Local Threat / SUCCUMB

Local Threat — The Lineage

Before there was a syndicate, there was a genre. Here’s the family tree we come from.

1997 — Ultima Online: The Original Sin

Everything traces back here. UO was the first MMO to let players kill, rob, and burn down anything another player owned in open-world space — full-loot PvP with real consequences, years before anyone had a name for that design philosophy. Every game on this list is either a descendant of UO’s chaos or a reaction against it.

2003 — EVE Online: The Spreadsheet That Bites

CCP Games launched a single persistent universe where every ship lost was gone forever, every alliance was a real political entity, and the biggest battles in gaming history were fought over null-sec real estate. EVE proved that a single-shard, full-loot economy could sustain itself for decades — corporate espionage, market manipulation, and thousand-player fleet fights included.

2003 — Shadowbane: Burn Their City Down

Wolfpack Studios released Shadowbane in March 2003, built around a mechanic almost nobody has replicated well since: player-built cities that rival guilds could actually siege and raze. Servers ran until Ubisoft shut the game down on July 1, 2009, and the IP later changed hands to a Chinese company that attempted a revival under the name World of Shadowbane.

2003 — Star Wars Galaxies (Bloodfin): Every Server Tells a Different War

Sony Online Entertainment and LucasArts launched Star Wars Galaxies in June 2003 with maybe the most ambitious sandbox the genre ever attempted — no fixed classes, a crafting economy deep enough to support entire real professions, player-built cities, and a Jedi unlock so secretive that most servers spent a year just hunting for the requirements. Bloodfin was one of the original US servers, and by the time SOE pulled the plug on every server on December 15, 2011, Bloodfin’s Galactic Civil War had tipped almost entirely Imperial — 89% to 11% — the kind of lopsided outcome that only happens after years of the same guilds fighting the same war on the same planets. SWG is also the genre’s most-cited cautionary tale: the 2005 “New Game Enhancements” gutted the profession system overnight and drove away a huge share of the population, a permanent lesson in what happens when the people running the world stop listening to the people living in it.

2005 — Guild Wars: The Other Branch

Not every path from UO went full-loot open-world. ArenaNet’s Guild Wars took PvP and made it competitive — instanced Guild vs. Guild battles, structured tournaments, a buy-to-play model with no subscription tax. It’s the esports branch of the family tree: less “rob a hauler in open space,” more “beat the other guild on a level field and take the bragging rights.”

2006 — Face of Mankind: No NPCs, No Safety Net

German studio Duplex Systems launched Face of Mankind in March 2006 on a premise almost nobody has copied since: outside of a handful of hostile aliens, there were no NPCs anywhere in the game. Every cop on patrol, every corporate desk clerk, every commander handing out missions was a real player, running one of eight fully player-led factions — law enforcement, military, rebel cells, peace activists, rival corporations — with real hierarchies and real consequences. It’s the purest expression of “the other players are the content” on this entire list, right down to a 2007 DDoS attack that took the whole game offline for a month and helped tip it into decline. Several revival attempts followed over the years, none of which stuck for long, but for a stretch in the late 2000s, FoM was proof an entire MMO’s economy, law, and warfare could run on nothing but player will.

2009 — Darkfall: Skill Over Levels

Aventurine’s Darkfall combined real-time action combat with unrestricted PvP and full looting in a persistent world with no class or level system — you were only as dangerous as your actual aim and your actual gear. The original ran from 2009 into 2012, when it was overhauled into Darkfall: Unholy Wars; those servers shut down in 2016, and the license split into two community-run continuations — Darkfall: Rise of Agon and Darkfall: New Dawn — each taking the formula in a different direction.

2010 — Mortal Online: UO’s Direct Heir

Star Vault built Mortal Online explicitly to recapture Ultima Online’s player-driven, sandbox design, wrapped in a first-person skill-based combat system where you could lose everything you were carrying in a single bad fight. A sequel, Mortal Online 2, launched into full release on January 25, 2022, and remains the closest thing on the market to “what if UO had modern combat.”

2013 — Star Citizen: Every Lesson, One Universe

Star Citizen is where this whole lineage converges — UO’s full-loot stakes, EVE’s persistent economy and politics, Shadowbane and SWG’s territorial warfare, Face of Mankind’s total player-driven world, Darkfall and Mortal Online’s skill-based combat. Local Threat exists because every game on this page taught us the same lesson: the servers with the best stories were never the safe ones.