Image: Platinum Games
All good things must come to an end. Babylon’s Fall is not one of those good things, and yet it, too, is ending. In a statement, the Babylon’s Fall team announced that it would shut down the hack and slash’s servers on February 27th, 2023, not even a full 12 months after the game’s abysmal launch in March of this year.
The game’s quiet, whimper-like ending is both predictable and unexpected. In a tweet made shortly after the game’s release date, the Babylon’s Fall team addressed players’ concerns that its poor initial reception would lead to early cancellation. The tweet assured players that work on the game would continue and that the team had “no plans to reduce the scale of development on Babylon’s Fall.”
Today, we revealed new information about version 1.1.0, the NieR:Automata collaboration event and the future of BABYLON’S FALL development.
Read the full update here: https://t.co/DhGbngEdlK pic.twitter.com/VUmCn2FrLn
— BABYLON’S FALL (@BabylonsFall_EN) March 18, 2022
Reviews of the game called out Babylon’s Fall’s repetitive and unsatisfying combat that made the game feel like a relic of the PS3 era. It is currently the second-worst reviewed PS5 game (the ignominy of worst goes to eFootball 2022), and if there were Razzies given out for video games, Babylon’s Fall would sweep every category from visuals to voice acting.
It’s sad when a game fails its purpose. It’s even sadder in the era of Metacritic rags to riches stories like No Man’s Sky and Square Enix’s own Final Fantasy XIV. There’s evidence the team at Platinum Games was working to right the ship, as shown in its earlier tweet, stating, “We will continue to provide new content for the game and make improvements based on player feedback, striving to keep existing players playing and to attract newcomers.”
Unfortunately, it seems like existing players just didn’t stick around, with concurrent player counts on PC, as measured by SteamDB, falling to one single, solitary player back in May before stabilizing to its normal, king’s ransom-sized player count of 20–50. Oof.
The Babylon’s Fall team did say it would try to stuff the game with as many activities as possible before the lights go out, publishing a schedule of events leading up to the final days. Maybe then the servers will fill up again like stores do whenever the “Going Out of Business” sale signs go up. Babylon is set to Fall on February 27th.