Closers is one of 2 South Korean MMOs I actually brought attention to before they were licensed for distribution within North America and Europe.
I did “let’s play” style videos documenting my and my little sister, Wiggy’s slow progress throughout not only the Korean version, but also private servers for the game, before En Masse finally licensed it and allowed for me to officially play the game translated legally into English.
And after years away, I’ve finally come back to see if the game is worth investing time into in 2022.

Hey, my name is Stix and welcome back to another episode of “Is it worth playing?” A series where we analyze every facet of an MMORPG and come up with as objective of an opinion as we can on whether the title is worth playing in 2022.
Today, we’re taking a look at Closers.

Now I last played Closers back in.. 2018. Oh, wow, it’s been almost 4 years. I guess that explains a few things.
Back then, there were tens of thousands of active players, towns were filled with clones of your character, local chat was spammed with gold sellers, you had to actually work towards obtaining gear. Ahhh, what a time to be alive.
Upon my return, I created a brand new character – and there are a lot of characters to choose from now.
Each character has their own faction affiliation, however, it really doesn’t serve any purpose in my opinion.
Character creation is non-existent, thus my comment about all the clones running around the towns. There is customization, however. There are outfits, hairstyles.
You gotta make money somehow, and cosmetic items are one of the most popular methods with which to drain every last cent out of your cultured playerbase.
Each character has their own unique story, and their own unique starting area. Although admittedly some of those zones are shared.

So there I was, jumping into the game for the first time in 4 years, not knowing what anything did or that I actually had an entire set of gear that allowed me to 1-shot every single monster, including bosses, for the hours I spent streaming this.
Yes, don’t be like me. Make sure to click all the notifications when starting a new game. More often than not, you’ll be gifted with gear so powerful, it’ll actually make you quit due to a lack of meaningful progression.
And that’s actually what kind of happened here. I spent over 3 hours doing nothing but clicking my abilities once each, and massacring entire hordes of monsters. There was absolutely no challenge present whatsoever.
You can see the drained look I have on my face. The sheer utter disappointment I had having learned that the fun, action combat I had once loved so much was now utterly pointless until much later through the game.

And I mean, don’t get me wrong. I understand the bulk of the game takes place at endgame. But Closers is the type of game that requires you re-run the same content in a vicious, repetitious cycle that is entirely unfulfilling, and just.. not at all fun.
Closers is a hub-MMO. Meaning that there are towns, cities, central “hubs” that players can co-exist within. You can see players, you can interact with them, and you can group up with them so you don’t have to push through content alone.
Progression takes the form of running dungeons. There’s no world to explore. You run instances. These instances consist of a couple different rooms with the same monster type, complete with a boss encounter towards the end.
These instances take a few minutes to complete each. Now imagine completing dungeons for hours where you do nothing but hold your right arrow key to move horizontally, and cycle through a few AoEs bound to your WASD keys.
If the dungeons were varied, that wouldn’t be so bad. But here? They send you through the same dungeons repeatedly, across several difficulty levels, where the only difference is how long the dungeons take because they increase the bosses HP’ exponentially, drawing out the encounters.
So in essence, you’re re-running the same dungeons repetitiously, engaging the same single monster type for hours at a time, all by yourself. For a new player, this isn’t the experience you want, and is likely not the experience to grip you. To retain your attention long enough to get to the better content.

Thankfully, the combat is a saving grace. To a degree. Since you spend roughly 95% of your time in combat, and the other 5% skipping all the text the game is so cluttered with, it’s a good thing it’s not only highly fluid, but also incredibly flashy.
Interestingly, you move your character with your arrow keys, as opposed to your WASD keys or your left mouse button. This is something I don’t really see done in the MMO scene, and I understand why. It’s clunky moving your right hand between arrow keys and your mouse.
There are plenty of abilities you can learn, giving you a little in terms of individual class identity, and you’re capable of leveling every ability up. Honestly, I never have any idea what I’m doing so I always end up YOLOing it and hoping for the best. It hasn’t let me down yet.

Graphically, Closers utilizes an Anime aesthetic. Character models look stunning – they always have. They honestly possess some of the best looking characters you’ll find in an Anime MMO – better than PSO2, better than Aura Kingdom, better than SoulWorker.
These characters are incredibly well endow-er, developed- oh god, there’s no way of saying that without it coming off as… Ahem. Unfortunately, the rest of the game is pretty basic.
When you have characters that look as good as these characters do, and you have combat that is as stunning as is present within this game, and then everything else just looks so plain – ordinary – bland, you’re left with this sense that they really didn’t care about the world itself.
And again, I’m well aware the world isn’t the focal point of the game, but it wouldn’t have hurt them to put a little more effort into it – both inside and outside of the instanced dungeons.

Unfortunately, outside of the intro to the game I felt as though the narrative was pretty empty. “You’re an agent, go do this, kill that, talk to them.” It’s about what you’d expect out of a side-quest in an MMO – not the main scenario.
I attempted to read some of it but I felt it was just so unimportant and pointless that I ultimately ended up skipping it. And I’m a massive fan of story in my games. If there’s no story, typically I skip the game. I need to feel a sense of connection – to become enthralled in what’s going on so I remain interested and playing.
That’s something that Final Fantasy XIV has done for years that no other MMO has.

In terms of content, there’s – well, a plethora of dungeons to run. The entire game is just one large dungeon-adventure. There are raids, although I’ve never actually participated in one. I don’t believe the population was ever large enough to support raids of this scale.
There’s PvP, although I never participated in it because… well I didn’t know it ever existed. I had to Google this to verify it did, and apparently it does. But given there are 70 people online right now.. I’m gonna speculate it isn’t popular enough to warrant even investigating.

At the end of the day, Closers has changed quite significantly from what it once was. And not in a good way.
This used to be filled with players, and while it’s impossible for any game to truly weather the test of time, it’s sad to see everywhere I went completely empty.
I found it awkward being thrust directly into the game at almost level 70, with no understanding of where I was, what my abilities did, and what gear I had. I wasn’t instructed to equip my gear – I had to manually redeem it from the mail. Something I honestly forget to check when starting new games, because I never anticipate anything being there.
Seriously, who’s gonna be mailing me? Having to grind the same monsters within the same instances over and over was something I wouldn’t wish upon any new player. It’s unenjoyable. Unintuitive. Uninspired. Unbelievably boring.
There isn’t a single thing, outside of the waifu-bait that I would say truly stands out about Closers anymore. When it was released 6 years ago? Sure, maybe. But there is no question in my mind as to why this game is dead. And yes, with 100 people logged in.. this game is officially dead.
I don’t think any amount of work could save this from being worth it when there are just better alternatives out there like Dungeon Fighter Online, Elsword, MapleStory, PSO2 or SoulWorker.

Is this the greatest MMO? No. Not even close to being a contender for that title.

Combat – 5/10 Honestly, for an Anime MMO this game has some pretty damn fun action combat.
Graphics – 4/10 Graphically, the character models were incredible to look at but everything else was flat and uninspired.
Narrative – 1/10 The narrative.. started off strong, and just.. disappeared. Even though I’m sure there’ll be the odd person in the comments section that argues that point.
World – 2/10 The world is.. small, and empty. There’s no reason for it. You might as well just queue for content from a small overview of zones.
Content – 5/10 It has about what every MMO has. Dungeons, raids, PvP. A lot of dungeons, though. Almost to a ridiculous level. I just wish so many of them weren’t copy/pasted.
Overall – 17/50 Honestly, I ended up rating this a little higher than I had originally thought I would. But that is mostly due to the character models and the combat.

Admittedly, Closers is a very basic hub-MMO. It doesn’t really provide anything worth playing – there are alternatives that offer everything this game does, but better. Better combat. Better graphics. Better worlds.
I loved this game. This was one of the games that really put our channel on the map, and it’s a shame to see it end up where it is now. But every good thing eventually comes to an end, and with Closers’ population as low as it is, it’s only a matter of time before it sunsets as well.
I guess this might genuinely be my last time ever playing it.

For those of you that weren’t aware, En Masse, the North American publisher for Closers Online shut down a few months ago. En Masse Entertainment published TERA and Closers Online over here in North America. While TERA’s North American publishing rights ultimately went to Gameforge who now publish the game in both North America and Europe, Closers Online went back to the official developer for the game, Naddic Games.

People were unsure what that really meant for the future of the game. Naddic promised they’d continue to support the development of Closers while self-hosting and self-publishing it globally, but have remained quiet in terms of future content for the most part.

That is until earlier this week when they revealed they were introducing a surplus of new content for players to consume: a new dungeon and raid for endgame players focusing on the Ocean King Asmodeus.
Accompanying the new dungeon and raid are several different events, with Naddic confirming they’re already working on various different patches planned for release over the course of 2021. So if you thought the game was dead.. you’d be wrong. If you’ve been avoiding it, now might be a good opportunity to jump back in and see how it’s doing! It can’t hurt.

This has been an interesting couple weeks. We’ve had some new MMOs announced, we’ve had some entire publisher studios shut down, and gotten some announcements we’ve been actively waiting on for.. years now.
So you guys should be excited! We’ve got quite a bit to talk about in this week’s Weekly Byte of MMORPG News video.

miHoYo, the developers behind the upcoming Genshin Impact game have announced that they’re going to be launching on September 28th – globally, on the PC, PS4 and mobile devices.
Yes, the PS4 release was expected to be delayed due to the beta test period being extended well beyond the PC and mobile test periods, but apparently they pushed through and will now have a simultaneous release across all platforms.
I’ve talked about Genshin Impact quite extensively over the course of the last year, and I’m happy to say that it’s finally almost time for everyone to get in-game and play.
Together, with other players if you want to – Mrs Stix and I – or at least Mrs Stix is definitely going to be playing as I think the multiplayer experience is utter garbage, but disregarding the multiplayer aspect the game is truly an incredible game.. well that and the Gacha system is terrible.
PS4 pre-registration is also available right now for players that want to register for the PS4 launch – or at least it was when I wrote this up.

I was directed to an article on MMOCulture this morning where I learned that Nexon are in the process of developing a brand new PC MMORPG that they’re calling a “AAA-class masterpiece game that can satisfy users in all aspects such as content and visuals.”
I know, guys, Nexon has disappointed us with every single release in the history of their studio, but maybe they can change. Maybe they- okay, I can’t continue that sentence with a straight face.
While the project has a currently unnamed title, they did go on to announce what they’re creating: A medieval fantasy MMORPG based on a completely new IP with a seamless, open world that features no loading screens, has guild content, will be cross-platform between PC and mobile devices like Genshin Impact or Tower of Fantasy and – if I read correctly.. might be an isometric MMO like Diablo or Path of Exile?
They’re also developing another project, “Project HP” but little is known about that thus far other than it’ll be another medieval game with magic.

For those of you waiting on any news pertaining to Project TL.. here you go, finally! NCSoft confirmed that the game is going to be undergoing a test phase from the 31st of August through the 4th of September, with an upcoming Closed Beta scheduled for later this year.
I had reported on this earlier this year, where I mentioned that both Project TL and Project BBQ were both going into some form of testing this year, but this confirms things – at least for Project TL.
NCSoft also just registered the “TL” and “TL: Origin” trademarks as well, which leads us to believe it’s close to releasing – with them promising it’ll launch by 2021!
They went on to elaborate that they have every intention of launching globally, with “Project TL being developed for the global audience with technologies and visuals they are familiar with,” further going on to state that this is supposed to be the “start of a new universe.”

En Masse Entertainment, the publisher behind both TERA and Closers announced last week that they were actually shutting down.
Meaning all of their staff members – people that have worked on their games for almost a decade now, or over a decade, actually, since I believe they started 11 years ago, are now jobless – a terrible situation for any person.
While it’s always sad to see a publisher shut down, or MMOs go offline, it’s worth noting that Naddic Games, the developers behind Closers have several updates for the game planned, including continuing to publish the game in the regions it’s currently available in.
We’ve heard nothing pertaining to TERA’s fate currently though, but it’s a safe bet to assume Gameforge will likely publish it since they recently attained South East Asian publishing rights for the game on top of their European publishing rights.

Amazon Game Studios, you know, the very same people behind Crucible and New World, have announced that they entered into a publishing agreement with Smilegate RPG, the developers of Lost Ark.
This sparked a wave of interest, as they went on to confirm that “Amazon Games is committed to bringing our customers the most engaging game experiences, both through our own internal development teams and from the very best external development studios around the world.”
This is confirmation that they are open to working with other developers around the world to bring foreign MMOs to the global market. MMOs that would have otherwise been completely ignored, self-published, or published by companies like Gameforge or MY.GAMES – something none of us want.
They went on to note that Smilegate has a “strong track record of creating big games that players love, built to offer years of enjoyment.”
Currently, Smilgate has developed and publishes 3 PC games within South Korea: Soul Worker, Tales Runner and Lost Ark. Since Soul Worker is published by Gameforge, and Tales Runner is in no way a AAA budget PC title, it’s all but confirmed we’ll be getting Lost Ark.
Next year, actually, since they confirmed the game will be launching “some time during 2021,” with specific details being revealed at “a later date.”

ArenaNet made 2 large announcements concerning Guild Wars 2 earlier this week: The first is that the game is going to receive a much needed boost in population when it launches on to Steam in November 2020 – yup, players will finally be able to connect the game to their steam accounts.
This is something that players have wanted for a long time. But one issue with that reveal is that you’re going to be required to make a brand new account as unlike Star Wars The Old Republic and PSO2, ArenaNet will not be supporting account migration options.
What this means is that if you have an account on ArenaNet, you’re stuck there. You can’t connect your account to Steam, instead, you’re required to make a brand new account via the Steam client – something I know has caused a lot of upset in the community as it just seems ridiculous.
Second, they announced that their next expansion, which is taking us back to Cantha, is actually titled “End of Dragons,” although not much was really shown or detailed during the reveal, including an expected release date.

So New World is having a Preview event held until September 4th, allowing players to log in if they’re pre-ordered the game at some point in the past and test the game completely.
I actually just did a video on this yesterday, where I went over my experience within the game and while I was definitely disappointed – I feel like Amazon have plenty of time to fix issues both Mrs Stix and I had with the game.
This definitely has a target audience that will enjoy the game, as it’s not in any way a bad game, but that audience is definitely not the MMORPG niche as it felt like a survival crafter more than anything else.
If you’re interested, I urge you to head on over and watch my New World video to decide for yourself.

Last week Intrepid Studios, the team behind the upcoming Ashes of Creation MMORPG announced that they were breaking off their partnership with MY.GAMES, who was in charge of publishing the game within Europe.
Intrepid instead have opted to open their own publishing studio within Europe to handle publishing within the region, which while I’m glad to see – as MY.GAMES are terrible, look at Revelation Online and Skyforge, I don’t know how well this will turn out considering this is a smaller indie dev studio we’re talking about here.
Ashes of Creation is still a very, very long way off releasing, as is the way of the indie MMO scene.

This is coming earlier than I’d anticipated. People were assuming “end of December” for the Shadowlands release, but apparently Blizzard just announced yesterday – or, a couple days ago as of this going live, that Shadowlands would be going live on October 27th, 2020.
This means that the pre-patch is going to be hitting the live servers very soon, like it always does ahead of a new expansion.
It’s been a while since we’ve gotten new content, so it’s nice to see that it’s only a short wait between now and then, and both Mrs Stix and I are incredibly excited, so much so that not only will we be starting brand new characters once the pre-patch hits, but we’ll also be leveling those characters on stream. And you guys are more than welcome to join us in-stream and in our new guild as well! We play on Stormrage, FYI.

By now you’re all well aware that Bless Unleashed is also releasing on PS4 under Bandai Namco – which if it’s anything like the Xbox release handled by Bamco won’t really be bad, but also that Neowiz is self-publishing the PC version of the game on Steam.
And that version probably will be, as Bamco actually distanced themselves from the PC release claiming they have “nothing to do with it.” But I digress.
The PC iteration of Bless Unleashed is going into Closed Beta testing next month, and there’s a pre-registration form for players that are interested in testing the game out on PC.
The PC Beta will run for 12 hours on September 26th, and there won’t be any restrictions preventing players from across the glove from participating. Yup – this and likely the full release of the game will feature a full global release.

I did a video covering this a couple days ago, but apparently Jandisoft, the developer behind the upcoming Grim-dark MMORPG Mad World have stated that after being mostly silent throughout the year, they still have an expected release date of 2020.
The game was initially expected to release back in 2018 but suffered quite a few setbacks that ultimately resulted in the game being delayed as long as it has been. There have been a few small updates made over the course of the year, but otherwise I find it interesting that they still expect to release in the next couple months.

Who would’ve thought that Grand Fantasia would continue to receive updates? Because I got some good news for players still active within the game – Gamigo has rolled out a large update that allows players to tackle a brand new dungeon with new bosses, new items and more.
I wasn’t aware that the game was still – well, can we say “actively updated?” Because let’s be honest, yes this is an update, but it’s in no way being “actively updated,” right?

Yes, you read that correctly, En Masse Entertainment, after 11 years in the industry, is completely shutting down, much to the dismay of the general player population that play their games, leaving them wondering what exactly will happen to their favorite MMOs. En Masse took to the Facebook pages for both TERA and Closers, reposting the same message on both.

However, on the official Closers forums, a staff member, SingleBear decided to make a forum post titled “Closers Service Will Continue With Naddic,” Naddic Games being the developers behind the MMO. Apparently, Closers will feature 2 additional updates scheduled for August 31st and September 28th, after which the game will change hands over to Naddic themselves who will be self-publishing the game henceforth. This is unexpected and surprising, but I’m curious to see where it ultimately ends up going. TERA fans were not as lucky though as.. we weren’t given anything definitive. Will KRAFTON, the developers of TERA and the upcoming Elyon MMORPG take over self-publishing of the game? That’s a possibility, but considering their new partnership with Kakao Games that allows Kakao to publish Elyon within North America I highly doubt it. What seems most likely is the fact that Gameforge, who acquired the SEA publishing rights earlier this year will finally obtain full global rights to the game, publishing within SEA, Europe and North America. Regardless of where TERA ends up, you know we’ll be here to cover it!

Alternate Title: Code Closers Online
Developer: Naddic Games
Publisher: En Masse Entertainment
Type: Action MMORPG
Model: Free-to-play
Platform: PC
PvP: MOBA
PvE: Dungeons, Instances

Enmasse’s Closers Online servers get Harpy today, the high-kicking, double jumping, acrobatic card trick enthusiast.

To celebrate the rogue’s release, Enmasse are holding a “leveling sprint” event.

All new Harpy characters that make it to level 20 before 23:59 (PDT) on Tuesday May 29th will get the following cool stuff, including an adorable permanent head accessory (pictured) award by June 1st:

• Pirate Washing Machine ×5
• Elite Status (1-Day)
• 500 EMP
• Midnight Phase Wings (AAA Tuned, 30-Day)
• Permanent Shark Accessory

As well as the levelling event, on their stream on Thursday 31st, Enmasse will be giving away 10 Closers Deluxe Collector’s Packs (containing the exclusive Nightmare Costume set, a pair of Midnight Phase Wings, 30 days of elite status, 2000 EMP, Gardening and Maid Service vouchers, and 5 plum sodas) to random winners picked from the people who completed the leveling sprint by getting their Harpy to 20 in time.

What do you think? Will you be trying out the new Harpy class in Closers? If you don’t play, does this new class make you want to give the game a try? Do you not care? Leave a comment below or join in the discussion on The MMOByte Discord Server.

Closers Online, The hyped and anticipated Anime MMORPG has officially launched as of February 6th! However it’s launch isn’t the only thing new within this Action MMORPG, in fact they added a whole new update to accompany this launch. What did this update introduce? To start off, you will now be able to enter the Dimensional Ops Center which is a place where you can earn and achieve one of the more powerful gears sets found within the game of Closers Online. That, however isn’t the only thing they added, they also Added the first raid, where you’ll fight Tiamat! A deadly boss. Then there is of course the new added Enhancement System, this system allows you to add slots into your gear. After that there is Pet Awakening, where your chosen pets can level up and improve all the way till level 50. Said awakened pets will have better stats, and more special effects.

Besides this, there are also new outfits and a Premium Starter Pack for the character Nata. This is but a small amount of the new content added, if you’d like to read more about what was released during this update, you can here!

En Masse Entertainment finally released their new free-to-play anime-style action MMO Closers Online into Open Beta, meaning players are given access to get into the game and play, fully translated into English for the very first time.

With their transition into a free to play game, En Masse released a large update, adding a new character, Levia to the games roster of characters. Additionally, they went on to further add player housing, and new Christmas events for players to partake in during the holidays.

The game is still available to purchase however, for $14.99 for anyone that still wants to support En Masse and get the premium items associated with the purchase.

Otherwise, you can find the game directly through Steam.

Closers Online is a free to play Action MMORPG originally published by Nexon in Korea. In Closers, you take on the role of a “Closer”, a special agent employed by an organization called UNION, gifted with special powers due to a freak dimensional event taking place, gifting a select few people with psychokinetic powers. Using these powers, “Closers” fight monsters that continue to seep through the dimensional gates that gave Closers their power in an attempt to stop the world from being overrun.