EA Mythic's MMORPG Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning has now officially shutdown after five years of service, closing its doors to the last players overnight. The announcement had been made back in September, with subscriptions being removed and new player registration being disabled to allow dedicated players a graceful goodbye.

The game's former producer Josh Descher has posted a frank goodbye on his personal blog, with careful words once again indicating that the product suffered from a great deal of internal conflict:

I’m not going to waste time picking at old wounds or attempting to offer a post-mortem commentary on “what happened”. There’s been tons of gossip and speculation and smug armchair game design (and project management) in the years since it launched. Some small bits of it have been on-target. Most of it is uninformed BS. It will be up to people well above my pay grade to decide if the “real story” ever gets told, but in the meantime I will say this:

We were proud of and confident in the game we launched. We knew it had enormous potential. We knew it had been well-built and crafted with care and affection by hundreds of developers. We knew that those developers spent YEARS of their lives, giving it their all to make sure that WAR would be everywhere and enjoyed across the globe.

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As a final note, I wanted to touch on the folks whose post-WAR experiences haven’t been entirely rosy. I don’t want to gloss over the real human cost of the project’s failure to become a blockbuster, because that’s a very real part of the story as well. I realize that not everyone was able to transition to new and better things, at least not within our industry. There were a large number of people who simply decided they couldn’t put their families through the stress of the game development “lifestyle” anymore. For those folks, I totally get it and wish them well. But there were also plenty of people who left the team and were never able to find a new industry gig. That, to me, is a tragic waste of talent and experience and potential. I hope that everyone who worked on WAR is aware that – for all of the bumps and bruises we endured after it launched – the work they did is held in high regard across our industry.

Forthcoming crowdfunded project Camelot Unchained is widely considered to be the closest thing to a successor for WAR, with developer City State Entertainment being led by Mythic founder Mark Jacobs with a team padded out by many Warhammer Online and Dark Age of Camelot veterans.