Action MMORPG lost thousands of players, had to switch to Free2Play

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Two years after its release in China, Sword of Legends Online was released on Steam in July 2021. At the time, it was being praised for not using Pay2Win, but lost thousands of players in a month. MeinMMO shows you how the game is doing after a year.

The most important things at a glance:

  • In 2019, SOLO was released in China and became available to the West in July 2021
  • Unusual for an Asian MMORPG: it dispensed with Pay2Win
  • Despite a promising start, the big hype didn’t materialize and thousands of players stopped playing in the first month
  • The switch to Free2Play took place in March 2022
  • Now comes a patch with raid and summer event
  • Another raid is said to be on the way
  • SOLO celebrates its birthday with new content

    Demons and Bikinis: Patch 2.1 was a major update back in June, including new story quests, new regions and a new PVP season. This included “Realm of Light”, an open-world zone with expansive grassy areas and floating rock formations.

    Now there is more new content with patch 2.1.4. According to the patch notes, the “Realm of Halucinations” raid is said to be related to the “Realm of Light” and to be found in the area outside of Tianlu City.

    A thousand years ago, a horde of demons is said to have been defeated there, and a mighty demon has now appeared in their place.

    In groups of 10 to 20 players, you can face different bosses and get equipment at level 225, among other things. At first there is only one normal level of difficulty, an easy mode is to be added on Sunday, July 17, 2022. (via GameForge)

    For the right summer feeling, there is also a beach party that will take place on Dragon Turtle Beach from July 14th to August 4th. Four different Daily Quests let you collect tokens, which you can then exchange for prizes like a snazzy new bikini.

    With enough fragments, you could even own the Fat Duck pet by the end of the event. (via GameForge)

    The party mood is clouded by numbers

    Where does SOLO stand now? In addition to Steam, SOLO can also be played via Epic and its own Gameforge launcher. Player numbers can only be viewed from Steam, but these give little hope. Less than 1000 players were online at the same time in the last 24 hours.

    If you look at the numbers over the course of the last year, you can see a steady decline in the number of players. While there was a small boost with the move to a Free2Play model in March, these players were unlikely to be retained over the long term.

    Swords of Legends Online Steam player count (via Steamcharts)

    There is also little going on in the SOLO subreddit, overall there seems to be little talk about the game on Reddit. When looking at the post of a user who wanted to know why others had stopped with SOLO, the central problems are revealed.

    The poor English language version is mentioned again and again, but SOLO is also plagued by performance problems. One user even reports a frame rate of just 20-30. Others are bothered by the user interface and think the game looks outdated. (via reddit)

    An MMORPG cannot survive without players. It remains to be seen whether the new content will be enough to attract more players and revive the ailing SOLO.

    Actually, Swords of Legends had good prerequisites to become a successful MMORPG. However, he did not manage to keep players permanently. However, SOLO is not alone in this, because almost all new MMORPGs 2021 have failed and we players are partly to blame.

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