Swords of Legends Online

Swords of Legends Online (SOLO) was the Western edition of 古剑奇谭网络版, the MMORPG that Wangyuan Shengtang and Shanghai Zhulong have run in China since 2018 as part of the Gujian series. Gameforge put it on PC in the West on 9 July 2021 with a pitch you rarely see in the genre: instead of one more generic swords-and-sorcery world, full-blooded Chinese xianxia — immortals, flying swords, sects, gods and demons — carried by an enormous, fully voiced, heavily scripted campaign.

The setting wasn't decoration. The main story was built like a xianxia novel — chapters, cutscenes and a voice cast that stayed with you for almost the whole run. Combat was hybrid: classic tab-targeting at its core, but with dodges, cancels and combos that gave it a pulse closer to an action MMORPG than to a traditional hotbar game. That blend is its signature and also the thing that split players most: anyone expecting pure action found it stiff, and anyone coming from classic tab-target found it demanding.

It launched with six classes and ended up with eight, each carrying two sharply distinct role specialisations. Endgame was its strongest suit: scaling dungeons across several difficulties, twenty-player raids, PvP arenas and seasons. On top of that sat a housing and decoration system deeper than almost anything else in the genre — your own plot, freeform building, craftable furniture, visits — to the point where a good chunk of the community treated it as a game inside the game.

In the West it started as buy-to-play: €39.99 for the standard edition, plus Deluxe and Collector's editions with gold skins, outfits and flying mounts, and no monthly subscription. The trouble was what sat on top of that: a cosmetics shop and a battle pass inside a game you had already bought, which earned it plenty of double-dipping criticism back in 2021. On 3 March 2022, with update 2.0, The Firestone Legacy, it went free-to-play on Steam, Epic and the Gameforge client: all content — old, new and future, classes and zones included — was opened up to everyone, monetisation was declared cosmetic-only, and existing buyers got founder rewards.

The free-to-play pivot wasn't enough. Gameforge announced the closure on 1 June 2023 and shut the Western servers down on 30 June 2023, by mutual agreement with Wangyuan Shengtang, citing an overcrowded MMORPG market and a population that never recovered — not with 2.0, not with the patches that followed. In the final stretch payment processing was switched off and shop prices were cut by 90% so players could burn whatever currency they had left; there was no account migration to the Chinese version, due to version differences and GDPR. It is now delisted from Steam and Epic: you cannot buy it or play it in the West. The Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao service eventually went dark too, in November 2024.

In China it's still alive, but on maintenance duty. Major content stopped arriving in 2024 — no new sects, no new raids — accounts were migrated to WeGame, and the final content update, 【吾谁与归】, landed in January 2026, closing the main story with chapter 25. The Chinese servers and the 海外版 client still run weekly maintenance, season rotations and holiday events, but with no roadmap for new content. The Steam 海外版 is Chinese-only and region-locked, and the game is still announced from its official Chinese site. There is no announced plan for a Western return.

Let's be honest: for a Western player, SOLO today is mostly a piece of genre history. Even while it was live it had flaws that were hard to ignore — a long, repetitive levelling grind before the good stuff, uneven localisation, and a launch week of queues and server crashes that wrecked the first impression — and that heavy opening lost plenty of players before the endgame ever got its chance. What it did leave behind is a real identity: xianxia with a budget behind it, a campaign that takes its own story seriously, and housing that still gets cited as a benchmark. If Chinese fantasy appeals to you and the language barrier doesn't stop you, the Chinese version is still standing — with the caveat that it's a finished game rather than an ongoing one. If you were hoping to play it in English or Spanish, that door is shut.