The Successors Are Still Loading

Ashes of Creation: Eight Years and a Beta

Intrepid Studios announced Ashes of Creation in 2016, funded through a Kickstarter campaign that raised over three million dollars in thirty days. The pitch was specific and ambitious: a fantasy MMO with a node system in which player activity would dynamically reshape the world's cities, economies, and available content — a structural counter to the static, developer-curated worlds that WoW had normalised. Nearly a decade on, the game has not released.

What Intrepid has shipped is a series of alphas, each one opening limited access to a still-incomplete build. Alpha Two began in 2024, introducing mounted combat, naval systems, and extended node gameplay to a small test population. The footage is competent — sometimes genuinely impressive — but the gap between demonstrated systems and a shippable game remains wide. An open beta date has not been announced. Intrepid funds continued development through cosmetic shop sales during testing periods, a model that generates its own commentary about incentive alignment.

The honest status: Ashes of Creation is a serious project, not vaporware, but it has been a serious project for a long time. Any honest comparison to WoW's development cycle — roughly four years from founding to launch in 2004 — invites uncomfortable arithmetic.

Throne and Liberty: Launched, but Changed

Where Ashes remains in progress, Throne and Liberty has actually shipped — which created its own problems. The game was developed by NCSoft in South Korea, where it launched in December 2023 to a reasonable domestic reception. Amazon Games, which published the Western release, launched it globally in October 2024.

The reception landed as mixed, and the reasons are structural rather than cosmetic. Throne and Liberty arrived in the West with a free-to-play monetisation model that players and reviewers found aggressive: a battle pass, a cosmetic shop, and — more damagingly — a progression-adjacent currency system perceived as providing meaningful time-to-power advantages. The combat, the class flexibility, and the large-scale guild PvP received genuine praise. The business layer over those systems received something close to the opposite.

This is the Western publishing problem applied cleanly. NCSoft built a game calibrated for a South Korean audience, where F2P monetisation norms differ substantially from those of the Western playerbase Amazon was selling to. Amazon had already navigated a version of this tension with Lost Ark, another Korean MMO it published in 2022, which followed a similar arc: large launch numbers, monetisation friction, sustained but diminished population. Throne and Liberty traced almost the same curve.

Player counts on Steam, where the game launched with concurrent numbers in the low hundreds of thousands, declined sharply across the months following release — a pattern consistent with subscriber churn following high-visibility launches. Amazon and NCSoft announced updates and events in response, as publishers reliably do, but the core design-monetisation tension is not resolved by event schedules.

What the Genre Is Waiting For

Both games illuminate the same structural reality. The MMO genre's ceiling is still set by games made in the early 2000s — WoW most visibly, but also EverQuest before it — because building a credible alternative requires either enormous capital over an extended timeline, or shortcuts that compromise the product. Ashes of Creation is attempting the first path. Throne and Liberty, filtered through Amazon's publishing apparatus, effectively demonstrated the second.

The genre also has a successful recent counterexample: Final Fantasy XIV's reconstruction under Naoki Yoshida produced a game that now competes with WoW for the same subscriber attention. But that recovery happened from inside an existing, established IP, not from a standing start.

For players who have been waiting since WoW's 2015 subscriber floor for a viable alternative, 2024 offered a launched-but-flawed contender and a still-loading one. Neither outcome is surprising. Building an MMO at scale remains one of the most capital-intensive product problems in games, and the history of studios that tried and closed is considerably longer than the list of those that lasted.