahey reviewed the game for Eurogamer and gave it an impressive 8/10.

Picture of Wesley.

About Wesley Yin-Poole

Wesley is Eurogamer's news editor. He likes news, interviews, and more news. He also likes Street Fighter more than anyone can get him to shut up about it.

Read more articles from Wesley by visiting the Wesley Yin-Poole archive page.

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Comments (13) Latest comment 2 years ago

Comments for this article are now closed, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • reelbigkris #1 2 years ago

    Noooooooooooooooooooooo!!... Wait, I've never heard of this before... 8/10 you say? I must be living under a virtual massive multiplayer rock.

  • Raznilof #2 2 years ago

    Find some rest TcoS, it was really fun knowing you.

  • ZuluHero #3 2 years ago

    I really liked it - It just a bit too long in development and didn't have the budget of the big boys...It had some great ideas and the world was pretty unique.

  • Kami #4 2 years ago

    It was a wild ride whilst it lasted, definitely a great game that just didn't get much publicity.

    Same old story really...

  • Chaosmos #5 2 years ago

    Some of the best visual and audio design of any online world I ever entered. Too bad they couldn't find a way to make it take off.

  • Khorrax #6 2 years ago

    It really is a shame. I didn't play it much because I was waiting for it to be relaunched. Seeing the lack of updates, I was expecting this outcome but it doesn't make the news it any less sad.

  • Rajin #7 2 years ago

    Really loved the worlds concept and some of it's art(sadly looking at the art book most things didn't make it further then the drawing table)

    The fighting system had a lot of potentional and was far better then most modern mmo's. It just had a enormous list of bugs(Shroud mainquest for exsample) But the lore that was intertwined within quest was amazing, and the dialogue was far better then world of warcraft.

    Sadly i stopped after my free 120 days at level 30 when i couldn't get the past all the bugs and endless empty promises by the developer. Besides the fact that the game was ready to be shipped at 2005-2006(anyone knows Within Temptation song Hollow?) But released at 2008/2009 because of financial and publicer issues.

  • Debbilicious #8 2 years ago

    The players of The Chronicles of Spellborn were recently informed the game will be closing at the end of this month.

    Since Acclaim sold out to Playdom months ago our community has been ignored by all administrators/moderators/support team and have been fighting keep the game going by contacting all the companies involved.

    Acclaim did not reply to any e-mails.
    Playdom replied stating they have no involvement in the game.
    Spellborn NV did not reply.
    Frogster directed us to their German site even after being told the correspondent was English and therefore unable to use a German site.

    This latest news about the game's closure was not received by Playdom, but by a Games.com writer who received an e-mail from Playdom informing them of this decision, this seems strange as they informed us they are not involved in the game.

    We love this game, and do not want it to end.

    The players have created a petition here to keep the game online - [link url=http://www.petitiononline.com/tcos/petition.html
    ]http://www.petitiononline.com/tcos/petit...[/link]

    We have appealed to Playdom to review their decision but are not hopeful of a reply.

    We think the online gaming community has a right to know about how these companies treat their players.

    thank you for reading this

    player name Debbilicious
    Michelle Dodds

  • shotgun44 #9 2 years ago

    I would have put money on her name being debbie...

  • ndbsolar #10 2 years ago

    Hopefully they see some sense and make this open source for the community like Ryzom did, instead of leaving the code in a safe somewhere where nobody can enjoy it.

  • tenofspades #11 2 years ago

    Doesn't look good for small budget mmos when an original one comes along and flounders like this. But, from what it sounds like it was buggered from its launch. The company ran out of money then and its just been a half-arsed effort by whoever took over to get people playing.

  • hobojebus #12 2 years ago

    I've never even heard of this which is probably why it failed, you need to advertise or people wont spend their money just look at singularity.

  • levitate #13 2 years ago

    Another generic MMO with a generic title bites the generic dust.