Kathana

Kathana is a free-to-play MMORPG set in a fantasy world steeped in Hindu mythology. Behind the new name is really the return of a classic: a rebuild of Tantra Online, the Korean MMO HanbitSoft launched back in 2005, now handled by Uruguayan studio GameOlic. It doesn't try to hide its age—it leans into it.

The design is deliberately old-school. There are eight classes with free stat allocation, branching skill trees, and slow, long-haul progression built to be played with other people. None of that is accidental: Kathana reproduces the logic of 2000s-era MMOs, when leveling took time, every point you invested mattered, and your character was built out of both builds and hours.

The bulk of the game is social, not a solo campaign. What you'll actually do is party quests, dungeons, world bosses, guild wars, ranked PvP arenas, and open-world PK. Community is the engine here: without people around you, a lot of the content loses its point. It's the kind of MMO where your guild and your regulars matter more than the map.

Kathana is free-to-play with no entry barrier: you download and play it for free on Steam, and GameOlic has confirmed the free model stays in place during and after launch. There's no subscription and no mandatory purchase to access the content. Monetization runs through an in-game store of cosmetic and convenience items, plus a few optional packages/DLC that on Steam range from $9.99 to $89.99. In practice: you can play the whole thing without spending a cent, with the usual caveat that convenience is for sale.

The game has been in Steam Early Access since August 8, 2025, with full release estimated for Q4 2025; character progress carries over out of beta, so what you play now won't be wiped. Reception is mixed-to-positive: around 74% of some 567 reviews are positive—and roughly 84% of the recent ones—with frequent complaints about crashes, lag, and the technical roughness you'd expect from a game still in development. It uses kernel-level anticheat (Easy Anti-Cheat) and supports several languages (English, Japanese, Korean, and Simplified Chinese, among others). A note for fans of the original: it coexists with Trimurti Online, an Unreal Engine 5 remaster of the same Tantra that GameOlic keeps in a separate alpha.

Kathana isn't trying to compete with modern AAA MMOs, and it doesn't pretend otherwise. It's aimed at players who remember 2000s-era MMOs—the pace, the grind, the guild-driven social life—and want to go back to that, or who are curious about what those games were actually like before the genre got faster and more solitary. If you value slow progression, PvP with consequences, and community over campaign, there's something here for you. If you want AAA polish, a cutting-edge open world, or to play without leaning on other people, probably not.

It's worth going in with clear expectations. In exchange for a classic, free, community-minded MMO, Kathana asks for patience and some tolerance for technical rough edges: it's an Early Access game with reported crashes and lag, systems inherited from twenty years ago, and polish far from the AAA standard. The flip side of old-school is the grind, and not everyone enjoys it. The honest recommendation is to try it—it's free, you risk nothing but time—knowing that what you'll find is a piece of MMO history rebuilt, not a modern blockbuster.