Jake Song is back — and his new MMO treats AI agents like players

Some game developers you follow because they ship reliably. Jake Song is the other kind — the kind you follow because every time he builds a world, the genre bends around it. The Kingdom of the Winds helped invent the graphical MMO. Lineage turned Korea into an MMORPG superpower. ArcheAge remains the most systemically ambitious sandbox of its decade. He is, without much competition, my favourite game developer of all time.

So when Song left XLGAMES in March 2025 saying he needed to recharge, the question was never whether he'd come back. It was what he'd come back with. On July 20 we got the answer, and it isn't a studio, a publisher deal, or a cinematic trailer. It's a GitHub repository. When I saw the announcement I was filled with so much energy — for me, this is Mike Tyson stepping back into the ring. One of the greats of all time is fighting again.

Talking Island, age thirteen

I missed the original Lineage — I was simply too young for it. My introduction to Song's worlds was Lineage II, when I was about thirteen, arriving straight from classic RuneScape. Song had already left NCSOFT by the time it shipped, but Lineage II was unmistakably a descendant of the world he built — he's the grandfather of the whole series. What I remember first is running around Talking Island as a fresh human character, fighting the orcs and mobs on the starting fields and just thinking how crazy these graphics, this game, this open world were. For a RuneScape kid, it was another universe.

But the game of his I hold closest is ArcheAge — to this day one of my top three MMORPGs of all time. The sandbox brought everything together: the levelling, the open-world PvP, the house building, the unhurried skills like fishing, the naval warfare, and — my favourite detail — a pirate island where all the red-named player-killers ended up. It remains my epitome of bringing the whole genre together in one place: the holy trinity, as I've come to call it, of crafting, PvE, and PvP. When the person who built that says he has a new idea about what an MMO can be, I listen.

An MMO where the server can't tell you from a bot

Open MMORPG is a solo-built, open-source experiment with one radical rule at its core: AI agents and human players are equals. Agents connect through the exact same WebSocket protocol as humans — no privileged API, no server-side flag, nothing. The server literally cannot tell them apart. Every MMO player has decades of muscle memory that says bots are the enemy: the gold farmers, the queue clutter, the economy wreckers. Song's design inverts that instinct and asks what happens when agents are citizens instead of parasites.

Think about what that could mean for the genre's oldest, saddest problem: the empty world. Every MMO eventually faces the night-shift server, the dead starting zone, the guild that logged off one by one. A world where capable agents live under the same rules as players — visible, killable, tradeable-with — is a world that's never empty. Whether that feels alive or hollow is exactly the experiment. I genuinely don't know the answer, and that's why I can't stop thinking about it.

What's actually there today

Let's be honest about the current state, because excitement without honesty is just marketing. What exists right now is rudimentary — closer to a living tech demo than a game. You sign in with a Google account, in a desktop browser, and walk a procedurally generated 32×32 km world: biomes, road networks, rivers and bridges, settlements, a seasonal system driven by a planet orbiting its star with two moons. There's D&D-flavoured stat-based combat (4d6, drop the lowest — Song is not hiding his influences), an 11-slot equipment system, item drops, and multi-story timber-frame housing you can build in the open world. The music — about fifty tracks of it — is AI-generated. So is a lot of the code: Song has been open that he built it solo with heavy AI assistance, a Svelte and Three.js client over a Rust server.

This is a game in early development, but we are excited to see how an open-source project by one of the greats evolves — or is evolved by others — and what we can learn from it.

Why the repository matters more than the game

Here's the thing that elevates this from 'legend tinkers in retirement' to something I'd point every MMO fan at: the entire project — source code and design documents — is public. Anyone can read how a three-time genre-defining designer structures an MMO server in 2026. Anyone can jump right in on GitHub — fork it, contribute to it, or build their own agents for it. The genre's founding generation mostly took their knowledge into retirement with them; Song is publishing his, in runnable form, for free.

My expectations, honestly, are small — and that's freeing. I don't need Open MMORPG to be my next thousand-hour game. What I want is to try what he's built and understand a bit more about how game design and game building work with AI: to watch how Jake Song thinks, what he adds to the game week by week, and what other people add around him. There's a personal kinship in it, too. I started working with AI myself about a fortnight ago, vibe-coding my first apps — so watching one of the greatest MMORPG developers and designers of all time start a project the same way is, frankly, Christmas in July.

None of this replaces what's still ahead — I'm looking forward to ArcheAge Chronicles as much as ever, and I still hold out hope of properly playing a Lineage II Classic in the West someday. Will Open MMORPG become a game you'd recommend to a friend? Probably not this year, possibly not ever — experiments are allowed to fail. But the MMORPG has spent a decade iterating on safe formulas, and the last person who refused to play it safe with this genre gave us ArcheAge. I'll be watching every commit.

Traveller's note — after a first night in the world

A postscript, written the evening this piece went up, having now actually walked the world myself: it is even earlier than I may have thought. What's live today is best understood as an early pre-alpha tech demo — less an unfinished MMO than a proof of what AI agents can do inside one.

The most alive things in the build are the agents themselves and the mobs: an AI runs the general store, another stands guard, and talking to them is the closest the world currently comes to gameplay outside of killing mobs. Though I think it will be quite a task to traverse the 32×32 km world. Fascinating to try and test; nothing to 'play' in an in-depth manner just yet.

I'm interested to follow the developments on this and test a bit more of it out — and, since it's open source, to learn more about MMO code and design myself out of interest. I really enjoyed talking with the shopkeeper and them realising, and talking about, what I had sold them — and a conversation with the town guard being backed up by the shopkeeper, who was 'listening in'.

The Open MMORPG profile reflects that now — it's filed as in development rather than released, and the release tracker records July 20 as an open-source pre-alpha drop, not a launch. Everything I wrote above stands unedited; consider this the calibration.