The Matrix: Retirement

Tyndall wants you to join the fight!

Or rather she did. As of Today, The Matrix Online is now closed and players from around the world can no longer log on and jack in to fight for the Machines, the Merovingian, New Zion, The Cypherites or E Pluribus Neo. It's been a great, four year journey, but due to internal difficulties and lack of revenue (I presume) the game has had to close.

It never was the dream it should have been, for whatever reason uptake was not as high as initially planned for, this meant cutbacks and reductions in the amount of mission and epic events that were planned.

But the reduced team persevered, restructuring the way the program went so that we got regular mission updates and a rolling programme of "Live Events" featuring key characters from the Matrix and involving anything from large scale battles to diplomacy. The dedication of the team was evident, when after funding ran out for cinematics, the lead developer drew and animated new ones himself for two chapters.

There were moments of great excitement - a rogue Sentinel army led by a program known as the General kidnapped Sati, and her absence of weather control turned the sky red permanently. The machines eventually defeated him by attacking his base 'Stalingrad' with a huge army of Sentinels and Sati was recovered.

Seraph was infected with a code and began attacking redpills, it was eventually revealed that these people had been 'overwritten' by machine programs, used to spy on Zion and other organizations.

The Machines discovered the hidden human city of New Zion and declared war on humanity once again. They attacked Zion, but the new city is much better defended and far harder to penetrate.

A group of humans, calling themselves the Oligrachs, arrived on the scene, possessing the power to override and control the Machines and seeming to have some kind of agreement with them as equal powers. Unfortunately we never got to find out what happened next and so the story came to an abrupt close.

A key developer had to leave, and this stalled all stoyline progression - the main element of the game, interest declined, no new progress was made and eventually the decision was made to call it a day.

There was some fun to be had on the way out - they turned on the normally seasonal Halloween and Christmas events allowing us to participate in zombie hunts, sinowball fights and obtain cool costumes. They bumped every player to level 99 (the normal max is 50) allowing easy access to a number of missions and quests. And set off a number of event related items such as code bombs, which was cool for me as I'd never seen them before. I stuck around to the end, partying on top of one of the monuments in the city and then, with a final server crash, it was over.

Thanks for the memories MxO!!