I feel sick and I’m steadily developing a headache. I saw this message and went to the website to check, thinking it was just a troll message. I literally found out ten minutes ago.

I started playing with Issue 6. It’s been a part of my life, however large or small, for a long while now. When I first started, Masterminds only had four primaries. Villains could only get to level 40. There were no allied zones, no inventions, no alignment system, and certainly no incarnate endgame. I had all these ideas and plans for the future. Alts I wanted to make, stories for them, inter-character dynamics between existing characters. And that’s all pretty much just up in smoke now- it was for sets that haven’t been introduced yet.

The game never reached any semblance of an ending. It at least had a climax with the Preatorian War ending. But there was still the Battalion and Coming Storm, which was supposed to be Issue 25- the very next one. The notion that the Well of Furies was actually evil; basically the source of all superpowered conflict in the multiverse. Ouroboros was supposed to be destroyed at some point, dealing a huge blow to time travel. Things were marching toward not just an endgame resolution only for something more to be added later, but an end story resolution.

Probably the worst part is how sudden this was. Not just to us but obviously the developers. They were talking about things they wanted to do in the future mere days ago. Everything we’d heard was about how successful the change to Freedom had been. They had to have found out themselves either late last night or just this morning.

I feel a little better after writing about it. But yes; it upsets me. It just sounds like that corporate-style “you’re doing okay, but not well enough” sweep-out-the-door. And the further the video game industry goes, the more often that seems to happen.