Third time’s the charm: ELOA is back (again) as Warlords Awakening

Recently, we got hold of a press release announcing this new game, Warlords Awakening, but somehow it felt extremely familiar. This feeling of déjà-vu was overwhelming, and then it suddenly hit: it's ELOA (Elite Lord of Alliance).

Again. For the third time, in fact, if we're not counting the first and extremely controversial western release as Inspirit Online. Man, that was a mess of epic proportions. ELOA launched in the west through Webzen, but it shut down in October 2016. Later, Game&Game acquired the publishing rights for North America, and the game ended closing down for the second time in August 2017.

Now, it's time for another publisher, Playwith, to give it a shot, and maybe changing the name can give it a new lease on life (or so they thought). Warlords Awakening is the new and generic title of the game, and the publisher wants to calm the players' fears with a nice FAQ, where you can read things like this:

“It was previously developed and published by another company and we feel as though it was never serviced properly. The previous iterations were lacking in their ability to properly provide localized service and there was a clear disconnect between the user’s feelings towards the game and how it was presented.”

“The game is in a playable state, but there are some kinks we would like to sort out before releasing it to the public. Content or lack thereof was not a serious problem in previous iterations of the game, simply that the content was not handled nor presented in a way that was appealing to players.”

Shots fired, Webzen and/or Game&Game!

Anyway, while ELOA was a nice little game, it did fail – twice – to capture a decent player base, so just how much will this third try be different from the previous ones? Also, Early Access once again, Founder's Packs and all? What happened to proper development (not just this, but most games nowadays) and getting the game to an actual release state?

Finally, there is no mention at all about the business model, and believe me, we tried hard to find it. If Warlords Awakening isn't going to be a free-to-play game, then… you make the math.