Recent Events: Combat Arms America and Europe Merge; Cyphers Shuts Down in China and Taiwan
So popping back to life at last there’s certainly been a heck of a lot which I’ve missed out on posting about. Two of those things are Combat Arms going transatlantic and the Chinese service of Cyphers being shut down.
As of June 30 2015, Combat Arms Europe and Combat Arms America have merged into a single service managed primarily by Nexon Europe. Both Nexon Europe and Nexon America accounts can now be used to log into the game. As it’s the pre-merge European client that is being used for this unified service, previous Combat Arms America players may notice some minor differences in game content due to prior localization differences. Servers for three regions (Europe, North America, Global) are available for play. The united service seeks to bring together Combat Arms’ 7 million European users and 6 million North American users so that Nexon can “provide the best possible service to the dedicated Combat Arms community” and will be available for play in English, German, Italian, Polish and Turkish. Nexon America appears to be keeping Combat Arms present on its game portal. The English website can be accessed at http://combatarms.nexon.net/.
This merge comes as both Nexon America and Nexon Europe are running the beta testing phases of brand new first-person shooter (FPS) games. Nexon America’s Splash Damage-developed Dirty Bomb is presently in its open beta phase (http://dirtybomb.nexon.net/) while Nexon Europe prepares the next beta test for Combat Arms: Line of Sight (http://calineofsight.nexoneu.com/en/).
Meanwhile, both the Chinese and Taiwanese services of 3D multiplayer online battle area (MOBA) game Cyphers Online have been shut down. The contract period between Nexon and respective publishers Tiancity and Gamania expired and were not renewed. The title from Nexon-owned studio Neople, the developers of Dungeon Fighter Online, strove to appeal to a similar base as the global phenomenon League of Legends but has clearly failed to connect as well as anticipated. The Korean service of the game enjoyed success for a period but its community has waned in recent times.
Posted on July 17, 2015, in Combat Arms, Combat Arms: Line of Sight, Cyphers. Bookmark the permalink. 10 Comments.
The msupdate Blog 
Smart of Nexon America. Since CA is sorta dying they can just pass the baton to Nexon Europe.
And Dirty Bomb seems to be doing good, I’ve heard quite a bit of praise from it!
CA LoS on the other hand.. I never knew it existed. I don’t think sticking “Combat Arms” on the name is smart because it feels really old at this point. Combat Arms had it’s era of excellence but that’s gone now.
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I remember when I really wanted to play Cyphers. Really a shame that the game has been dying. Neither can I say that I’m surprised though, Neople simply can not complete with LoL or Dota 2 and, with its loss against SMITE (the only other 3rd person MobA afaik), will have a hard time recovering if it ever does at all.
I actually do agree with you on the addition of “Combat Arms” in the Line of Sight name. I understand where it’s coming from but how I see it is that it’s better at this point for distance to be placed between this new game and the original Combat Arms, rather than them sharing names. On the other hand, Combat Arms is still a respected, albeit aged, brand especially in Europe.
To be honest I’m VERY shocked that Cyphers didn’t take off globally. Yes it’s a RTS MOBA but it wasn’t a copy of League of Legends or any traditional MOBA game. It set itself apart and proved itself to be unique. Why exactly it didn’t do as well as we would have hoped, I’m not entirely sure. There are actually many, many MOBAs out there. They’re countless, some more successful than others of course, with LoL standing head and shoulders above the rest.
I don’t know much myself but I Cyphers was TOO different. Unfortunately, statistics show that people actually don’t want something new.
In China, (where Cyphers closed), DotA 2 released recently and its numbers are insane, pushing the game to 1mil+ concurrent users globally. It beat out Cyphers by barely changing the core Moba style! No doubt it shifted attention away from Cyphers further pushing its shutdown.
You’re probably right on that. The biggest difference between Cyphers and the traditional MOBA is that while most such games are played from a high angle perspective while Cyphers was played from a kind of behind the back, over the shoulder view which is typically seen in TPSs and RPGs. I also believe but am not completely sure that Cyphers employed a non-target combat system similar to games such as Dragon Nest rather than the point-and-click mechanism which exists in LoL and almost all other high profile MOBAs. This is of course much easier to implement in Cyphers’ graphical perspective than the high angle perspective but I would think it would be a huge asset to the game. I guess we’ll never know exactly what caused the game to not live up to expectations.
Reminds me of Dawngate. It was a MOBA that did things a bit differently (not as drastic as Cyphers tho), and it got shut down by EA before it even got out of Beta with the excuse “it aint making us enough money”. NO SHIT IT AIN’T EVEN OUT OF BETA!
/rant
But yeah, both had something awesome but got shut down. Never got a change to play Cyphers or actually bothered to look up gameplay, gonna do that now.
One a side note, any of ya playing KMS2 by any chance?
Oh trust me, Dawngate is more personal to me than you know Robbin. I’m certain much of the reason for its cancellation is EA coming pretty close to abandoning its microtransaction based F2P games (Battlefield Play 4 Free, Battlefield Heroes, FIFA World and Need For Speed World have also bitten the dust recently). In a similar move to what was done with Dawngate, EA announced in April the cessation of development of the titles and their shutdown 90 days in advance. Yeah you should take a look at what Cyphers was like and tell me your impression of it.
I’m not playing MS2. I have gotten the chance to try it a couple times but don’t actively play myself.
By the way guys, go check out Soul Master gameplay. MMOHuts’ first look gameplay vid on Youtube is good. It’s an RTS game with strong RPG elements and I’m trying to see how people feel about the concept. There are other games out there similar to it but it tries to do things a bit differently. It’s actually “been around” for a very long time now but kept slipping in and out of development and got thrown around publishers quite a lot while it’s been offline. It went through the beta stage in America way back in 2010 under GamesCampus but that shut down quickly and there’s no recent word on an English service (although Gamigo still has up the site for the European service which they ‘have/previously had a very long time ago’ (http://soulmaster.gamigo.com/) but that never even made it to beta and the site has been open and unchanged for literally at least 5 years with no news whatsoever). Nexon just relaunched the game in Korea late last year.
Dawngate looks pretty. Only looked at it for a couple minutes though, not enough to see the changes as I don’t have loads of time right now :p. Shame it closed!
I did watch the whole Soul Master video and idk if it chages up the formula too much xD. You just have other minions fighting for you while you hit stuff like you would in a normal dungeon crawler. I also found a pvp video and, while you can command sets of minions to go wherever you please, I still feel like the minions are just in the background while the other players fight. ^^” I’d like you to prove me wrong though. I enjoy the artstyle and it looks pretty cool for a typical dungeon crawler anyways.
I dont have a Korea acc so I won’t be playing MapleStory 2. Would’ve liked to try it out but I found that I can’t handle games with language barriers. If it ever comes out in NA i’ll definitely take it for a spin!
I just wanted to know you thought about Soul Master from just seeing some gameplay. I didn’t particularly love the game when I tried it out way back in the day and actually installed it after a few days. I haven’t actually seen any gameplay from the game now to see if it’s changed at all.
Don’t approve my previous comment, was on the wrong account.
OMG new post from Zach!!! Wow I didn’t expect CA to merge its servers. Wasn’t it being developed by Nexon America instead of just published? If so I find it odd to switch develoment over into the hands of Europe. They would either have to move the dev team to Europe, get a European dev team or work remotely.
Never really played CA but what are the differences you mentioned between the NA and EU client?
Hey Robbo. No it wasn’t being developed in-house by Nexon America.
Minor differences. Content was streamlined so the same content always passed through both services (apart from the occasional exclusive piece). Things like different names for maps and equipment may exist though.