Ar:piel Online, What Happened?

Back in 2017, Wiggy did quite a few videos on Arpiel. She explored various classes and made it through some of the game.
If you recall back in 2017, Nexon announced a brand new Anime MMORPG was in development. Both Wiggy and I were quite excited for the game because it looked like an isometric version of Soul Worker.
Like, imagine Diablo or Path of Exile but with Anime graphics right out of something like Soul Worker – that’s what Arpiel was supposed to offer us.
It had adorable Anime-inspired graphics with cute character models and pretty awesome action combat.

Speaking of, the combat and the entire premise of the game was a hybrid of the hub-based MMO brawler Closers.
In Closers, you occupy a hub, take quests and go out into instanced off areas where you attempt to complete whatever your objectives happen to be.
Interestingly in Closers you progress as a side-scroller, whereas in Arpiel you progressed as a top-down isometric graphical style.

It had a fairly unique premise: You choose between 6 distinct classes, the Hunter, Witch, Fighter Leopard.. yes, seriously.. Fighter Leopard.
I don’t know why it’s called that, or who thought that that was a good idea to name a class but.. moving on, the Mage, the Puppeteer, and finally the Engineer.
What make these classes unique is the fact that they all have their own affinity with a different animal leading to unique weapon types, unique approaches to combat mechanics, abilities, actions and traits.

The game had a lot of promise, especially with the success of other hub-based brawler MMOs like Closers, Soul Worker, Vindictus, Phantasy Star Online 2, and Kritika.

I’ve Googled around, checking various MMO-related news websites for any kind of information.
I searched Reddit, the unofficial Arpiel subreddit to attempt to find any information pertaining to the game in any capacity over the last year.
I asked around if any people in the niche that I talk to regularly had any info on the game or where it went, but.. I ended up fairly empty handed.

I know the game was live in South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, with the game launching into closed beta in Taiwan at the end of 2017.
I’m aware that Nexon closed Arpiel down within the last year or so, like they seem to do with most of their games.
The reasoning behind the official South Korean version of the game shutting down is difficult for me to find.
According to a Reddit post I came across, there was a Russian version of the game expected but it was shut down in December of 2018.

So here we are. It’s 2019, and we never received a final version of the MMO. Due to it failing and shutting down in every region it released in, we never will receive a version of it either.
Which honestly may be for the best since if it failed everywhere else, it probably wasn’t all that good.
Still, it had a lot of promise and looked fantastic. Wiggy enjoyed it and I really wanted to try it when it came out.

This is just yet another reason to never trust a Nexon game. Not that from past experience you should, regardless.

I’m sorry if any of you were still holding out hope that we’d one day get to play Arpiel, or if you were under the impression that it is still being worked on.
We won’t – and it isn’t. But that’s alright, there are other good MMOs on the horizon for us to play, so we should look forward to them!