9Dragons Relaunches on GamersFirst – Woot!

GamersFirst, the free to play MMO publisher best known for War Rock, Knight Online and Sword 2 recently relaunched 9Dragons. 9Dragons is a 3D martial arts themed MMORPG that the now defunct Acclaim Games used to publish. Playdom – the social games company behind Market Street, Kogaumu, and a handful of other facebook games actually bought playdom in early 2010. The purchase was clearly a mistake, as Playdom shut down the Acclaim website along with ALL of the games Acclaim used to publish (Including 9Dragons). Luckily, GamersFirst saw this as an oppurtunity to expand and bought the North American license to run 9Dragons from Indy21 (The independent Korean game developer who made 9Dragons). I’m actually not too surprised that 9Dragons was brought back to life as it was easily the most popular MMORPG that Acclaim had. I personally wasn’t a big fan of the game, as the graphics were a bit lacking and the interface felt a bit clumsy. For martial arts themed games I’d much rather play Twelve Sky 2 or even World of Kung Fu than 9Dragons. I’m not saying 9Dragons is bad, because it isn’t. The game has a fairly sizable playerbase, so there’s clearly something to the game.

I think 9Dragons is successful because it’s one of the most PvP heavy martial arts MMORPGs out. The game has 9 “clans” and two factions. The factions are at war with each other and the game also features open ended PvP where players can pretty much PK each other anywhere in the game world. Dragon Raja, Conquer Online and Legend of Edda are some of the only other MMORPGs with open world PvP. Plus, the faction battles in 9Dragons should keep things interesting. They aren’t as ridiculous as the 1000 vs 1000 faction battles of Aika Online, but the PvP in 9Dragons beats the PvP in more modern games like Runes of Magic and Heroes of Three Kingdoms. I do suspect that some of the newer PvP MMORPGs like King of Kings 3 may be superior, but only time will tell whether those games will be successful or not. 9Dragons has already proven itself to be a sustainable game over the last 3+ years. The game launched in North America and Europe back in early 2007 in case you guys didn’t know.

My only concern about 9Dragons is that it might not be able to “keep up” with new MMORPGs like The Lord of the Rings Online and EverQuest 2 which both recently became free to play games. Sony Online Entertainment also announced that they will be making Pirates of the Burning Sea free to play too. These are just the pay to play MMORPGs going free to play. There are a ton of triple-a free to play MMORPGs which launched this year including Vindictus from Nexon, Uncharted Waters Online from Netmarble and Forsaken World from Perfect World Entertainment may eventually put 9Dragons out of business. It’s difficult for older games to compete with newer ones with vastly superior graphics. Some people pretend that graphics aren’t important, but the fact is graphics do matter. People tend to like games with better graphics. It’s just the way it is.

So will 9Dragons be a success on GamersFirst or no? Will it be able to compete against newer MMORPGs? I personally think it can’t, but only time will tell.