New free-to-play MMORPG crash-lands on Steam with an 1,800+ player peak and abysmal reviews
Zemi Interactive officially released Iverian Wars: Craxion vs Defugel into Steam early access on February 24, 2026, with the purpose of redefining the world of Iveria for a more modern audience. However, the title’s debut has not gone well - there's a massive disconnect between expectations and reality. Long known in dev circles as 4Story: Origin, the game is effectively a rebrand of the 2008 Korean MMORPG 4Story, and this lineage has now proven to be a double-edged sword. While it did successfully tap into a near-dormant fan base to hit an initial all-time peak of 1,839 concurrent players, the "Mostly Negative" reviews tell a whole different story. The community feels "nostalgia baited" by a product many describe as a step backward from its decade-old predecessor.
The primary source of the game's infamy is a catastrophic "bottleneck" in its opening hour. Players are funneled into a starting quest that requires killing specific spiders, but with hundreds of users competing for only a handful of spawns, progression stagger to a halt. This design flaw was exacerbated by severe optimization issues; community reports on Reddit and the Steam forums show frame rates dropping as low as 6-12 FPS on high-end hardware like the RTX 4090 during these player-dense encounters. Aside from the lag, the gameplay loop has also been heavily criticized for being "soulless." People say it relies on repetitive "kill-and-return" quests that don't have the mechanical depth or fluid movement present in modern action-RPGs.
For additional context, much of the shame surrounding Iverian Wars involves its relationship with its own history. Fans are seeing that the game’s "new" proprietary engine delivers visuals that are arguably inferior to the original 2008 assets - glitching textures and inaccurate building hitboxes are extremely common. Furthermore, this game’s monetization has already raised "pay-to-win" (P2W) red flags. Players add that high-level PvP weapons can be crafted almost immediately by spending real-world currency on specific materials, which bypasses the progression grind entirely.
All this, combined with the lack of basic features like a functional mouse-view response and a "Mixed" technical state, has made this title more of a cautionary tale on the current state of F2P MMORPG relaunches. If you want, you can check out Iverian Wars' Steam page here - just be sure to check the latest patch notes before committing any serious time (or money) to this Iverian revival.
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