Going Gently Into The Good Night

It's Easter weekend. The sun is shining. The trees are coming into leaf. It's the time when everything springs back into life after the long, hard winter.

Or not.

Noah's Heart is set to sunset next month.

On the 29th of April, to be precise. It launched on 28 July 2022 so that's not even two years. I really liked Noah's Heart but honestly I'm surprised it even lasted that long.

As the MassivelyOP report notes, Archosaur, the game's publisher, never really did much - or anything - to promote the title. I can't remember seeing anything about it post-launch. Certainly nothing at all in the last twelve months.

Of course, it's a cross-platform title, playable on Android and iOS as well as PC, so I was never sure whether the complete lack of promotion for the version I was playing also applied to the mobile versions. I've played quite a few such titles and it often seems that it's the mobile players who are keeping the games afloat, with PC players something of an after-thought.

Not so well. The world is ending, in case you hadn't heard.

In this case, though, it does seem to be quite the extreme version of that benign neglect. MOP point out that news of updates has "been kept largely to the client and its existing players" but when I logged in last night to have a look I couldn't see any mention of the closure in the game itself. 

Even the link in the MOP article that goes to the official announcement doesn't take you to the website's front page. It goes to the "News" section, which is only available from a small button in the header. 

As you can see from the screenshot below, taken the day after the closure was announced, the landing page still shows the game as up and running with a massive "Available Now" banner right across the middle. 

And I guess it is. For one more month.

Redbeard asked in the comments to yesterday's post for my thoughts on the closure, given my heavy coverage of the game in the past. There are fifty-nine posts here with the Noah's Heart tag, after all. You might well expect I'd be sad. Or upset. Or pissed.

I'm not any of those things, not really. Mildly disappointed, sure, but not surprised, let alone shocked. As I said, I've been expecting it for a while. And of course, I stopped playing a few months ago. It's not like I'm in the middle of anything

It's an odd thing to say about an MMORPG that lasted less than two years but I think it had a pretty good run. Or maybe I should say I had a pretty good run with Noah's Heart. While my early posts tell some adventure stories, most of the later ones focus on housing and fashion. I played close on every day for more than a year and a lot of that time was spent working on furnishing my house and making my character look good.

I did do other stuff. I liked exploring and the asynchronous PvP was fun. There were some good stories, too, at least for a while. The game does have some kind of through-line narrative. It might even be interesting if you could follow it. It's certainly quirky and amusing in places and even thrilling on occasion. Unfortunately, much of it is so badly translated as to be almost incomprehensible, especially in the later stages.

It may as well be both of us. I mean, what's the point now? It's all over.

I finished all the "Season" stories until they stopped coming but I never finished that main storyline although, even with the problems with translation, it wasn't because I lost interest. It was because it got too hard. 

As with Genshin Impact, I gave up on the main quest because I couldn't win the battles any more. Either I'm not good enough at action-combat or I'm not prepared to pay money to engage with the gacha mechanics to upgrade my characters sufficiently to compete. It's both, actually.

Luckily for me, unlike Genshin Impact, which quickly lost my interest when I couldn't win my fights, I had no trouble finding plenty to do in Noah's Heart without needing to do any combat at all. Mostly I did the extensive selection of dailies and worked on gaining affection with various Phantoms so they'd give me the recipes to craft the nifty-looking clothes they were wearing. 

The main reason I stopped playing towards the back end of last year was that I'd BFF'd all the Phantoms who had anything I wanted. I spent a good while going through all the rest of them in detail and there wasn't a single item of clothing left I could imagine my character wearing so I felt I was done.

Why? It's not like there's anywhere to run.

I could have carried on working on my house but again, I was happy enough with the way I had it set up. It didn't feel like it would be worth the effort required to upgrade it any further so once again, I felt I'd done all I wanted to.

If Archosaur had still been adding content to the game that might all have changed but they weren't. For the first six months there was a torrent of new content, much of it very entertaining. That slowed down to a trickle and eventually stopped altogether. 

Sometimes when that happens, live service games enter a kind of unnanounced maintenance mode and just carry on indefinitely. I could name a good few like that. Sometimes, though, they just close down. 

I used to dread games I played closing down. I even dreaded the end of games I once played but wasn't playing any longer. Now, it doesn't really affect me all that much. If it's a game I'm playing it's a bit annoying. If it's a game I've stopped playing, it's fine.

Everything has its time. For some online games that time seems to be measured in decades. For others it's months. And anyway, as we all are starting to realize, the end doesn't have to mean The End. Games come back, legally or illegally. They're about as hard to kill as super-heroes.

I can see the end approaching.

Noah's Heart won't come back. No-one is going to emulate it. No-one is going to buy it. It's dead, or it will be by the end of April. That's a shame. It was a good game in its way and I'm sure it was someone's favorite and they'll be distraught. Unfortunately, it was never going to be enough players' favorite game. It's a crowded marketplace and there's too much choice.

I've had my Noah's Heart screenshot folder set as my desktop background source for more than a year now. The image changes every ten minutes and there are enough screenshots in there that I don't see the same ones that often. 

Because of that, although I'd stopped playing, I've still been looking at my character every day. But even before the closure news broke, I'd been thinking it was probably about time for a change.

I have my screenshots all backed up. I have the posts I wrote. I can go back and relive the things I did in Noah's Heart any time I want. The best ones, anyway. 

That's what matters. The memories. 

Being able to play the game really isn't all that important. 

Not any more.