Hello, it's me fujiwaranomokou2. It's been almost 3 years since I wrote about HeroWarz and recently, with the first installment celebrating its 10th anniversary this September, but before that, let's talk about the two games in the series, which were previously known as Gunfight Mansion and Nightmare Breaker, and are now known as Building & Fighter (BnF for short) and Night Walker (NW for short).
But first, let's focus on Nightmare Breaker, which was released as a open beta in China back in September 2021 and launched in Korea as Night Walker last January, and will be shutting down this August.
Despite the fact that HeroWarz, which launched in 2014, was first well-received by both the western and eastern playerbase, A.Storm (the original developers of the game)'s failed attempts to expand overseas and operational failures along with the publishers' incompetence, resulted in its KR server being shutdown in 2017, which caused them to create a new game using the original game's IP in order to fulfill the contract they had with the original game's Chinese publisher NetEase before releasing it in September 2021 as Nightmare Breaker.
Later, during G-STAR 2022, it was announced that Nightmare Breaker will be developed by the same makers behind Hero Wars and published by Nexon in Korea under the name of Night Walker.
Prior to this, according to them, Night Walker was revealed to be a remake of HeroWarz whereas Gunfight Mansion, now known as Building and Fighter, which was recently shutdown this June, was a mobile game sequel to the game which used location-based AR, which is why they all share the same characters.
Not to mention, according to the first episode of its Director Interview, NW is set in a parallel universe, sharing the same universe and characters as HeroWarz, and unlike its predecessor, it focuses on the playable characters, which originally started with 6 and expanded as the game evolved over time, and the scale of the story was simplified accordingly.
Unfortunately, Night Walker had multiple problems, including outdated graphics and UI for a game that came out in early 2023, as well as incomprehensible stories, poorly designed skill and farming structures, poorly implemented content and the current direction of the game.
Eventually, it was announced 3 weeks ago that Night Walker will be shutting down on August 29th, which would be a month from now, and a year and 7 months after its release.
Since then, they're currently offering refunds between June 27th post-maintenance and September 27th, so if you have time and spent money on this game after the game's release in January 2023, you're eligible for a refund.
Anyways, let's focus on Gunfight Mansion (GM), which entered alpha testing in July 2022, under the name of Building & Fighter (BnF).
Unlike HeroWarz and Night Walker, Building & Fighter was a mobile game sequel, which launched last October and was shutdown a mere 8 months after its release, and allowed players to compete against each other for real world buildings and landmarks using GPS technology and link their actual location to capture Korean buildings and landmarks.
Additionally, players could also capture the areas they've visited and fight other players who owned the buildings or landmarks to steal or defend them, while using the resources gained from capturing buildings to hire 50 different characters with different personalities and abilities as well as their minions.
According to an interview, BnF's main story was set after the events of HeroWarz, in which most of its playable characters, who for some reason, had arrived in modern-day Earth.
Not only that, unlike its prequel, since the game was targeted towards an adult audience with its main premise being about the capture of real-world areas and developing your very own faction, its main story seems to have a strong sense of crime, dealing with mafia and gangsters who are in a struggle between organizations and gangs.
Unfortunately, Building & Fighter was one of the few worst pay-to-win games in Nexon's entire history, with the limitations for F2P players quickly becoming apparent, as the rewards for quests using AR were minimal, plus there were no balancing safeguards, which caused the gap between players to grow at a ridiculous rate since it first launched.
Not to mention, within 3 days of its release, the gap between F2P players and whales had widened so much that it was impossible to keep up for F2P players.
On top of that, the average gaming behavior of their players were so bad that from day one, the game's Korean community was filled with memes and mockery à la Trickster M (which itself was a terrible cashgrab game, even by people who grew up with the original Trickster Online), and it's impossible to expect it to run on its own, and almost pointless to even play the game unless if you were willing to spend a lot of money on it.
In the end, after it was announced that Building & Fighter will be shutting down on June 12th, they offered refunds until July 12th, a month after the game was shutdown, with Night Walker following suit on August 29th, which will mark the 3rd anniversary of the What Happened to HeroWarz essay and at the same time, the end of the HeroWarz series, known as Project MC, in almost 10 years since the original game came out in 2014 in KR and 2016 in NA.
My condolences to the remaining players and fans of the HeroWarz series.
UPDATE (as of July 17th, 2024):
Turns out, according to an article written by a Korean-language news outlet, I was able to find out that the founder had left A.Storm back in March of the same year to start a new company in the same industry called Buttons, taking most of A.Storm's staff with him before acquiring its online and mobile game business.
Since then, they're currently working on a new game called Project Everret, which is completely different from their previous games.
UPDATE (as of August 6th, 2024):
The entire two-part essay are now compiled into a DeviantArt journal, with additional modifications added to it. You may feel free to read the entire journal by clicking this link here.
UPDATE (as of April 27, 2026):
Welp, but deep down, we know it wasn't supposed to be like this.
Hello, it’s me fujiwaranomokou2. Recently, I decided to make a post talking about what happened to the now-defunct online game HeroWarz (also known as 최강의 군단), which will be celebrating its 7th anniversary on September, but first, let me tell you the history of its developer and the game itself.
A.Storm was founded in 2010 by former Neople employees who were involved in the development of Neople‘s games, notably Wingtto, Dungeon Fighter Online and Cyphers (which was built with Unreal Engine 2, while the game itself was made with Unreal Engine 3).
A.Storm recruited closed beta testers for HeroWarz through its own Naver Cafe back in 2013, and the closed beta lasted until early 2014, and its own official website and cafe were opened without any announcements.
There was a controversy that happened 2 months before the open beta date that caused the AfreecaTV livestream of the second meeting to display a drawing made in MS Paint, and the artist who hosted this livestream posted a comic on a internet forum 4 years later.
HeroWarz’s Korean servers entered open beta on September 2014. One of its characters, Izanami was released. In October 2015, A.Storm partnered with KOG to publish the game in North America and Europe under its American subsidiary KOG Games which publishes its own games as shown with a picture of the CEOs of both companies holding a trophy facing infront of the camera.
4 days after the news report, 4Gamer had the chance to interview its director Spike Seo who was visiting Japan at the time and they received information about its developer from him.
The only update HeroWarz’ Korean servers had was actually an counterattack update that also removed the Infinite Corridor Extreme dungeon in January 2016.
Since then, there has been no updates on the game’s Japanese servers, and the Japanese Twitter account posted their first tweet on August 2016 despite being created in May 2016, which was the same date when the NA closed beta test began.
In January 2017, KOG posted an announcement on HeroWarz’s official NA website, announcing the suspension of the servers on March 26th of the same year as they saw everything was wrong with the game while at the same time they had plans to relaunch it in 2018 with updates, which backfired as the Korean server was shutdown on late October 2017, while its Japanese publisher Sega closed the game’s Japanese website 2 weeks after KOG‘s announcement.
Initially, after March 2017, HeroWarz’s NA website domain redirected to Elsword‘s own NA website until the subdomain was unable to access as of June 2021. Currently, HeroWarz’s official website now redirects to A.Storm’s official website as of November 2017.
2 years after HeroWarz was shutdown, there was a news report that A.Storm appears to be working on a mobile game that is confirmed to be a sequel of the game itself, and “HeroWarz 2” is the tentative name of the mobile game project they were working on. Since then, A.Storm has been offering jobs on their own website.
Not only that, there’s a remake game that is developed and produced by NetEase, named “Nightmare Breaker”, which will be releasing as an open beta in September this year.
