Tiny MMO Book of Travels is ending development after 5 troubled years

The "serene online RPG" Book of Travels turned some heads before its launch into early access in 2021, but almost immediately ran into trouble: Just a couple months later, developer Might and Delight laid off staff, and while it committed to ongoing development in the future, little was heard from it beyond that aside from occasional small patches and updates.

Now Might and Delight is finally bringing the project to an end, announcing that servers will close on July 31—but it's adding an "offline, singleplayer experience" so fans can continue to play, and opening the door to unlimited modding as well.

After apologizing for a lack of communication that Might and Delight acknowledged was the cause of "frustration" among the game's remaining followers, the studio admitted that it had simply taken on more than it could handle with the game.

"We could not deliver what we wanted to, and what we had promised," the studio wrote. "We realized along the way that we did not have the capacity required for this type of project. Even so, we believed we could make it work, and we wanted this project to succeed just as much as any of you. It was truly the project of a lifetime for us.

"However, the very foundation upon which the game was built proved unsustainable. No matter how many approaches we tried, workarounds we implemented, or patches we created we were never really able to solve the core issues."

The offline mode added in the latest update enables Book of Travels to be played exactly as it was, but as a "lone wanderer." The team has also rebalanced the game to better support solo play. Existing characters are currently stored online but can be manually downloaded so no progress is lost, but only until July 31, when the servers go offline. There will be no limits on modding Book of Travels, and the dev team said it "will work as much as we can with the modding community" to help out on that front.

And because development is over, Book of Travels will also, finally, shed its early access label on Steam and be considered a full 1.0 release. The price is also being dropped, from $30 to $5.

It's always a shame to see a game go away, especially one that tried to do something genuinely different—and, to a good extent, succeeded: PC Gamer's Lauren Morton chose Book of Travels as her Game of the Year Personal Pick in 2021, describing it as "purposefully slow-paced and often opaque" in a way that other RPGs and MMOs are simply unwilling to attempt. To Might and Delight's credit, though, it's handling the end about as well as anyone could ask for.

"We are truly sad that this project didn't become all that we wanted it to be," the team wrote. "We hope that with this last push, the game can be as good as it possibly could be given the circumstances, and that it can continue to be played for a long time."